connection

Catfish

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ Leave a comment

Today’s word prompt was “fish.” I thought I’d bite. Via Daily Post: Fish

The summer I was seven years old is the last happy one I remember of my childhood.

My family spent two weeks out at my father’s business partner’s “farm,” which was really just a house on some land about an hour’s drive from Houston, Texas where we lived. I insisted on wearing a burnt orange bikini that was a bit too small for me. I was still young enough to be un-self-conscious, and I just loved that suit. I didn’t see my belly protruding out as any problem. The rolls of baby fat still at my waist didn’t concern me at all. Nor did I care that my butt crack peeked out in the back.

I wore it loud and proud, much to my parents’ chagrin. My mother hated it because it was “too revealing” (translation: my body made her uncomfortable.) My father, because it was “too revealing” (translation: he wanted me to stay a little girl forever.)

Me and my two older brothers spent many hours swimming in the swimming hole, a small  manmade body of water that had an anemic dock and several leafy trees ringing it that offered shade and respite from the unremitting Texas sun. There was a raft or two, and we’d all end up out by the hole, floating or swimming about.

My mom, who never swam and stayed inside to read her beloved crime novels, insisted I wear a t-shirt, to save my pale white skin from the dangers of skin cancer. I begrudgingly wore one, hating the extra layer between my skin and the water and the hot-but-still-moving-air slow breezes that the Texas heat sometimes mustered up.

Our dog Ginger would leap off the dock onto the raft with us, then slide off into the water. She’d paddle to the side of the hole and hunt for a pile of cow dung and then roll ecstatically in it.

I, too, was ecstatic, despite the darned t-shirt. My brothers were both entering their teen years, so the times we were together had siphoned down to a trickle. Here at the “farm,” they seemed to shed the new attitudes they’d picked up from junior high school. I had my Bubbies back to myself, and they had me giddy with laughter.

The only damper on the occasion was that we shared the swimming hole with the dreaded catfish.

Catfish, put there for ambiance, I suppose. Catfish get their name from prominent barbels which appear to be like cat’s whiskers on either side of the fish’s head. I had gotten it into my mind that those whiskers would sting me. Not just sting, but actually slice any skin that they touched.

You might think that such a fear would have kept me out of the water. But my brothers went in, so I was going in. I was not going to be a baby about it. Not me. Plus, it was hot as Hades. The choice between staying hot and sticky and getting some relief was no choice at all.

So in I would go. But boy, was it scary. Any slight movement in the water around me, and I was shrieking and lurching to cling to one or the other of my brothers. They’d toss me back in the water, away from the safety of their older brother-ness, and surges of adrenaline would shoot through me as I scrambled to get back to their vicinities.

Those two weeks would eventually come to an end, as would the summer. My brothers would adorn their new attitudes again. We’d never play together like that again.

But I can still remember the feeling of being in that water, and the odd mix of love and fear and safety. I loved every minute of it. I loved my brothers. I loved my burnt orange bikini. But I hated those catfish.

New World Order

Aside ~ ~ Beyond the Skinny Branches ~ Leave a comment

It’s happening. Slowly but surely, people are being phased out of more and more jobs, replaced by tablets or machines.

I don’t like it. When I was traveling this past summer, I saw it everywhere. The latest? The airport tablet trend. It’s the brainchild of OTG Management, and it is the bane of travel as far as I am concerned.

Airports have always held the promise of connections. Plane connections, yes, but connections of other kinds as well. Conversations at the airport bar or while waiting for your flight and grabbing a coffee, or at the gate, have sparked romances, dalliances, business opportunities. People-watching at airports has inspired films, writers and artists of all kinds because airports hold so many real-life stories unfolding before our eyes. Stories of reunited loved ones, people traveling for funerals, weddings, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.  Airports have been the way station between adventures. A part of the experience of travel. They’ve held the potential for adventure, the unknown, new experiences.

Now, airports are looking more and more like, well, a sea of i-Pad stations. Every restaurant has them in front of every chair on every table. If you are with someone, there are two i-Pads standing upright between you, separating you like the plexiglass at the bank teller. There are still some employees, but your contact with them is minimal. (Yet you still are expected to tip them.)

It is supposed to be more efficient and reduce the travelers’ stress at airports. Every time my husband and I ordered through them, there were errors and it ended up taking twice as long as it should have. Our meals were comp’d twice due to error. I had to take rebel action and un-dock our i-Pads so we could actually be together while we ate. I found it all incredibly annoying. And disturbing, in a Hal-creepy kind of way (the software for the OTG system is named Flo.)

