Author: Bev

When responding to an invitation, I was tempted to say, we will be there, “if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise;” (1955 Jerry Reed) because you just never know what that day may bring.  Then I rethought that and just said, “we’ll be there.”

English grammar rules are fraught with exceptions.  This makes our beloved language one of the most difficult languages to learn for the non-English speaker.

Grammar mistakes circulate through families, as does “good grammar.”  Exceptions to the grammar rules are also handed down from one generation to another.  From a young age, we learn language through example and our teachers are those with whom we spend the most time.

If your daddy said, “I seen a bear in the woods today,” and your mama said, “Well, I saw a wild turkey during my walk along the trail,” it’s possibly a toss-up whether you’ll inherit your dad’s grammar mistake or your mom’s crisp understanding of the rules regarding the word, see and its variants.

Most of us remember from school, an oft-used spelling ditty involving a familiar spelling rule: “I before E except after C.”  But there are over seven thousand words in the English language that defy this rule.  As I said, there are so many exceptions in English.  We native English speakers have learned to accept the rule that “it’s this way, except when it isn’t.”

We accept most exceptions. For example, the homophones in my previous sentence have got to be a conundrum for non-native speakers.  To “accept” is to receive without question, but to “except” is to exclude.

Have you ever been the exception, been excluded for some reason or another?  Have you ever been the other, or an outsider?  If so, then welcome to English-based civilization.  I think we’ve all been the exception at one time or another.

I’m not necessarily a rule breaker, although there has been a rule on the books that stipulates not to use contractions in writing.  But I write how I talk.  There is another rule, not to start a sentence with but.

I really like that there are exceptions to the rules just in case I’m not all that keen on a certain rule in the first place.  From a writer’s perspective, it seems like the rules sometimes restrict personal expression, creativity, and even clarity.

About song lyrics and the story of “ain’t.”  I was under the impression that “grammar rules be damned,” originated with song lyrics, such as the one quoted in the first sentence of this tome.  Music is a famous vehicle of rebellion, communion, antipathy, and agreement, all balled up in one very influential enigmatic medium.

But when I did a bit of research, I found that the “word” ain’t was used way back before the 1955 hit, “Ain’t that a Shame” sung and popularized by Fats Domino.  What’s with the bad grammar in these 1955 songs?

The controversial word, ain’t is one of the most pervasively non-standard English language vernacular words ever used.  And, incorrect usage of don’t for doesn’t and seen for saw, pervades our cultural landscape in songs, rhymes, and everyday conversation.

Ain’t is used widely in song lyrics, presumably because it rhymes better than the more cumbersome but grammatically correct, is not, are not, isn’t, etc.  For example, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” wouldn’t quite cut it as “He Isn’t Heavy, He’s, My Brother.”   Nor would “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” sound right as “It Isn’t Necessarily So.”

There’s a certain flow to familiar phrases such as “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” “you ain’t seen nothin yet,” and “say it ain’t so, Joe,” that their grammatically correct counterpart can’t achieve.  The word usage of ain’t may not be grammatical but it is acceptable in certain instances.

Ain’t is okay nowadays, but like it or not, it is sometimes associated with the non-standard speech of the less educated and is socially unacceptable in some situations.  In fact, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries the word, ain’t became stigmatized as the perfect example of a shibboleth, a word used to determine inclusion in or exclusion from those who were educated.  “Ain’t that a shame?”

General Douglas MacArthur said, “rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.”  Well, ain’t that somethin’?  I guess the good general adapted well to the myriad of English language grammar exceptions.  I think I’ll go and lie down after I lay this piece to rest.…..

With reference to the 1980 Blondie song, “Call me on the line, call me, call me, anytime,” I ask, really, anytime?  Have you answered a call on your life?  Do you have a calling?

Having a strong inner impulse toward a certain vocation, profession, or action is sometimes referred to as a calling.  This use of the term can be traced to the 1550s, although it originated in the biblical book of I Corinthians 7:20, where it refers to a position or state in life.

