a chorus of voices in my head, each having their own lines--you're a bad mom, you're a failure as a writer, you have squandered your youth, you will never find happiness, you are going to die alone and broke, you gained ten pounds and look disgusting. . .

oddly, i was at the computer so i posted a status that i was having a major anxiety attack.  i was looking up where the oberlin hospital is located.  i wondered if they had state of the art cardiac and stroke care.  then i noticed lots of messages and comments popping up from facebook friends.  breathe, a great many suggested.  take a hot shower.  watch the movie enchanted april (hey, if i knew how to get the television to work in my room i would!), go out and sing the national anthem, someone wrote and pretend you can do it better than whitney houston.  well, i can but that’s only because she can’t do it anymore at all.  hugs, many sent me and others sent me their own experiences. i’m not alone.  i was really really really touched.  this is exactly the sort of thing that makes mark zuckerberg’s creation meaningful.

i pulled it together to get to eastman’s performance at a recital by michael pisaro who is visiting from the california institute of the arts near los angeles.  what he does with a two minute “rest”–well, he definitely solves the Mozart problem of too many notes.

an hour and a half of experimental, atonal music–very modern and sophisticated.  my stomach growling drew the attention of several audience members.  an hour and forty five minutes no intermission.

and then i went back to the hotel room, took two ativan and got into bed.  thinking about pennsylvania.  the trip, the hours, the turnpike.  took another ativan.  looked for something to read.  the gideon bible.  but too much stuff about being struck down dead.  and then the yellow pages for oberlin.  sort of funny.  under elderly care they had something called the scooter shop!

i enjoyed the image of oberlin citizens of a certain age getting out their hog scooters and terrorizing the neighborhood!

this morning, i had no sleep and was frankly more exhausted than when i went to bed.  i made a decision.  onward to detroit.  it’s closer to home.  i’m feeling a bit bruised.  i think this is a strategic retreat, not a dive for the covers of home.

from a distance, using only facebook and an occasional phone call to check in, i wasn’t too sure how molly was doing.  i think she had focused more on sharing with me the times she hadn’t been able to do what she set out to do rather than on how much she’s actually done.  i was really wowed when i came to the parshall home on the river’s edge.  she was so happy and cheerful and i got to meet jeff for the first time.  jeff works at the local foundry but had the day off.  i took a chance–i asked to drive with her and jeff to the train station.  we got there.  yeah, sure, she had a big anxiety attack and we had to turn around, but we made it to the station.  i’m so damn proud of molly and i’m so amazed at the love and support of her husband jeff.

after we got back from the train station we three walked down to the river in back of their house. i can't wait for the day when molly and jeff visit me in chicago!

the afternoon was a delight and i left with a huge smile.  but i had the ohio turnpike to contend with.  and that is no fun whatsoever.   now i am napping in a hotel in ohio before making the push to drive into pennsylvania. . .

f2fb friend #299 dan kingery has worked for the community house since the pleistocene era. he has been my friend since i moved to winnetka twenty years ago.

i drove back to winnetka and made my way to the winnetka community house, which is sort of like a ymca but with no young christian men.  i attended a party given by the village follies, which is a small theater company that donates the proceeds from its shows to the community house.  seeing dan there was a treat, as he has worked a janitor at the house for as long as i have known him.  he is always friendly and he asked about my two sons joseph and eastman.

after the party, i received word from facebook that my account was to be frozen for seven days because i had violated their rule against making friendship requests to people i don’t know.  this seemed odd to me but then i realized that if you click “add friend” to a friendship “suggestion” you are in essence making a friendship request.  facebook was quite impersonally stern about this matter and offered me the option to cancel all outstanding friendship requests.  which i did.  and then i remembered. . .

i sent a friendship request to my mother, who is now on facebook. i told her that she has two grandsons who would like to know her. she has not confirmed me. i don't think she ever will.

my mother aleta and my father justin put me up for adoption when i was three years old and they divorced roughly a year later.  i was raised by the patrick family until i entered the juvenile justice system and was sent to many foster homes.

before facebook, it was pretty tough to track down someone with whom you were estranged. i used a private detective to track down my parents when i was twenty five. i continue to have a relationship with my father justin. i haven't seen my mother since my older son joseph was born twenty three years ago.

i did a little facebook browsing and figured out that my biological aunts are on facebook but they are not friends with their sister aleta.  i might send a facebook friendship request when my account is “unfrozen”. . . .

i drove far south, over the course of two days, to meet f2fb friend #298 colleen kennedy jacobs.  colleen suggested that we go to the best cafe in town.

