Of chickens and libraries and life

For the past couple of years I've been struggling with the idea that I'd like to be a farmer. Don't laugh. Okay, go ahead. It is sort of funny. But, I am serious. I've read numerous articles in Organic Gardening, Martha Stewart Living, and even the local newspaper about raising chickens or heritage animal breeds, or about people who have given up the 9-to-5-grind for the honest, wholesome work of raising organic crops, and they grab me by the insides and pull hard. I believe that small-scale local farming, especially organic farming, is environmentally necessary, economically beneficial, nutritionally superior, and even morally imperative. The idea calls to me in part because of my love of gardening. I want an excuse to stay home and work outside, and to have enough work to keep me busy if I were to stay home all day. I want it to be meaningful and productive work. I want to spend my time with plants and animals. I want to get up and look out at vast fields at sunrise, to smell hay, to make my own composted manure, to eat fresh eggs from my chickens, to have a barn with animals of some kind in it. My heart wants to be a farmer, while my mind and my body scream, "Are you freaking kidding, Girlfriend?!" because there are certain realities which my farm fantasies ignore, like animal pests and diseases, and the intense labor and long hours required. 

Because you see, I am an intensely lazy person --physically, at least. I always have been. I liked bike riding as a child, but not too fast or too far or uphill. I didn't really like playing games that required running, like kickball or tag. I was sort of jealous of people who could do gymnastics, so I was proud when I could muster enough courage to be able to pull myself up on a bar and hang upside down. But I don't know if I ever did manage to cross those sets of parallel monkey bars on fancy swing sets. If I could do one or two I was usually pretty happy with myself.

I preferred indoor activities. I liked playing pretend and drawing and coloring and painting and jigsaw puzzles and writing and more than anything else in the world: reading. What I remember most was playing house, playing librarian, playing teacher, and reading, reading, reading, reading. I LOVED going to any library. Even as a child I loved the hushed solemnity and the smell of all those books. I wanted to quietly browse for hours and pick out dozens of books to take home and read or reread. I loved searching in the card catalog and writing down call numbers. My favorite was the towering Morris Library on the SIUC campus, filled with not just rooms but FLOORS full of books. When I was somewhere between 5 and 7 and my dad was in grad school, he would take me with him. In awe, I would follow him up the wide, echoing stairwell, and then settle myself on a high stool at the tall tables near the card catalog to use the little tiny pencils and scrap cards for notes as I pretended I was doing some sort of important library work. I would sometimes look through the card catalogs there at the incomprehensible titles, or browse through the shelves of academic tomes and wonder if someday any of those books would be interesting.

And now I profile those books for a living. My 7-to-5-daily-grind involves working for a corporate business that sells those books to the very same library that enchanted me as a child. I hate working for a corporate business. This is not what I ever wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer or a teacher or a librarian, and instead I became a teacher, got fired, had already indebted myself for the rest of my life getting a master's degree to be a teacher so I couldn't afford to go back to grad school to become a librarian, and managed to land my current job out of luck and desperation. In some ways, it is the best job I've ever had. In other ways, not so much.

One major drawback is that I don't feel like I'm making a difference in the world. As a babysitter and then a nanny and then an early childhood teacher I was helping to raise interesting, loving, fascinating children. At the law library, well, the law library was a fun job because I was working at a library and socializing and/or flirting like a mad fiend. But I was helping people in a variety of ways, and learning about library work at the same time. It was that experience which impressed my current employers when I applied for my job. But now? Now I commute 2 heart-shriveling hours a day to essentially churn out sales for a company that doesn't pay me what I think I ought to be making for the amount of intelligence I bring to the job. It doesn't even make good use of my intelligence, and it doesn't allow for much variation in my duties, so I get bored and frustrated frequently. And there's no moral compensation that at least the world is a better place because I do what I do. This is not the adult life I had planned.