In the mid-13^th century, the noun, calling, referred to a summons or invitation.  In this sense, if you were called to appear before someone, it was not unlike our modern-day legal summons to appear before a court official, and it isn’t a request, it’s more like a demand.

In 1882, to call, was Middle English, to stand at the door and call out.  This reminds me of a familiar scripture from Matthew 7:7-8, ask and it shall be given; seek and you will find; knock, and it shall be opened. 

The thing about asking, seeking, and knocking, is that they are action verbs.  When you take these actions, you rightly expect a reaction for your effort.  However, expectation is key here.

When you ask, you will receive, but you might not receive the answer you expected.  When you seek, you might find something altogether different from the thing you sought after.  But, with an open mind, you just may get something better than expected.  The Rolling Stones put it this way, “you can’t always get what you want… but if you try sometimes, well, you just might find you get what you need.”

When you knock on a door, the one that opens to you might be surprising.  What’s behind your door may beckon you inside a maze of paths that lead you in a direction that is not a part of your five-year or twenty-five-year plan.

Don’t be disappointed at your unexpected outcomes.  In fact, I’ve encountered a few busy signals in my day.  Many times, when we call, we can’t get through.  Or we’ve been called, didn’t or couldn’t answer and when we return the call, the line is busy.

I can’t tell you how many true crises we’ve been through that have led to opportunities and an easier course, forward.  “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” comes to mind.

This reminds me of a story in current affairs.  Let’s say you were called to become a princess, or duchess as it turns out.  You expected to be adored worldwide.  You thought your job would be to dispense goodwill, dress extremely nicely, wave and smile a lot, travel, and receive thanks for your efforts.

Instead, your job is work, constant, thankless work, helping some folks who don’t care, are ungrateful, and who criticize you to your core.  You found that there are plenty of people out there who don’t like who you are and they’re not afraid to shout it to the world.

The nice clothes are fun but somebody somewhere says you’re a cow.  Your waves and smiles are said to be fake and some of the travel is just plain dirty and you’re expected to eat some pretty gross stuff, with thanksgiving, trying not to let your face betray your disgust.

Suddenly your dream of becoming a princess has come crashing down around you and your self esteem is damaged, perhaps beyond repair.  Your mental health has nosedived and all you can think is you want out of this mess you’ve been called to.  You think, “If this is what my calling to be a princess is, I quit.  I’m hanging up from this call.”

As a princess, you’ve got the power now to exact revenge on the people who made you a disillusioned princess.  Will you wield that power with your eye toward the folks who appreciate the good you are capable of, or will you try with all your might to hurt those who called you to this gilded cage?

Untempered vision is a dangerous thing.  Rejected counsel is another.  Whole-hog action without a juried plan, is folly.

Be all that you can be, as that princess.  It truly is your calling.  Become pliable clay in the hands of the one(s) who called you to this task, this place, this job, this family; they know what this calling takes.

The thing about “calling” is that you’re compelled to follow it whether you like it or not.  So, learn to like it, some how or another.  Be teachable by your fate.  You might be surprised by what you’ll learn, I know I have.

Over the last few years, the scarcity of paper and paper-based products has plagued the world over.   I’m sure that someone’s brilliant solution to this shortage is, “go paperless.”

Nearly every bill I’m obliged to pay every month, practically begs me to “go paperless.”  I tried this with a number of bills over the last years, with mixed success.  I apparently need a piece of paper as a reminder that there is something I’ve got to take care of.

There are certainly many categories of things which doing less of or having less, is doable, if not beneficial to one’s personal economy, health, wellness, prosperity, or the public good.  White sugar, animal fat, salt, smoking, inactivity, bad attitudes, hatred, bitterness, and all manner of strife, we could do with less of.

Less stuff has got to be better than more stuff.  Piles of stuff are rather chaotic.  As I cleansed an old rolodex on my desk, I ran across a little piece of paper with an apropos quote: “Peace means destroying the authority attached to chaos.”