bill's toasty shop has a facebook profile under the name "bill's toasties". . . . the menu features fried cheese, fried pickles, fried broccoli and cheese, fried . . . oh, you get the idea! in any event, it is quite famous throughout the state and beyond. and bill's toasties has 5,253 "likes" on facebook. can't beat that!

taylorville is the county seat of christian county and it was originally a mining town.  at its heart is the courthouse square and four one way streets force a driver to glide past dress shops, beauty parlors, diners, a laundromat, a bookshop, and a convenience store.  walk one block away from this center square and there’s really not a whole lot more.  but friendly people–i asked a passing stranger where a cash station was and he walked me all the way to the bank!

f2fb friend #298 colleen kennedy jacobs showed up with her “safe” person–her mom–and it was as if we were old friends who had simply missed each other too much!  we talked about golf–colleen’s mother won the taylorville women’s tournament four times and her sister has won it an astonishing ten times.  if it hadn’t been freezing outside, i would have demanded golf lessons from this 93 year old who still carries her own clubs.

colleen overcame many things she’s afraid of in order to come to bill’s.  first, she ordinarily doesn’t leave the house.  at all.  only when she’s with her mother, her boyfriend, or another safe person.  a safe person is very important to someone with agoraphobia–i think i used my sons as “safe” people which probably isn’t healthy parenting.

second, she was meeting a new person.  that makes two of us–meeting a new person is always scary.  facebook can make us believe we know another person, that we’re friends, that we’re simpatico, but really, it’s the face to face interaction that is most important to friendship.

colleen uses a picture of the singer lionel richie as her profile picture. it's a family joke about one christmas when mom put up pictures of all the relatives and added "uncle richie' a favorite singer to the collection. i would not have been completely surprised had a tall black man in pastel attire had showed up at bill's and serenaded me "all night long". . .

third, colleen doesn’t like to eat in public–her mouth gets dry and she gets nervous about swallowing.

i can totally relate to being nervous about eating in public. but i plowed through a "regular" sized burger, some fried cheese balls and onion rings. oh, and a medium diet pepsi. jeez, they sell a "large" triple burger that is three pounds of meat. for under six dollars.

colleen had her first anxiety attack when she was in junior high school and she freaked out so much that she ran away from school to her grandmother’s farm.  her grandmother was a devout baptist totally opposed to drinkin’, dancin’, and whatnot but totally addicted to a medicinal home remedy that contained 11% alcohol.  she gave colleen a healthy dose of the stuff and sent her home with a bottle.

well into the twentieth century, over the counter medications often contained alcohol, cocaine, or opium and people trusted that whatever they were buying was "safe". colleen's grandmother probably had no idea what was in the medicine she gave her granddaughter.

colleen continued to have trouble with anxiety and transferred to a catholic school in town.  she married three times, each time to someone from taylorville.  she has two sons although one of them, sadly, passed on.  she has tried every medicine and every therapy she has had access to.  she is so brave and so beautiful and i asked her what she wanted to do most.  ambition is hard for someone like us.  but she allowed as how she wanted to drive somewhere by herself.

lunch was over.  her mother was getting a little antsy. i had to get on the road.  i was invited back to the house.  i asked colleen if she wanted to ride with me–i have a mini-coop and she was sort of excited by the prospect.  so we walked over to the town square parking place. . . and i threw her my keys.

“you drive,”  i said.

well, that wasn’t so scary because she does drive sometimes so long as her mom is in the car. and we talked about how her mom is increasingly showing signs of needing to rely on colleen.  colleen’s siblings have left taylorville and one day colleen will be the one who has to take charge . . . but then i did a lying, manipulative bitchy thing as we drove along the one way streets circling the courthouse.

“stop the car,”  i said.  “i just saw the greatest dress in that window.  i’ll get us a parking space.”

and i opened the door and got out.

now there’s not much you can do on a one way street except go forward.  and the only way to get back to where you are in taylorville is to circle around the courthouse.  one block south, one block east, one block north, one block west. . . to where i’m standing wondering “did i remember to pay the car insurance bill?”

but, you know, colleen did all right by herself!  and just before we walked into the little luxuries* shop. . .

it turns out the dress in the window was gorgeous but alas, not my size, but colleen found a white dress that is motivational.  she’s planning on driving by herself every day and putting aside a little money every time so that she can afford the dress.  as colleen put it “who doesn’t like to get a new dress?”

sure, there’s the dress, but i think her real motivation to grab hold of her life is the fact that her mother is now ninety three and colleen will become her mother’s caregiver at some point.  and also, colleen wants to be part of the bigger world, the one she reads about, the one she interacts with on facebook.

while we were at the little luxuries store, we met the owner colleen's friend laura long. it was a nice reunion!

i am very grateful to colleen for a wonderful wonderful day in taylorville!  and i can’t wait to be sitting in my study and hear a car pull into the driveway.  colleen kennedy jacobs gets out, wearing her new white dress, and yells “hey, let’s have some fun, girlfriend!”  she’ll keep the car running!

