Category Archives: THE WEIRDNESS OF LIFE

Sometimes a Song

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Weirdly enough, two things happened at once that thrust me backwards in time. The first was that a long lost friend/unrequited love turned up on Facebook. This is a guy that I thought, at the time, I had no desire to date. But when I remembered it back after all of these years what I see more than that is how afraid I was of someone with strong, sincere feelings like that. But boy, did he kind of stick with me over the years in an odd way. So now he’s on Facebook. That is the strangest thing about Facebook, well — maybe it’s number 515 when it comes to weird things about Facebook.

The second thing that happened was an encounter at the Federal building with a total stranger also made me think of this person. We exchanged smiles briefly. He stood behind me and said my last name was the same as his mother’s maiden name. But, though I thought he was cute and all, something stopped me from engaging in conversation with him. What was it? Fear? Lack of interest in jumping on that roller coaster ride of a relationship? Whatever it was it was a strange, unsettling encounter with someone who seemed very familiar to me. Since I spend so much time online now I forget that there are other ways of meeting people.

And finally, on a nightly jog, this haunting song came over my headphones and it once again thrust me back. I think we’ve all been the girl in this song one time or another. I dare say we’ve also been the guy. When I’ve been the guy, it hurts like hell. When I’ve been the girl I often look back with a fair amount of regret. It’s like a mournful puzzle that never gets put together. A maybe beautiful one, in its perfection and impossibility.

When I hear this song it floods my brain with my recorded memories of being a much younger woman. It recalls lazy summer afternoons spent up at the creek smoking pot and skinny dipping. It recalls occasional trips to Dodgers Stadium, too few and far between, and all of the romance that goes with boys and baseball, or baseball at all.

And as my daughter and I get ready to flee this city and head for the South of France, to Cannes, this is probably the song that remind me of today. Right here, right now.

Down the Rabbit Hole – Angela Wesselman-Pierce and Mark Zuckerberg

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Two new movies about Facebook are coming out, or have come out, right about now. One is Catfish, and the other is The Social Network. The latter is, I think, probably going to be turn out to be 2010′s one true masterpiece to rule them all. Not sure. Inception is right up there too. And there are other great films 2010 has produced, like Blue Valentine, Another Year, Inside Job, etc.

But Social Network and Catfish involve real people. Catfish is a big pill to swallow that these filmmaker dudes actually had some faux online relationship with this woman pretending to be three different people. Well, the weird thing is that if you search for the woman’s name, Angela Wesselman-Pierce you will find a great many websites out there but most, if not all, have been removed. She has been scrubbed almost completely from the net. This is very bizarre. I don’t know how she managed to erase her paper trail but she did.

The even weirder thing is that her name will pop up as a cast member for the film Catfish. She supposedly was cooperating with them (money involved?) but has since pulled her name and is suing them. I don’t even have all of the facts. All I was trying to do was a little internet stalking.

I don’t really believe these dudes didn’t know what they were walking into. It all seems very staged to me.

And a Zuckerberg stalking DOES turn up interesting info. Like William Randolph Hearst, the Zuck in The Social Network is not the real dude. But it’s still fascinating to internet stalk him for buried info. WAY TOO FUN.

Angela Pierce or Wesselman-pierce has all sorts of weird blogs she started and they’re by invite only, like http://www.incrediblyordinary.com/

Here is her flickr photo stream –

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40483951@N02/

And her painterly website:

http://www.artbyapierce.com/

It says this on her painterly website:

About Me
I’m a Mom.
I like to paint, take photos and write.
I like Blue Cheese salad dressing.
I thank God for giving me the talents I have and for giving me the strength to overcome the challenges in my life.
I hope you enjoy viewing my work as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Dr. Laura Quits

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Full disclosure admission: I have been listening to Dr. Laura off and on for many years. Many many years. Even though I am one of the “bad people,” according to her code of ethics: single parent, not married, had baby out of wedlock. I did stay home to raise my kid so in that way she would approve of my lifestyle. I’m a bleeding heart liberal but I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t get much from Dr. Laura’s show over the years. I just tuned out the political stuff or anything I disagreed with. I found much of what she said valuable. And beyond that, it was occasionally entertaining not just to listen to her berate callers (why did they call her if they knew she would tell them what they didn’t want to hear?) but to hear people who were far worse off than I have been.

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Making Sense of the Mommy Bloggers

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I don’t get the whole mommy blogging thing very well. One thing I noticed is that almost everyone wants to be a prototype, or a brand. They have to sell an identity – like a sitcom star, or a reality TV star. The brand they’re selling is often helpful and entertaining. They give back more than they take, which is why they’re making money. But every once in a while you can see behind the curtain. That’s what I love about this photo.

You don’t often see what it really must like a lot of time at the Drummond ranch in Oklahoma as Ree Drummond displays a fantasy life for her readers. It is all fantasy, with a smidge of reality thrown in here and there. I really don’t begrudge the fantasy – I just sometimes feel like a sucker for being pulled in, I will admit. I prefer hardcore truth in writing. But I also enjoy the fantasy. Why not, right?

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Missed it by That Much

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Last year, before my daughter moved to our old/new apartment (we switched from a tiny one bedroom to a two bedroom), we had a fantasy about living on the top floor of a duplex apartment down the road from where now live. It was out of our price range but so much the kind of place we’d wanted to live in. For one thing, we didn’t have to “be embarrassed” about where lived. This was squarely in a good neighborhood, an upper with lots of light and windows, a hard wood floor, a fireplace and a huge kitchen. Two tiny bedrooms.

My daughter saw the ivy crawling up the brick wall outside and fell in love. It had its own yard and a patio area. It was the kind of place in which you could build a container garden, for instance. It was the closest thing to a “home” that we had looked at. And it was a huge step-up from our current one bedroom (which I liked because of the view, even if I did sleep on a mat on the floor).

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