I’m all about peace these days, so what say we take some authority over the chaos of stuff, and purge dear folks, cleanse, and breathe….  Speaking of purging, and considering less is more, there is the happy occurrence of being in your own home, braless.  Braless is not just an historically feminist mantra of the 60s or 70s, but an annual summer necessity for many a modern woman of every shape and size, creed and color, ideology and political bent.

Back to the shortage of paper, our business requires it, specific kinds of it.  It’s not as simple as the inconvenience I feel being out of paper plates on which to microwave my turkey bacon the way I’m used to doing it.

And there is my refusal to pay $8.95 at my favorite discount store, for a small packet of said paper plates.  There is always Amazon, but dear Lord haven’t we given them enough business, already?

Seriously though, the paper shortage has become critical in printing-related businesses such as ours.  Again, somebody out there is suggesting we go “paperless.”

Your suggestion has been noted.  In fact, we heard your plea more than a decade ago.  Digital downloads have been a part of most businesses of our type for many years.  However, not to get too specific, method books for music teachers on how to play this or that instrument, are usually too voluminous to be accommodated by a digital file.

As mentioned above, if you do your personal business online, which many of us do, you have been offered paperless options for your bills.  But, my peeve with “their” concept of paperless is that it’s paperless for them, but you usually utilize the Print tab on your computer screen and from your printer, obtain a paper receipt, if not in addition to the paper bill which you printed earlier.  It’s never really paperless.

“Less,” as a suffix isn’t as simple as doing with less of something.  Like, meatless, it’s doing without meat or whatever word precedes the suffix, less.

At this critical time, paperless for some businesses is trying to do with massively less than is necessary to conduct our business.  We’re used to being creative with our resources but creativity can only make up for so much lack of supply.

The supply chain crisis, worldwide, seems to be manipulative toward the masses with a goal of conformity to a new norm.  It’s a bit dictatorial if you ask me.  That was rhetorical because I’m aware that nobody is asking me.

It’s like we’re living in a penal colony under a correctional system of government and we’re being punished and squeezed until we comply with the new regime’s vision of things.

So, just like sleeveless, shapeless, speechless, careless, fearless, ageless, breathless, lawless, useless, helpless, restless…., there is paperless.  It’s not a meaningless thing. 

Well, it’s probably endless to keep writing about how I can’t do without paper, but I just won’t do without sleeves; it’s a thing for me.  And it’s rare for me to be speechless, although it may have happened once or twice in my life.

I forget to take care from time to time, but I don’t recall feeling helpless more than once.  I have a constant need to stretch my legs, which I used to think should be called “restless leg syndrome,” but it’s not.  I just need to move, because being motionless is torture.

So, I admit, I can’t “go paperless.”  It just can’t happen.  How about you? Bless you, by the way.

Is your life full of distractions, like mine is?  I catch myself once in a while, realizing that I’ve spent hours dealing with peripheral personal business while the “real” business of the day waits on the back burner until I can just muster enough mental and emotional energy to eek out what has got to be done.

I click on my email in the morning and I seem to move from one distraction to the next before I get to the main event.  And the Internet is notorious for one distraction tumbling after another.

You can intend to do a simple Google search for something that matters to you and off you go.  If it’s not click-bait on your Google feed or Facebook feed, Instagram or Twitter, it’s legitimate movement from one bit of “research,” that leads to another bit or bob that leads to yet another, until you nearly forget about your original point of interest.

Click-bait is essentially internet advertising masked as information, or gossip about celebrities and their secrets to success.  Most of us, out of curiosity, click on it at some time or another. Someone once said that advertising is 48% distraction, 48% manipulation, and 4% information.  They got that right.

Distraction is a matter of contemporary culture, offering information overload from politics, to entertainment all around the globe, to cute kitties, dogs, babies, weddings, sales pitches, and gossip.  It’s nearly impossible to stay focused on what’s important, when distractions, even worthy ones compete for your attention.