*little luxuries, at 15 s. washington street, taylorville, illinois is owned by laura long and her mother.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9054243/Facebook-and-Twitter-more-addictive-than-tobacco-and-alcohol.html

this morning i am on the road to see f2fb friend #298.  i’m not sure exactly what she looks like because she plays with her profile pictures a lot.  so do a lot of people.  last i saw, she looked like this:

i'm figuring lionel richie isn't actually my facebook friend under the name colleen, but i could be wrong. . . i'll definitely make him sing "all night long" to me in bill's toasties diner where we're supposed to meet!

this morning i discovered that something i’m highly addicted to is dead.  namely, the battery on my cell phone.  i overcharged it.  i don’t have a phone.  i don’t know colleen’s number because it’s stored in my phone.  i can’t take a picture when i see her because my camera is in my phone and my next stop and my next stop after that . . . ?  in my phone. my relationship with my two sons who live far away? in my phone (well, not exactly, but you know what i mean)

before cell phones there were phone booths where clark kent would change into his superman togs and teenagers would breathe heavily into mouthpieces. today, abandoned phone booths are used by old men who duck into them in order to fart. it is an acknowledged wisdom born of age which says a man, unlike a child, should never run away from his farts.

one of the things i’ve learned this past year and almost two months–flexibility.  i’m going to need a lot of that today. . . .  and a verizon wireless store!

so i gotta ask you:

i felt really depressed on valentine's day because i thought my younger son eastman (f2fb friend #1) had forgotten about me. then the fedex guy showed up with a mushy card from eastman--it featured puppies and little candy hearts and who can't tear up when they see the combination? this is a valentine's card i received from one of my newest facebook friends talib who is from iraq where valentine's day is not generally celebrated. i appreciated the beauty of this card and the effort that went into making it!

ann malone and i have been divorced and i think we both agree that our agoraphobia/panicattacks/anxiety contributed to that unhappy fact.  and we both can remember every detail of our first panic attack.

i was nineteen.  i was grocery shopping at the kroeger’s across the street from the police and fire station in naperville, illinois.  i was with my boyfriend keith.  i was wearing white pants, white shirt, a tie, and a dark blue vest.  i was carrying a backpack of books.  wait?  a tie?

my attire that day did not reflect anything about my gender identification. the 1977 movie "annie hall" starring woody allen and diane keaton influenced my fashion sense. so did the prices at the salvation army thrift shop where i bought my clothes.

i sat the window sill at the end of the cash register waiting for my boyfriend to complete his purchases.  i looked outside.  a furious thunderstorm was coming.  the thunderstorm made me think of anger–an angry mother, an angry universe, an angry God.  this is like death’s arrival, i thought and i turned to look at the paramedic and two firemen waiting in line to pay for their lunches.  ”they can’t do anything to save me,”  i thought.

and suddenly, everything pressed in on me:  the imminence of death and destruction, the explosion of my heart, the oxygen being sucked out of lungs, lights and sound slamming against me.  too many things at once.  i stood up.  my legs were tingling with weakness.  this is death, i thought.

within a half hour, i was in edward’s hospital emergency room and a doctor was telling me i couldn’t possibly be having a heart attack.  you don’t know that, you don’t know that, i thought.  ann’s experience was a little different in details but the essence was exactly the same.

and what happened next?

**http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?pagewanted=all

***http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/04/07/natural-remedies-ineffective-for-anxiety/12656.html

children as of january 1, 2011 — joseph, living in new york, and eastman, a freshman at oberlin college in oberlin, ohio

facebook friends–325

new sons acquired during the past year and one month–

emilia who is from indonesia.  he’s muslim, likes hip hop and jempoler’s mania.  aldo who lives in seoul but is originally from indonesia.  he’s also a friend of emilia.  it’s nice when siblings get along.

shizuka who is from nagano, japan and has more siblings and daughters and cousins than anybody i know.  and oddly, i’m not his only mom.  and he’s just three years younger than me.

daughters:  maya and andrey from indonesia and ayin from malaysia–cory who is about to leave quezon city and move to kuwait to work for burger machine.

