An egg, a leg, and the wild swing of life online

For someone who avoided Facebook for years, I've taken a ride on the wild side of online networking lately. Some of my encounters have made me want to swing out as far as I can, let go of the hand grips, and drop off the face of cyberspace.


Quite unexpectedly, I've been recruited into a group that posts pictures of Females in Fishnets; "rewarded" for documenting a trauma-induced aversion to food blogging; lectured on copyright infringement; and reminded that I am quite possibly losing my spunk and spark as an older worker overshadowed by go-get-'em Gen Y'ers. All in the last week or so.


My real life seems idyllic and pastoral in comparison, phew. Thank God I have one!


Let me explain. I've been site-hopping like a tourist with hot Vegas winnings. I was a little drunk on the idea of being a bonafide though yet undiscovered online brand, what with the soft opening of my Swoosh by Scrollwork shop on etsy (shameless plug! but it's my blog) and the ensuing attention paid to my young blog (there I go again!)


There's real-time life, and there's the carefully crafted online realm. I spent a lot of time in the latter last week. Escapism always held sway over me, even as a child. I read each volume of the World Book Encyclopedia one summer— but only the fairy tale section. By the way, a moment of silence for the demise of hard copy encyclopedia...I miss the smell of our musty home library.


At the University of Santo Tomas (Manila) as a Lit major, I joined a debate about whether or not contemporary literature should function as a magnifying lens on society's ills. I pressed for greater accountability for the journalists, leaving us "art for art's sake" writers free to pursue our escapist concerns. I thought I was in my element, too, silencing the cavernous auditorium with my pithy opinion, until a commenter afterward noted that he stopped chitchatting just to hear my deep voice. He didn't remember a word I had said. I had been pleading for permission to escape the burden of excoriating martial law and the corrupt Marcos regime, and my audience had already escaped that humid afternoon via my voice. 


As an adult I am ever on the lookout for various avenues to transcend the right now. How could I resist the siren song of the three enchanting W's for very long? www-dot-anywhere-but-here took me places in guises of my choosing.


So last week I was on Flickr, a photo-sharing site; Darren Rowse Digital Photography School; etsy, a vintage and handmade global market; and Brazen Careerist, a Gen Y-pandering (oops! too harsh?) version of LinkedIn.


Does this girl not have a day job, you're wondering. Um, no. I work evenings, OK? And please, it's woman, not girl. Just sayin'.

• On Flickr I posted a picture of my leg right after I took off some really tight fishnet stockings that I'd worn while teaching dance for three hours. To me it was photojournalism. To others it was something else, apparently.

• On Rowse's DPS site I responded to the weekly assignment, "Still Life: Food" with an egg picture I had snapped for an earlier post, My first poached egg, and why I won't blog about food.

• On etsy I asked sellers how they'd react if I used a photo of one of their wares on my blog without asking for permission.

• On Brazen Careerist I responded to a thoughtful young man's query on how best to encourage older workers to regain their gusto for work.

If you went purely by the personas I concocted/seem to have been assigned by these various Internet communities, I am simultaneously:


A) A pupil-dilating exhibitionist with a predilection for racy hosiery;

B) A blundering idiot in the hallowed blogworld of foodies—and therefore a freak show; 
(with 1,574 gawkers to date)


C) A blogger with a pitiful following and possibly objectionable content;
(On the flip side, I might also be the blogger whom fellow etsy sellers would appreciate to death for featuring a picture of their work)


D) A wizened baby boomer with a cautionary tale for today's up-and-comers.
"Grandma's Table" tells the tale of an impatient adult son who banishes his feeble mother from the dining table because she shakes and spills things. She has to eat alone by the broom closet. The son has a come-to-Jesus moment when he asks his block-building daughter what she's making and she replies, "A table for you and Mommy for when you get old." Memo to the Gen Y'ers: What goes around comes around.


What did I learn from my forays into these villages? 

• Flickr viewers do not read blogs. At least not mine. If they did, I'd have seen a spike in my page views from the 1,500+ egg spectators.
• Etsy sellers are a feisty, candid, opinionated bunch. Kinda' like me.
• Some Gen Y'ers are mature leaders I would love to work with; some are full of themselves. Just like the generation I'm a part of, and generations to come.
• People who don't know me but read my online comments are more likely to sign up as followers of my blog than people who personally know me but secretly dismiss my blogging as a diversion from real life and the unsavory reality of unemployment. To the former, a cup of virtual tea; to the latter, to quote an etsy seller, "A fart in your general direction."

An autobiography told in clothes and pictures

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."

— Mark Twain 

I was engulfed by men in uniform when I was growing up. For seven years, we lived in Nichols (now Villamor) Air Base in the Philippines, where Dad was a colonel. Every morning we were trundled off to school in a weapons carrier with an olive green canvas roof that leaked when it rained—which was six months of the year. The drivers were enlisted men of various rank. We called all of them "Sarge." I never did learn to distinguish the stripes on their sleeves.

I've lived 15 years in uniform, all while in school. In mid-life, it would become the itch I needed to scratch, the ditch I clambered to escape.

I went to three different elementary schools and wore three uniforms. I found a picture of myself with my two best friends in the first grade.