The lyrics to a song called, Breathe 2 a.m., by Dido, which is included on my jogging track, speaks to those daily distractions which are a major part of our modern lives.  “…you can’t jump the track we’re like cars on a cable and life’s like an hour glass glued to the table; no one can find the rewind button now, so cradle your head in your hands and breathe, just breathe, oh breathe, just breathe.”

I think, poignant to the song, Breathe, is that the artist sings whole sections without taking a breath.  It seems that our culture, like that song, is about movement from one thing to the next, with barely a moment to take a single breath.

I need one extra long breath some days when dealing with all those distractions.  It’s peculiar that when I’m doing my own thing, stuff goes swimmingly.  But the other things that I’m stuck doing because of somebody else’s mistakes, minute by minute, hour by hour, suck the smooth right out of some, or if I’m honest, most days.

Don’t even try to fix their errors by yourself online because there are safeguards built into the system so that if you don’t go with their program, they bounce your bum right off the website.  Then you attempt via the old-fashioned telephone, to first explain the mistake to a human being, once you’ve swum through the morass of selections laid out before you.

After you’ve explained the situation to the first person, chances are you’ll be forwarded to another department or if you’re lucky, their manager or supervisor.  Then when you ask if the manager is aware of your issue and/or if they have your account number in front of them, they give you the duh-silent treatment and you have to go over it all again.

Meanwhile your distraction-meter is ticking up to the red-overload zone.  Okay, so now you have the supervisor on the telephone and you’ve repeated your issue.  You have hope that this person is qualified to settle the matter and this distraction will be over for today.

“I’ll have to research this and get back to you,” they say.  “Is this the best number to reach you?”  Day one passes as does days two and three.  Meanwhile the bill is due tomorrow, but the mistake on the bill has not been resolved.

That in itself presents another issue, that of confirming your identity.  Oh my, this might be “driving me to distraction.”

It seems time to re-set, re-boot and re-focus.  If one prevails, the distractions eventually wane and you get to do what you intended to do all along.  So, I guess the best antidote to distraction is a matter of the old stick-to-it-rive-ness.  Perseverance will get the job done every time. 

Besides information overload, emotional or physical messes create distraction, which reduces your power to concentrate on the bigger picture.  You can as easily get trapped in cleaning up a mess as a fly gets caught in a spider’s web.

Cleaning up this particular mess reminds you of another mess, and in the midst of that mess is yet another reminder that something else needs tidying, until you’re truly lost in messes. This is what T.S. Eliot meant when he said, “Distracted by distraction by distraction.”

Another phenomenal distraction is loss.  If you’ve lost something or someone, have you noticed that you have a reduced ability to focus on much of anything else?

Then there is the “wonderful distraction.”  When your mind is overfilled, distractions can be a positive trick to unloading and diverting traffic to a happier highway, so to speak.

If problems threaten to overwhelm you, any distraction will provide blessed relief.  The problem may not go away; then again, a bit of time away from it all may allow the issue to fix itself.  I’ve observed that making allowances for distraction is doing yourself a great service of self-care.

But, on the other side of the double-edged sword of distraction, I totally see Thomas Edison’s point when he said, “To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.”

Distractions are here to stay, folks.  So make the best of them and think on these things: truth, nobility, justice, purity, love, good reports, virtuousness, and anything that is worthy of praise – see Philippians 4:8-18.

I sat, in repose, on a big rock – taking a break from my walk in the woods.  In retrospect – if it can be retrospective, with only fifteen words under my belt – “sitting in repose on a big rock,” to a person over the age of say, twenty, seems an oxymoron, soon to be revealed in the degenerative disks of the aging back, numb butt and tailbone, of said person formerly at rest on a rock. We have quite a few of these natural accoutrements – big rocks, and woods, in our rural Pennsylvania environs.

When I’m in the woods, I’m often compelled to sit a bit and contemplate what it is about our forestscape that I’m repeatedly drawn to and which makes me exhale such peace – in startling contrast with my work-world that I left below, in the valley.