i think on facebook it’s sort of a sweet “extra” friendship to list friends as your relatives.  so they join my father justin and my sister casey, and my biological sons joseph and eastman as part of my facebook family.  and i have a lot of new facebook friends, many of whom have written to me about their experiences with being what once was called a “recluse” but is now more frequently called agoraphobic or having a social phobia.  facebook allows us to have friends and family but not necessarily have to travel or see them in order to keep up in real time.  so the reclusive or the socially anxious person isn’t shut out of social interaction.  the only difficulty is figuring out what is real and what is not real on facebook.  for instance, you might believe i have nine children. . . .

weight as of this morning:  146 pounds.  i blame my thyroid.  or maybe spending a year (2011) traveling–airport food is a diet buster.  does anybody know how to lose weight quickly?

tomorrow, we celebrate valentine’s day, a day that combines family, friends, and gaining weight.  how?  well, there’s chocolate, the traditional gift of the day–that’s going to put some more pounds on me.  and there’s love–which we share with our friends and family and on this day we try to make a point of expressing to them.  and then there’s the pressure. . .

potter’s thirty year old daughter jennelle potter was un-friended by payne and hayworth after what the couple described as jennelle harassing them on facebook (and sometimes on phone).  jennelle’s sometimes boyfriend jamie lynn curd (who is second cousin to billy payne) was charged with helping marvin potter.  jennelle is probably going to be charged as well and guess where the police are looking for their evidence?  yep, facebook. . . .

marvin potter and jamie curd in court. if they use the defense of "justifiable homicide" i think i have to review everybody i've ever unfriended. including that creepy guy who kept sending me pictures of himself. like, those kind of pictures of himself.

wow!  unfriending gets you murdered?  well, it reminds me of something that happened to me earlier this year.  i was unfriended and blocked by a facebook friend who read my post about yoga.  she was pretty upset with me and felt that i had disrespected her “sacred” place–namely, the yoga studio that she attends.  she also defriended two of my other facebook friends on the same day.  don’t worry–i have no interest in getting out a shotgun.  in fact, i want to apologize to her but i’m a little uncertain how to do it or what i’m apologizing for.  also, the tone of the email she sent me was pretty unequivocal and expressly told me to not respond.

i think if you read my blog often enough or if you know me personally, you know i have trouble with the grape. if i feel rejected, dejected, depressed, compressed, i'll reach for that white wine. i was really surprised i was able to resist. although i spent the entire next day in bed and was awfully sick.

i’m not sure how to send a note of apology and, oddly, her email went to my inbox while i was in the air coming back from having seen her.  we hugged and kissed as we parted.  i even mailed off a “thank you for having me” note before i opened up my email inbox.  and i got very “wha. . . ?” emails from the two other ladies who were unfriended as well.

i try to be real careful about how i blog about people's religious beliefs. and i try to keep an open mind in real life. on the other hand, i have a tendency to make fun of EVERYTHING! and i need to be more careful. i recognize the usual isms--christianity, judaism, islam, hinduism, buddhism.

the odd thing is that i had been a skeptic about yoga.  now i’m not so sure–i found one class made me stronger, calmer, and i even did a backbend (at fifty one this is no small accomplishment).

I have decided to unplug from all social networks, such as FB, yahoo email and cell phone. This experience will not only help my current relationships grow stronger but it will make one heck of a paper to write about for my school. So if you want to get a hold of me for the next 90 days (May 1st) You can call my home number which is xxx-xxx-xxxx, stop by my house or send me a letter (which I would love!, even if it is just to tell me how crazy I am)

I love all of you and I hope I hear from most, if not all of you in these next 90 days!

Love you!

when i saw the above message in my facebook message box i was taken aback.

no facebook? no cell phone? no twitter? argh!!!!!!!!!

deactivating a facebook account means that you effectively disappear from facebook.  but you can reactivate the account at any time.  maybe you just want a break.  maybe you want to focus your efforts on real relationships.  maybe you want to get some work done.  facebook will send you a manipulative message asking if you really want to deactivate your account because everybody will miss you, but hey, it’s your choice. . . .

people cannot find you on facebook and your skin and hair turns ghostly white. you don't have eyes or a nose or a mouth. and you have a cowlick. it's spooky!

my son and his girlfriend both deactivated their account when they broke up so that their mutual friends could not gossip on facebook about them.  two weeks later, both were back on facebook.  facebook reactivation gives you back all your information, profile pics, the messages, the status updates unchanged.  deleting an account is a little more dire–then you disappear and if you decide you want to go back to facebook, you have to start all over.  facebook claims it retains all account information for fourteen days, kind of a cooling off period in case you reconsider.

i’m going to be very interested in what happens to my friend and whether she returns to facebook before may one.  there has been considerable dissatisfaction with facebook’s changing privacy standards and format, but facebook’s growth in terms of users suggests that any trend towards deletion of accounts isn’t happening.  which makes me wonder. . .