The Sidewalks of My Mind...

      Are any of you on Facebook?  A while back I read an article on Facebook about how it's being used by people in every age group instead of just college kids.  After hearing so much about it and how great it is I decided to check it out.  The only problem is you can't check out Facebook without creating an account.  I didn't want all my personal information on there so I created a made-up secret identity and used it to check out some of the people on there (at least the ones who don't have their setting set to "private"). I found a lot of people I went to school with...some of them were good friends I wouldn't mind making contact with and others were horrible people who I never want to talk to again.

       I'm not sure I understand the point of Facebook. The article I read stated that it was a tool to keep in contact with all the people in your life.  But my question is: If these people are in your life already, why do you have to keep in contact with them on the computer? When you join Facebook you have to contact all of your friends who are on there and form a "friends" list.  One of the reasons I made this MSN Space was to have the ability to meet different people around the world, people I never would have met in "real life".  But you can't really do that on Facebook--you can look at someone's page but you have to be there "friend" in order to leave a comment...at least that's the way I understand it. 

       And what's the deal with the status bar?  On all the profile pages I looked at the status bar didn't convey any important or interesting information. They all said things like "Bob is happy to be home from work" or "Betty is baking a cake".  Who gives a shit?! What good does that information do me?  It's not like a blog where they can tell a story about their long day at work or why they're baking a cake. Imagine if you got a phone call every time one of your friends performed some little everyday action: "Hi Marge? I'm cleaning the toilet!  Just wanted to let you know!"  It would get tiresome after a while, wouldn't it?  And what's with the "Poke" feature? On the profile page just below your picture there's an option listed that lets you "poke" someone: "Poke Diane", "Poke Carl". It sounds graphically dirty.  Does anybody use this?  What's it for?  What happens when you "Poke" someone?

      So while anonymously surfing through the different names of people I know (or used to know) I found some people I went to school with who I haven't talked to in twenty years.  It was interesting to look through their pictures to see what they look like now,  but to be honest, some of them didn't look too good...the years have not been kind.  It was fun to see these people again but I don't know what I would say to them now...what do you say to people you haven't seen in twenty years?  They're pretty much strangers at that point, aren't they?

      It seems like there are some people who are on Facebook several times a day, which I can't imagine doing.  So if any of you use Facebook I'd be curious to know what you use it for and how often you're on there.  And if you're on Facebook and happen to come across my secret identity be sure to give him a "poke".

       My last blog entry got me thinking about movies and all the celebrities I've seen in LA over the years.  Twelve to fifteen years ago, when I had an apartment up in LA, I would see various celebrities sitting in the same restaurant I was in or out shopping on Melrose Avenue or at the mall.  Now, when we go up to LA (which is only a 30 to 40 minute drive) we don't see celebrities so much...not that there's anyone worth seeing. Is it just me or do today's celebrities seem really boring?

      So just for fun I tried to think of all the famous (and not so famous) people I've seen in public, standing just five feet away from me.  Here's the list (in random order) I have so far.  I know there's probably more but I just can't think of them right now.

Danny Devito 

Rhea Pearlman 

Jodie Foster

Julianna Margulies

Bruce Hornsby

Michael Jackson

 Pamela Anderson

Tommy Lee

Tia Carrere

Jaclyn Smith

Debbie Reynolds

 Jennifer Garner

Samuel L. Jackson

Geena Davis

 Flava Flav

 Rob Reiner

 Lloyd Bridges

Beau Bridges

Jeffery Jones (Mr. Rooney from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off")

 George Michael

 Kareen Abdul-Jabbar

 Hilary Swank

Alanis Morisette

George Foreman

John Candy

 David Spade

Luke Perry

Linda Hamilton

Johnny Knoxville 

      This list may seem long, but keep in mind that I saw these people over the past fifteen years or so.  I wouldn't want you to think that if you come out here on a week's vacation you'll be able to see this many celebrities.  Chances are you won't see any (unless, of course, you're a stalker.)

     Last week I accidentally stuck my hand into a yellow jacket nest.  For those of you who don't know what yellow jackets are, they're sort of like a cross between a bee and a wasp. And they're angry little bastards that have the ability to sting more than once...I found that out the hard way.