A while ago, in one of those moments of respite, I sent a text to my sister-in-law: “Just chillin’ in the woods.  Birch bark is so smooth and beautiful.  Meditating on what it is that I love about these woods. Textures abound in chaotic, natural randomness.” 

In our business I am Managing Editor, and I manage and control pretty much everything in my life.  When I come to the woods I can just breathe and relinquish all control to God and appreciate the uneven, unexpected, natural terrain I encounter. 

 

I noticed that in describing my beloved woodlands, I use a lot of un-words: unmanipulated, untrained, unplanned – and the two un-words above.  As thoughtful English grammarians know, un is a prefix, meaning not or negative, or an opposite force in adjectives, adverbs, and nouns. 

For me, when I describe what I feel when I enter the woods, it’s a description of what it is NOT.  My woods are NOT manipulated by humankind; not planned to death, not trained to be a certain thing to humankind – they certainly are not even or expected.  I like the French word for not, “pas.”  Right about now I could go for some pas de plan, pas de structure, pas de control, etc.

This reminds me of Paul Cezanne’s comparison of Paris, “nature, starched and tormented” with Provence, “nature, unspoiled.”  I could just as easily compare our domesticated rural communities with their neighbor, the woodlands.  One is configured and tortured to the bounds of human perfection and the other is left to an ultimately lovelier, divine, loving-kindness –an environment in which one can literally palpate the presence of God, untempered by human meddling.

This doesn’t discount the fact that Paris and other grand cities of its caliber possess an appeal of the senses, because they clearly do.  I found Paris aloof but alluring and it drew me into its “starched’ core in spite of itself.

Similarly, our pristine rural communities are the compelling reason we live where we live.  Just short of the English formal gardenscape, complete with boxwood hedgerows, pruned, barely escaping their lives; our rural environs of trimmed, tamed, symmetrical landscape, collectively make up the pretty place that we identify as home.

Without this primarily German and French atavistic attempt to perfect nature, to domesticate, prune, sweep, polish, and control it, we wouldn’t want to live where we live.  In fact, the few properties in our communities owned by people without the overwhelmingly contrary tendency to tidy-up or pretty-up their parcels are misunderstood, at least; fastidiousness, not running in their ancestral-line.

However, there is for me, a constant entreaty from the woods – an invitation from nature that begs me to temporarily leave the mimicry of my cushy neighboring community for its more unknown offerings.  And, when I can’t accept the call to nature, I feel unbalanced – like an essential nutrient is missing from my diet.

There is something about those entwined vines/branches, which I call “twisted sisters,” that I run across in the woods, that make my heart leap a little bit when I see them.  What is it about those twisted apparitions that are surely mistakes or flukes of nature, but just as surely send comfort to my core and balance to my soul?

Maybe it’s because they’re already twisted – misshapen, irregular, bent and mangled.  They therefore pose no expectation of perfection from me.  They’re fixed, finished, albeit imperfectly.

Natural curves in the landscape are much more interesting to me than the straight lines of human-made structures.  Is there anything linear in nature – without bumps, bends, circles, winding, combined, unanticipated, multi-directional?

My dad, an old-school carpenter, helped to build the house of my oldest brother.  As I recall – and I’ve been wrong before, so don’t quote me – Bill insisted on building his garage at an angle to the house.  Also, as I recall, my dad told Bill that if it wasn’t square, it wasn’t right and it would never work.  Witness – my brother’s angled garage, which works just fine, to my knowledge.

Similarly, I’m not a fan of ultra-modern architecture in homes – the style leaves me cold.  This might have to do with the lack of fluid chaos, disorder, unplanned, asymmetry of the warm, natural world.  Or, it might be that ultra-modern design utilizes little wood, stone, or plant material, the stuff of the forest, preferring glass, metal, and human technology for its aesthetic.