It wouldn't be accurate to claim that I was a really happy child. I was a precocious, opinionated, backtalking, quick-to-anger little girl who was always right and was obsessed with fairness, but who also had bouts of debilitating shyness and often thought she was unlovable and unloved. I did know that many people loved me and many people liked me. I did know that despite the fact that I could be a horrid brat, there were still many people who thought I was funny and admired my intelligence and talents. And I wasn't a morose child. I just lived in my head more than many people probably do, and I never felt quite normal. But that was okay, because someday I was going to grow up and life was going to be everything I wanted. Not that I would necessarily be rich and/or famous, just very well off in every way doing something fulfilling and sort of impressive.

I've come so far away from those visions of childhood, and it makes me sad. I still have most of the character flaws and the same frustrations with the world, but I've lost so much of the ability to enjoy myself which balanced things out. I've been out of school for 8 years, and I feel like my brain is rotting away. I don't have time to read for hours on end. I don't go to libraries anymore. I don't paint or draw or color. I don't write except for these entries. I don't even have a bicycle anymore. I don't play. Everything is about responsibilities and worrying and doing the unpleasant things that have to get done, or avoiding doing them by doing something else that is really sort of a waste of time, like sitting on the couch in front of a movie. Okay, I spend a lot of time on garden fantasizing and planning, but I could get away with spending a lot less time on that so that I would have time for other things.

But this goes back to me being an essentially lazy person who lives predominantly inside her own head. Some people work full time, maintain the small farm where they live, write books on the side, and still find time to raise a family, go to church, and do volunteer work. And some of those people even do it with less money than we make. I have NO CLUE AT ALL how these people do half of that, let alone all of it. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I want to know how they do it. Or at least, I'm not sure I could ever truly understand how they do it. I still have big ideas and big hopes, only now they tend to be about throwing in the consumer towel and forging a simpler life with honest, back-breaking work and sacrifice. But I don't honestly think that would make me happy, either. Just where is the soul-fulfillment that I seek? Does it require a massive change or can I find it within the conditions which already circumscribe my life? Can I even break the habits causing the problems in my current life? How? And when?

Will I ever own chickens? Will I find time to go to libraries once again and revel in the experience of just being there? Will I stop spending all my time and money on plants? Will I ever use my watercolor paints I've ambitiously kept around for at least 10 years now? Will I ever write a book or even a post more than 3 other people read? Will I ever again look to the future with more excitement than aversion? Will I ever stop writing this post and go to bed?? 

Why I Love Facebook

People who think Facebook is some sort of apocalypse for actual relationships couldn't be more wrong. Facebook is directly responsible for maintaining many of my most important relationships.

Thanks to Facebook, I can interact with my brothers and sisters-in-law all the time. I get to hear stories about my nephews and nieces and see pictures of them. We argue with one another, tease each other, and share music, videos, and other things we know the others will appreciate. We can offer support when we're having a bad day and remind each other that we're loved.

The same things are true for my aunts, uncles, and cousins. I am friends with 19 of my 27 cousins and 15 of my 21 aunts & uncles! With a family that large and spread almost all the way across the country, could there be a better way to keep in touch with everyone so easily? Now I often know things before Mom can tell me in our weekly phone calls, and once in awhile I actually know something about someone in the family before she does!

Facebook would already be worth my time for keeping my family so close, but it is also an invaluable link to friends of every kind. All of our friends "here" live at least an hour away and finding time to get together is difficult. Facebook keeps us connected when we are apart. (Heck, it keeps us connected when we're just sitting a few feet away from each other at work!) The same is true for "old" friends. Friends from high school, from college, from previous jobs. Kids I used to babysit. Parents I used to babysit for. Past friends. Best friends. Lifelong friends. Not everyone you ever knew has to stay in your life forever. There are plenty of people from high school I'm not friends with on Facebook. But I've had to say goodbye to too many people in my life that I didn't want to leave. And thanks to Facebook some of them are part of my life again.

