Facelessbook

I was remembering the other day that Myspace didn't have status updates (until it was already a sinking ship) and that Facebook used to not have status updates either. That was just a Twitter thing, once upon a time. And then I was like, "well wait, what did we even do on Facebook and Myspace then?"

And that's when it hit me. We talked to each other. It really was social networking. If I wanted to see how a friend was doing, I'd write on her wall and say, "hey, how are you doing?" And then she'd write back and tell me what was going on in her life. It still wasn't face-to-face but it was personal.

But now if I want to see how a friend is doing, I already know. Because I've seen her status updates. Take my friend Jackie from Elmbrook. Haven't talked to her in months, but I know she went backpack shopping with her little girl a couple weeks ago, and that she started preschool at Elmbrook this week. And if I look at her profile I can probably find out what TV shows she's into nowadays, and what music she's listening to. All without ever having any personal contact with her.

Instead of talking to people on a personal level, we broadcast our life happenings and our random thoughts to the world. We've become more open than ever before, but more isolated than ever before. Those two wouldn't have seemed to go hand in hand before the days of Facebook and Twitter. But there's less risk in post something to the ambiguous "they" than talking to someone who might just hurt you at some point.

I wonder what the generation we're raising up will be like. The generation who has had Facebook as a part of their formational preteen and teen years. Relationships are becoming more about knowing about people and less about interacting with people. I know I sound like an old codger at the young age of 26, but I really do fear for what this open-isolation will do for the generation just after mine. And to be quite honest, what it will do to my generation.

Sermons

Group is all about active learning. Everyone is involved. It's not sitting and listening to someone talk. Which is awesome...but I think it's made me more easily bored with things that DON'T fit into that mold.

Sermons, namely. I mean, in Acts Eutychus literally DIED of boredom during a sermon when he fell asleep and tumbled out the window. Is that really the model of teaching we want to follow? (Not that Paul got the message...he brought Eutychus back to life and continued preaching the rest of the night...)

And sure, there are some people who are very gifted at public speaking. Their voice, their stories, their comedic style...it's all captivating and you can stay awake and pay attention. But by and large, you won't remember those speeches. Research shows that people don't remember very much of what they hear, but they do remember a lot of what they experience and discover for themselves. Which is why Group is all about experiencial learning.

Dan and I love our church. But this Sunday after we got done teaching, we walked upstairs to go to service and both decided it looked too boring. So we went home. We just have no desire to go to services. We do go to a small group which we love and it's awesome - because it's interactive. We're actively involved in the learning. But this passive listening thing? I just don't think I can keep it up.

Grown-Up

I had this weird moment last night. I was working on some paperwork at home, and I was lying across my bed on my stomach, work in front of me, legs in the air. And I had this weird flashback to my high school days of doing homework.

And then I had this realization that I am a grown-up. I mean, it's not like I didn't know it before. It's just weird to think about how I went from high school to this 26 year old grown-up. Somewhere in there I started doing grown-up things like doing my own laundry, paying bills, finding places to live, planning my tasks for a job. Unlike high school where you're told what homework to do when, what chores to do when, and everything else is taken care of for you, as a grown-up I have to figure all that out my own. Or I can choose to just ignore the chores and wear dirty underwear. But that'd be gross.

I don't really know how to explain what I was thinking and feeling in that moment. It was just this sense of wonder that the sheltered teenager, afraid to grow up because I might not be good at it, became the me I am today. And it's weird to think that most of my friends are either parents or thinking about being parents. Without warning, I was whisked into the "friends with babies" stage of life.

Now, I'm all for holding onto some of those elements of childhood that make life fun, like swinging and jumping in puddles and coloring and not eating my vegetables. But without me really thinking about it too much, I've added a sense of responsibility to all of those things. I've transitioned into being a grown-up without seeing the transition.

Responsibility

Today on the way home from work I saw a dump truck with a sign on the back that said, "Stay back 200 ft. NOT responsible for broken windshields."

It stood in sharp contrast to a dump truck I'd seen on our vacation with a tarp on top and a sign that said, "We tarp our loads because we care."

There's no law that says dump trucks have to tarp. And so the truck I saw today denied any responsibility for damage their loads may cause. They put all the responsibility on the drivers to stay back a considerable distance.