     My garage is at the back of my house and it opens up into a narrow alley, which is where the garbage truck comes by once a week and picks up the garbage cans that everyone lines up on either side.  I don't know what the garbage collectors are like in you area, but out here the crew doesn't even get out of the truck--there's a big mechanical arm on the side of the truck that reaches out, picks up the trash can and lifts it up and over, dumping the garbage into the truck.  There's a house on the opposite side of the alley that's up for sale and doesn't have anybody living in it, so the garbage cans are left in the alley week after week and the garbage truck picks them up over and over again even though they're empty.  One of these garbage cans is in a position that makes it hard for me to back out of my garage.  I have to sort of make a three point turn to avoid hitting it, so after a few weeks of dodging this trash can I decided to move it up the alley a little so I could back out of the garage on the first try.

     What I didn't know was that there was a yellow jacket nest just under the rim of the garbage can.  There's a lip around the top rim of the can that's about an inch wide and two inches deep, and when I went to pick up this can I unknowingly put my hand right on the nest.  As soon as I touched the can I thought I had put my hand on something sharp... it felt like an electric shock and I immediately pulled my hand away.  I realized I had hit some kind of hive or nest,  and because I had disturbed it, the yellow jackets started to swarm, so I was standing in the alley flailing my arms around and swatting them away. (I later wondered if anyone saw me doing this and, if they didn't see the yellow jackets, what they thought I was doing.)  I got stung about five times on my hand and once on my forehead.

      My hand felt like it was on fire and I ran in the house and ran cold water on it...I don't know if that's what you're supposed to do, but it was the only thing I could think of at the time.  Fortunately I didn't have any allergic reaction to it.  I was stung by a bee a while back and didn't have any reaction to that one, so I wasn't too worried about the yellow jackets.  It just hurt like hell all day.  Once the burning sensation went away my fingers were still sensitive--it felt like I had wood splinters in my fingertips so it was hard to use my left hand for a couple of days (and I'm left handed, too).  To grab things I could only use my pinky finger against the palm of my hand.

      After all of that, I still hadn't moved the garbage can.  Once I was stung I moved it maybe an inch, so I went back out there a few days later and slowly and carefully pulled it up the alley about six feet.  I'd like to exterminate the yellow jackets and get rid of the nest, but I don't know how to go about doing that.  I did some research online, and I don't think any kind of bug spray will do the trick.  You have to get some kind of special dust and shoot it into one of the openings in the nest...I don't know if I want to spend the money or time to do this, considering it isn't even my garbage can.   I might contact the realtor and tell them they have a yellow jacket problem and let them sort it out.

      So the moral of the story is, don't go messing around with strange garbage cans...you don't know where they've been or what's living in them.

     I haven't been around Spaces for the past month because we've been really busy with remodeling plans, choosing and ordering tile and fixtures for the bathroom and getting the house ready for a construction crew.  In getting ready, I was cleaning out a closet and found an old box filled with short stories that I wrote when I was in college. (As a creative writing major, you more or less write short stories for four years straight, then they hand you a diploma.) The stories were a big unorganized mess in a box so I spent an afternoon going through it and making sense of everything.

     I didn't have a laptop when I was going to school (I went to college before laptops were commonplace...I know, I'm old!) I typed all my stories and school papers on an old electric typewriter, so none of my short stories are saved on disc or on any kind of back-up system. The only copies I have of them are all printed out on paper and if anything happened, if there were a fire or a flood, they would all be lost.  I have about 20 to 25 short stories and I don't really have time right now to scan them or transcribe them onto the computer so I decided to organize them and put them all in hanging files for now and work on it later.

     As I was looking through the stories and trying to make sense of everything I started to read some of them, but it was sort of depressing...a lot of them weren't very good. There were some that I didn't even remember writing--I could actually read a story I wrote and have no idea how it was going to end. A lot of these stories were written not because I wanted to write them but because I had a deadline and needed to turn something it at the time.  So as I was sorting through these stories and putting them in files I began to wonder "Why am I doing this?". These stories aren't any good and there's no way I would ever try to have them published so why am I keeping them? All of this paper is just taking up space...if I'm never going to do anything with these stories wouldn't it make sense just to throw them all away?  Why do I feel compelled to keep them, as if I need some record of my writing history?  What do you guys think?  Should I save it or shred it?  Is it really worth the time to save them all onto disc?

     This also got me thinking of this blog: do you have a file on your computer where you save your blog entries? I have about three years worth of blogs stored in the archives here but I don't have any of them saved on my computer, so if, for some reason, MSN decides to pull the plug on my Space all of those blog entries would be lost, which isn't really a big deal since I don't write any earth-shattering blogs, but it just got me wondering if any of you save your entries or if you think it's worth doing.