Maybe it isn't who you know on Facebook that the naysayers object to, but how you interact with others online. Anyone who thinks the kinds of interaction that occur through Facebook are shallow is also wrong. Maybe they think that sharing funny pictures, favorite videos, and interesting links is too trivial, but quite frankly the same could be said of sitting around drinking together and talking about sports. What matters is that people are connecting with one another in ways that mean something to them. Because of what my friends and family post on Facebook, I see articles that keep me informed about what is going on in my hometown and the world, and I get to read firsthand accounts of newsworthy events all over the country. They make me laugh and they encourage me when I'm having a hard time. In return, I try to do the same for them. We commiserate, we advise, we reassure, we debate, we entertain, we enlighten. Isn't that what relationships are all about?

And I, at least, also get a certain benefit that is extremely important for me: it keeps me connected to the human race. I've always struggled with being both very social and very antisocial, sometimes alternating between the two and sometimes feeling both at the same time. I've always been misanthropic, but I'm at my happiest when I'm surrounded by people whose company I enjoy. Moving to New Hampshire was a triple-whammy of "bad" in this sense. I packed up my life and moved 1000 miles away from the Midwestern university town (1) where virtually all of my social support network remained (2) to a part of the country where the population density makes it virtually impossible to get away from other people (3) and where the vast majority of those people are nothing like the people I was used to dealing with (see #1). In the 8 years since I moved here my misanthropic tendencies have almost completely taken over and my faith in humanity is at a critical low. I truly understand what the term alienation can mean now. I sometimes feel like the worst of deceivers when I try to argue what is best for Society and the Human Race when I don't feel like I belong to either one. But Facebook helps. It reminds me that there are good and interesting people in the world, and that they still allow me to interact with them. It puts a familiar face on opinions and perspectives which are different from my own and, because they come in the voices of people I care about, I have a reason to listen and to try to focus on the common ground between us. Facebook is a reminder of what I have in common with other people and why I have a reason to care about other people.

No, Facebook is not the harbinger of the downfall of Society. Face-to-face relationships are not the only way the Human Race has ever maintained real relationships. Historically, friends and family members used to relocate across oceans and never see each other again, but they stayed in touch for the rest of their lives through letters. And as for quality of communication, while some letter writers may have been quite talented with words, I'm sure there were just as many people who were nearly illiterate but wrote anyway. Or actually were illiterate and paid someone else to transcribe their letters. Verbal communication has always been even less formal. I doubt anyone could find evidence that the inane banter among idiotic Facebook users is any less erudite than the inane face-to-face banter among their idiotic counterparts of past generations.

I admit, I would rather hold my friends' babies than just see pictures. I'd prefer to see my nieces' and nephews' antics in person. I would rather share a meal with my friends and talk for hours. I'm a little jealous of my extended family members who can finagle the time and money to travel and see one another. But life is full of limitations, and when they keep us from doing what we'd like most, Facebook offers us the next best thing. With the added bonus of allowing us to interact with people to whatever degree we are comfortable, at whatever time works best for us, even when we're sick.

Yeah, I know, there are vast avenues of consideration I haven't touched. I've profiled at least a dozen books in the past year or two about the sociological issues and ramifications of technologically-mediated social interaction, yadda yadda yadda. But I'm standing by what I've said here. I spend a lot of time on Facebook and I've considered letting some of it go unread. That's part of the reason I only friend people I have actually met in real life. I'm not dissing online-only friends, but if I'm going to make new friends they need to be flesh-and-blood friends. Otherwise, I don't have enough time now as it is. But that part of me that craves social interaction doesn't want to miss any of the party that is Facebook. It makes me sad that a number of the people I know who have accounts rarely or never use them. I'm sure we'd both say to one another, "But you're missing so much." We'd both be right, and we'd both be wrong. I need Facebook. How much of it I need may change someday. Doing other things instead might be good for me, too. But for now, I'm proud to be a FB junkie.