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We’ve had self-service convenience lanes for years now at stores where you can ring yourself up. (I have to admit I do like those when I am in a hurry.) But at least they have installed them in addition to still having people to ring you up.

Even the people who hawk the free daily papers are being replaced by metal iron bins. Somebody figured out you can just leave the stacked papers in the metal bins for people to grab and forego paying whatever small amount they must have paid those people who would try to get you to take one on your morning commute. I am going to miss those people. Some of them were quite inventive. Like the way some of the subway announcers add a personal touch in the way they give out the usual informational announcements. Some of those people create a moment of connection in the subway with their wit or their exceptional voice — fellow commuters look around and catch eyes and smile in a moment of shared appreciation. More and more, those announcements are becoming automated as well. I will miss that, too.

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The opportunities we have to connect with people on a daily basis are becoming less and less as a result of all of this technological advancement and replacement. Interactions between strangers, once commonplace, is lessoning. Sometimes I look around on the streets, and in the buses and subways, and we all look like strange robot-people, plugged into “the source”…our various electronic devices…all looking down into our palms.

Even if you wanted to make a passing remark to someone, they wouldn’t hear you. (Ever try to get off the train, saying “Excuse me!” over and over only to realize that the person you were trying to pass was plugged in and couldn’t hear you?)

I really worry about how this will affect us over time. We’ve begun to notice that young children no longer know how to interact socially. Can it really be that big of a surprise?

It’s as if we all bring the comfort of our living rooms and our offices with us now everywhere we go. We can create our own soundtrack to play as we move through our lives. Sounds cool, right? But when we do that, we miss the actual live music of the actual world around us. Yes, there is a kind of music to the world of daily life around us. We don’t even recognize it anymore.

We now can watch our favorite shows as we move from one place to another. Those in-between times of transition between Point A and Point B used to be opportunities to process what has just occurred, to daydream, or to connect randomly with the world around us. Now it is a way to plug back into what we already know, what we will find at home when we get there. It’s as if we are constantly trying to get back to the state we know best…the state we recognize most. To spend as little time as possible being affected by and living in the actual world as we live in the actual world.

I have a 1.15 hour commute both ways to and from work each day. I often use it as a time to get certain things done. So I get it. I utilize that time, too, using the train as my temporary office. I type, I learn lines, I listen to workshop lessons, audiobooks, read on my Kindle, too.

But I do make a conscious effort to not be plugged in all of the time. I don’t run around the city with my music playing in my ears anymore. I purposefully start up conversations when at a checkout register with the person ringing me up, or the person selling me tea, or the person in line with me at the store. It is amazing how surprised some people are at it. It is not the norm anymore, it is the exception. Before I began to make this effort, I, too, would feel sort of jarred if a stranger tried to have a moment of connection with me out in the world. Sort of annoyed. Like, why are you interrupting my connection with my music or my show or my whatever-I-am-connected-to-at-the-time? Can’t you just leave me alone?

What? Wow. That floored me, when I caught myself feeling that way out in the world. That is when I had to take a hard look at what was happening in the world around me. And at my behavior in it. I had to ask myself what I was doing in the world in the first place.

Are we all here to remain the same as much as possible? To only connect with the known and to stay safely in control of what we are exposed to as we move through the world? Do I really want to try to maintain the world of my home and take it with me as I go out into the world?

Or do I want to go out into the world and be affected by it? Interact with it and communicate with people and allow myself to move through the world and connect to it? Be moved and changed by the interactions I have with real people?

So I started weening myself off of my smartphone. It was tough at first…to go back to just walking down a street without looking down and doing something on my phone felt, well, anxiety-provoking at first. My system was no longer used to the simple, naked action of moving through space with just me and my thoughts and the world around me. But in time, I learned again how to just enjoy the sunlight on my face, or to take in the street scene, to exchange a smile with a passer-by. Have a short exchange with someone on an elevator. Spark up a conversation in a line. There ARE still others out there happy to connect like that. You just won’t even see them unless you are available to it.

Just as I set office hours for myself as a self-employed person, I also now set boundaries for my time on my phone when out in the world. It makes a huge difference in the quality of my day.

I love my smartphone, I really do. But I love people too. I don’t want to forget how to have an exchange with a stranger. Some of the most memorable conversations I have had were in airports with strangers. I wouldn’t be the same without having had them.

#reallife #intheworldandoftheworld