Nary a braided or tangled texture would be found in an ultra-modern human being’s environment.  Me and my “twisted sisters” may live in a modern world and I’ve adapted to and even enjoy a bit of metal, glass, and a lot of technology in my home, but the woods are never far away.

 

There are invisible lines drawn all over the place, in my life.  I’m not sure why this brings to mind the actress, Catherine Zeta-Jones.  In the movie, Entrapment, she skillfully maneuvers through a dark room with red laser beams that intersect in an asterisk-barrier pattern in protection of an ancient artifact which she is about to steal from across the room.

Unlike me masquerading as Lucille Ball, awkwardly and comically trying to get out of my loved-one’s garage while badly dodging the closing garage door past one single security beam, Zeta-Jones performed an intricate ballet, or gymnastic feat fit for an Olympian.  I was, by the way, unable to successfully get out of that garage without the blasted door doing its best impression of a jumping bean, up and down, up and down, endlessly up and down no matter what acrobatics I tried in order to avoid that security beam.

Meanwhile Zeta-Jones got the object.  This was her reward for dodging, crossing, and landing between the laser lines of her fictitious life in that one movie.

These are not the same lines that I draw, cross, escape from, notice or ignore, most days of my life.  Some of us are agile at maneuvering those lines and others of us are just plain slapstick entertainment for the voyeur’s who watch us make fools of ourselves.

About the “lines between” this and that, the most oft articulated “fine line between,” is that between “genius and insanity.”  This particular fine line is tied to the idiom’s origins in English poet, John Dryden’s (1631-1700) quote in his essay, Absalom and Achitophel, “Great wits are sure to madness near alli’d and thin partitions do their bounds divide.” 

Okay, there’s some Old English for you.  However, the concept of “a fine line between,” or “walking a fine line,” has thrived into the twenty-first century.

We humans often observe that when we compare and contrast options between stuff, there is sometimes a nearly invisible boundary between the two.  The thing that is between them is known as “a fine line,” or Dryden’s “thin partition.”

Often these comparisons, are supposed opposites.  For example, many have concluded that there is a fine line between love and hate; pleasure and pain; self-confidence and arrogance; stupid and clever; success and failure, and so on.

It seems paradoxical that these things that appear to be opposites could also be considered so similar as to be separated only by the thinnest of boundaries.  However, if you look closely, society usually deems one of these narrowly divided options acceptable and the other one, not so much.

I’ve seen in print a number of comparisons with a fine line between them.  For example, anxiety and excitement.  Presumably anxiety is the unacceptable option when you consider its twin, excitement.  How about a groove and a rut?  Maybe a groove is acceptable because it’s planned, carved out, and purposeful, but a rut is something of a gully that you fall into but stay because it’s easier than climbing out.

An eccentric is colorful and quirky and interesting.  But their counterpart is just plain nuts.  There’s a fine line between deliberation and procrastination.  I guess deliberation is thoughtful preparation.  My husband calls deliberation, “getting ready to get ready to do thus and such.”  I dare say, he doesn’t procrastinate, that would be a delusional but optimistic hope that it’ll either get done like pie in the sky, or it’ll go away until another day, like the “rain, rain, go away, come again another day.”

I’m not bossy, but I’m assertive.  “I’m not bossy.  I have skills, leadership skills.  Understand?”  And you couldn’t possibly be stubborn.  You have determination.

There’s apparently something about losing, that begs a fine line.  The fact is, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.  The fine line, however, separates losing and defeat which belittles the “try, try and try again” mantra of the work ethic, and permits you to give up.

In today’s political climate, there are invisible fishing lines running amok like laser beams protecting a treasure.  We have a fine line between information and propaganda as well as between cultural criticism and bitterness.  There is all manner of barking and biting between this faction and that one.

One has to walk a fine line these days in order to keep in balance between this side and that one without falling to either side of the line.  When acts of kindness can be mistaken for people-pleasing, a disorder of self-worth and fear of rejection, we might have a cultural balance issue.