But the other truck took on extra responsibility. I'm sure it cost them money to tarp each load, but they knew that they shared some of the responsibility, and they wanted to do what they could to limit damage.

Too often we shirk responsibility. "That's not my job" or "it's his fault." Who knew a dump truck would set the example of how to own our part of a problem?

I don't know the name of either trucking company. But if I did and I needed a dump truck for something, I'd hire the dump truck company that cares.

Failure

You know those times when you just feel frustrated with yourself? Like a miserable failure? I'm going through such a period.

First, there's my wrist. It's not really that painful, just enough to slow me down. Just enough that if I use it a lot, even for typing without taking breaks, it starts hurting more. I'm getting so frustrated having to take breaks from typing, having to write with messy handwriting, having to struggle with my left hand to do things. It's really wearing me down.

On Friday I reached rock bottom. My wrist was hurting especially, I'd had a week full of cancelled appointments (all for good reasons, but it was still starting to hit me), and then I got a really discouraging email that got me questioning my ability to do a lot of things. I felt so demotivated I just wanted to sit and do nothing. Because even though it may be boring, it's hard to fail at being lazy.

There's a part of me deep inside that says I should take that failure, learn from it, and let it motivate me to improve. But it's hard to kindle that part of me.

Rest

While I was at urgent care, even though there were absolutely NO other patients there, I had to do some waiting. And I was pretty bored. They didn't even have any good magazines with articles about Ali the Bachelorette. Just dumb medical magazines.

So I'd just gotten my wrist x-rayed and was sitting next to the x-ray machine while the nurse made sure the x-rays had all come out well, and emailed them to the guy who checks them. And before she left me to do that she said, "Now you get to just relax while I check your x-rays."

The phrase "get to" struck me. It wasn't an obligation to sit and be bored. It was an opportunity to rest.

I'm not very good at just resting. I like to always be doing SOMETHING. Even if it's restful, like reading or watching TV, I can't just sit there and rest. The skill seems to be conditioned out of us here in America.

And as I sat and waited for her, I thought about what it would be like if I could really just sit and rest and be OK with that. If I could see waiting as an opportunity to relax, not a boring time to be impatient. It seems like that would be a nice outlook.

Rude

This was my struggle to find out what happened to my wrist.

I called the x-ray lab place and asked if I could just come in. They said no, I needed to see a doctor to get a request for an x-ray, then I'd need to have another visit to analyze the x-ray. I wasn't psyched about paynig 2 co-pays for the doctor plus whatever the x-ray costs, but it was still cheaper than my urgent care co-pay.

So I called my doctor and talked to the receptionist. Told her I hurt my wrist and I needed an x-ray, but that I needed a doctor's request for it. She said, "Just go to urgent care, they have an x-ray machine there."

I told her my co-pay was really high for that and that I wanted to save money. She said, "Well, does your insurance require referrals to see other doctors?" I didn't know what a referral was. I told her so. At which point she sighed and talked to me like I was 5 or just a big idiot. "Does your insurance require your primary care physician to authorize visits to specialists?" It doesn't, I told her.

"Then just go to urgent care," she said. I explained again that my co-pay was too high, and she said, "But if you come here then you'll need to go somewhere else to get an x-ray." Ok...but again, lower co-pay. X-ray a factor either way. She wasn't getting it, was treating me like an idiot, was being generally rude, and was telling me to go elsewhere. Well fine. I'm not going to beg you to let me be your customer. You want me to go elsewhere, I'll go elsewhere. And never go to YOU again, jerkwad!

So I went to urgent care. At that point I was too frustrated and too busy to try to find another primary care physician, set up appointments, and so on. This lady had me on the verge of tears and I couldn't shake the bad mood she put me in all day. And it didn't help when I was sitting in urgent care trying to fill out forms with an injured dominant hand. And when they kept telling me to sign stuff.

My friend who had recommended the doctor had also had a bad encounter with the receptionist lately. And she's also friends with one of the doctor's there, so she talked to the doctor today and told her of my encounter. She was told that they knew about the situation and are taking care of it. I didn't say anything to anyone at the doctor's office, so they must have heard her side of the phone conversation and realized she was basically telling me she didn't want to help me.