You are not having a pre-migraine aura. I tinkered with the picture to protect the identities of my chums. And anyway I've forgotten their identities so I can't very well ask them for permission.

My brother and I were in the choir during our nerdy childhood. I tried disguising his face with more digital tweaking, but his head looked like a giant peppermint lollipop when I was done. So I cropped him out except for his sleeve. I may have forgotten to put on pants that Sunday.

Two high schools, two more uniforms. Add to those the army fatigues required every Friday during compulsory military training my last two years of high school. We all cropped our hair to show the nape. This was in the '70s. No Farrah Fawcett hair for us. May she R.I.P.

All through high school, we wore boys' leather shoes with white socks. I see I've done a lousy job of cropping these photos to where you can't see them. We polished those puppies to a mirror shine, trust me.

Plus there was the Girl Scout uniform. I wore it for a day so I could go on a scouts-only field trip to the lake. Not my idea! Someone lent me her extra uniform. It's the only time I ever pretended to be someone I wasn't. That is, someone who knew how to swim. I didn't learn until I was 17.

Then a uniform through four years of college: That makes a total of nine.

My uniforms were either green, blue and white, or red and white gingham. To this day I will never buy anything with red and white gingham. The term, "back to school" induces nightmares. I dream I'm wandering the halls unable to find my classroom, unprepared for final exam, or unable to get home after dark. Why have I never mentioned this to my therapist?

Fashion was a remote concept to me then. What would've been the point? When would I have worn anything other than a uniform or a house dress and flip-flops? My parents would never have allowed me to go to parties. It never occurred to me to ask. I don't remember ever being asked to one, anyhow, so the situation never presented itself.

It dawns on me now how simple my life was. All those years spent with my nose between a book. I might've been a wallflower, but since I never partied only to sit dances out, who could tell? Who knew I'd end up a dance teacher in mid-life?

My first poached egg, and why I won't blog about food

My first poached egg, a mini victory, originally uploaded by scrollwork.

This being Try-it Tuesday, I thought I'd try something I've never done before: poach an egg. Don't look down your noses at me if this is old hat to you. I've jumped out of a plane like a monkey on someone's back without so much as getting my heart rate up. But the poached egg does not turn up in my cache of childhood memories. Mid-life is as good a time as any to test the waters.

The self-described egg lover eggstraordinaire at Ode to Eggs (ode2eggs.com) took all the trial-and-error mess out of it. All I had to do was follow instructions, which involved a pin prick at the large end of the egg before breaking it into a soup ladle. Then you lower it into the center of a simmering bath pre-sprinkled with salt and vinegar while stirring the water. This is why God gave us two hands.

See, this is precisely why I don't blog about food. Ever. I just shook my head over my pathetic paragraph. Where is Julia Child's passion, the sensuous description? If I could muster some up, my blog would billow out across the Net, enticing foodies to comment and subscribe, and those loathsome search engines would reward me with high rankings for using sexy Google AdWords like cook (13.6 million global monthly searches), butter (5 million), and pan (11 million, kill me now and put me out of my misery).

Let's try this again: The egg awoke and unfurled its pristine white skirts. What perfection. I grabbed my little point-and-shoot. I stared at my hasty photograph for minutes on end. I thought I saw my name surface from the depths of the yolk like answers on the Magic 8-ball.

And then I snapped out of it, fished my egg out of the water and ate it. It was good! By then of course it didn't look like the picture. The whites had the yolk in a straitjacket.

You know that Meryl Streep movie, Julie and Julia, in which Amy Adams plays the blogger who cooks one recipe a day from Julia Child's cookbook? She takes a bite of her poached egg and waxes poetic about the creaminess of it in her mouth. No, it did not make me want to rush out of the theater to poach an egg. I thought it was pretentious and annoying, the way wine spitters—oh, sorry, connoisseurs—go on about a wine's bouquet and nose, complex tones, hints, evocative notes and pungent whatnots.

Also, I vowed never to give in and blog about something popular but absurdly not interesting to me just to get the readership numbers up. I'm not saying Amy Adams' character did, because she truly was interested in cooking.

By now you've deduced I'm not writing about adventures in cooking at all right now. And you would be right.

Why, you ask, am I not interested in writing about food? Early trauma. In the early '90s I had to write marketing copy for a newspaper advertising supplement paid for by a family-owned chain of grocery stores. Even then I had zero interest in food writing. The marketing manager gave me a pep talk about the sensory richness this assignment needed, and off I went to interview the butcher.

We met with the client after all my articles were drafted. The one about the meat department caused a pained expression to cross the store owner's face. The butcher, who was present at the meeting, protested that I wrote in the wrong name for the knife he had used at our demo-interview. I said I couldn't have come up with that name on my own.

My marketing manager made like a horse and kicked me under the table. I remember thinking, "Oh, it's not just a saying. They really do kick you under the table here in the States." I went back to my desk and rewrote the meat article, my leg still smarting. And then my husband and I boycotted that store until it closed down several years later. The end.

Would I write about food if it meant keeping our house from foreclosing? Hell yeah! Am I hoping food editors notice my blog and consider hiring me? Gawd no. If I were a food editor I wouldn't hire me.

But will I ever poach an egg again? Yesssssss! Hurray for small daily victories.