I was okay at coping with the balance beam in gym-class, back in the day.  I wasn’t doing flips across it, mind you, but I could walk with a modicum of grace across its span, even trot at some speed.  But a circus tight rope, it was not.

When I wish my occasional craft-work to be rather invisible, I use fishing line.  It’s handy for hanging wreaths, tying things together that you don’t want to show that they’ve been tied, and what not.

Steven Wright cuts a fine line with his saying, “There’s a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an idiot.”  Do you think he wanted us to catch his figurative hint at fishing line being a fine line, when comparing fishing, to standing on the shore looking idiotic?

I could dance around fine lines all day but not to put too fine a point on the matter, that’s a line I would never cross.

Sometimes I get a giggle out of how we as a culture decide whether we like or don’t like strangers, for the silliest of reasons.  For example, we like or don’t like celebrities or public personalities, based on what we “hear about them” in the media or on the internet.

We all know that everything on the internet and in the headlines of supermarket tabloids is all factual, true and accurate.  Some celebrities and influencers count every “like” they get, accumulating “likes” along with cash, indirectly from those who bother to “like” them.

People appreciate being liked.  Few people from back in the day would forget the highly publicized award acceptance speech from actress, Sally Field, “you like me, you really like me.”  Being liked is never a glass half full.  Folks can’t get enough of being liked.

It’s the rare bird who doesn’t give a hoot “if you like me or not.”  But I think, that’s a defense mechanism based on being disliked by somebody who at some point in their life, meant something more to them than “the average bear.”

On social media there is an informal but powerful opinion poll, called a “like”-button.  One-click of your finger and you have empowered and approved someone’s opinion shared.  This approval means the world to some, is an accumulation of kudos to others, a popularity contest to yet others, and closer to meaningless to a few, I suppose.

The concept of “likes and dislikes” seems “high-school” to me, with the proverbial “walks on the beach,” heading up everybody’s likes, and snakes probably hitting the top ten of dislikes.  What is it about “liking” and high school that implores me to associate the two?

Perhaps most high-schoolers are insecure as to who they are and whether they’re acceptable, thus liked, for who they are at the moment.  High-schoolers test personas so as to eventually come to a conclusion about who they are.  How much they’re liked is the test-grade.  This persona, or that which gets a lot of likes, is a confirmation that this might be me.  If another persona gets no likes, then I guess I don’t want to be that person.

I believe there is a fine line between being liked and being authentic.  I suppose that if you are liked for who you genuinely are, then being liked is a reasonable gauge of acceptance.  But if you are deemed “liked” if it’s akin to the participation trophy, and not based on the merit of your skills, abilities and accomplishments, I’m not so sure that the “like-button” is all that meaningful.

I wonder if there should be a “lukewarm” button on social media posts.  Personally, I would probably be more honest if I could express “slightly warm” feelings toward a Facebook or Instagram post rather than “like” it.  Face it, many of us click “like” in order to be supportive rather than truly liking the subject matter.

Then again, English doesn’t always have the best adjectives, to describe feelings, as well as other languages.  I might like a social-media button that says chambré, which is French for bringing wine to room temperature.  I feel “room temperature in-a-good-way” about some of those formerly “liked” photos, comments, jokes, memes or gifs; but I didn’t have the option.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, about most things that could be described as popular culture: celebrity, politics, comedy, influencers, and everything TikTok, I feel little enthusiasm, indifferent, unenthusiastic, lackadaisical, dispassionate, noncommittal, unenthused, even Laodicean.

I am neither hot nor cold, I am lukewarm about popular culture.  I like serious stuff.  This reminds me of my mom who once explained that she was not what, today, we would call a lol, or “laugh-out-loud,” -kind-of-person.  She is the source of my sarcasm and dry sense of humor.

I guess, often when I comment lol to someone’s online material, I really mean to say, “I’m lukewarm, in a slightly moved, half-smirk, giggle, kind-of-way.”  I don’t like it nor dislike it.