I hope she gets fired. There are too many good people out of work right now to have someone so rude and unhelpful answering phones. Especially at a doctor's office, where people call and come in already in pain or sick and needing a comforting person to help them.

Two-Handed

I've developed a new admiration for amputees. Yesterday and today I've had my right hand (my dominant one) wrapped up in an Ace bandage in effort to support it a little bit. I'm not quite sure the extent of my injury, but it was initally caused by a fall at Garden of the Gods and made worse yesterday in a rousing game of "Duck, Duck, Goose." Actually, "Sit, Sit, Stand." Why those kids had to keep picking me I don't know. Why I didn't stop to think, "Hey, this is hurting my already semi-injured hand. Maybe I should find a different way to stand up" I don't know. But here I am in pain.

And I've realized a couple of things. First, my left hand is extremely weak. Things like opening file drawers that are usually done with minimal effort with my right hand take a considerable amount of strength from my left side.

Second, it's really hard to do normal, every day things with one hand. Even if things were reversed and my right hand was the good one, it would be a challenge. Tonight I cracked two eggs with my left hand, and assembled a lasagna the same way. It was challenging, and if Dan hadn't helped by browning the meat I think it would have been meatless.

Two-handedness is something I take for granted. But as I struggled to open a jar of spaghetti sauce tonight, I couldn't help but think how hard it would be to adjust to life permanently with one hand. On vacation we saw a woman with only one arm riding a horse. I don't know her story...if she had the arm for a while and had to adjust to the amutation, or never had it in the first place...but how much harder must simple tasks be for her than me? How many more trips from the car to the house must she take to bring in the groceries?

It always takes losing something (even temporarily) to really appreciate it.

Creativity vs. Consistency

There's a line that's hard to find between creativity and consistency. At Group innovation and creativity are major parts of who we are. At the same time, we want to deliver something to the customer that is consistent enough not to be confusing. When they order two quarters of the same curriculum line, they need to know what features to expect with the second quarter. We want to wow people, but not confuse them.

And therein lies the struggle. Here's one I struggle with: email signatures. Group recently created a standard format for email signatures. There's a value to the consistency there. It's part of the brand. If a customer emails two Groupies, that signature is a brand. There's slightly different content (obviously the identity and contact information), but there's a brand associated.

But then, does that rob us of our creativity? What if I wanted to use red in my signature? (Which I do, actually, despite the fact that it breaks the brand...)

But by allowing a free-for-all, would we have some people with no concept of readability and design that they put neon green text on a purple background in some obnoxiously hard to read font?

At Group we're always being challenged to think outside the box, break the mold, see things in a different way. Even to break the rules sometimes. But there must be some rules or things would be mass chaos, with customers too confused to use Group again.

The problem is finding the line in the middle of the spectrum.

It's Your Book Now

I wrote a blog similar to this back in my Myspace blogging days, but I'm re-writing it since I have a lot of new readers since then.

My name on blogger is Golden (It's Your Book Now). That comes from a Switchfoot song - probably my favorite song of all time, except maybe the Clapping and Jumping Song by the Smurfs (which isn't quite as touching).

The song is about a girl who is all alone and feeling all used up. She's been "staring down the demons who've been screaming she's just another so-and-so." And Switchfoot says this to her, "You are golden...don't let go."

I love that message. So often I feel like I'm fighting those same demons, screaming I'm a nobody. Just another so-and-so. And when I feel like that, I cling to this song. God sees me as golden. I am his golden child.

The song continues, "She's been hiding in the bedroom, hoping this isn't how the story has to go, it's not the way it goes, it's your book now..."

I love that line. Maybe because I'm a writer. It speaks to me like no other line from any song. I love the concept that when life isn't going the way we want, the story doesn't have to go that way. Obviously God has the ultimate power and plan, but sometimes he wants us to take action as part of that. I love this concept that rather than self-pitying and dwelling on the problem, you get out there and write a different story. Become who you want to be, don't dwell in the fact that you're not good enough. It's your book now.

"The green comes from the frozen ground and everything will be made new again, like freedom in the spring."

When we feel alone, fighting the demons that lie about who we are, this song is empowering. God sees me as golden. So I can go out there and write my story. Spring will come.