What's so social about this?

The other day I watched the film Teenage Paparazzo that came out on HBO starring Adrian Grenier about our fascination with celebrities and the illusion of being famous. It was about a young 14 year old boy who is a paparazzi and who Adrian turned the camera around on to educate on the perils of the spotlight and the unforgiving flashes of the cameras. We see this boy become consumed in his own celebrity and the attention it yields. His mom becomes an enabler just like the parents of so many other young stars and gives in to his whims. Adrian soon realizes the errors of his ways in his own project and that he simply is feeding the same beast that he abhors: everyone's fascination with fame and our seemingly train-wreck watching culture.

Here we are now and news is that an 18 year old college student killed himself because his roommate secretly videotaped him having sex with another man. Not only did he film the encounter, but he aired in on a streaming webcast. This comes a few months after another young girl took her own life when she was harassed online by other bullies. The social media can bring friends together and it can also tear lives apart. It can make people unwitting stars in videos that were never authorized or permitted to share in the first place. This new media gives access to demented individuals who thrive on hurting others and a wider audience at that.

It's hypocritical of the major news media to start harping on the online media channels now, but it will be coming. You will hear from CNN, ABC News, and Fox about the cruelty of the Internet. How the web has spawned this gonzo journalism culture and that people now have too much access to hurt others. The news media for decades has fed on sensational journalism to sell their advertising. They need ratings and train wrecks sell. They will expose the frailties of Facebook and Twitter, Skype and Youtube as they aspire for the next natural disaster to send their camera crew to. This isn't so much about the tools that the Internet provides, it's about how we choose to use them. The problem today with a lot of the younger generation is they are using them for social status but gaining nothing emotionally. They are surface builders, but feed nothing underneath. We look at pretty pictures, or are dazzled by funny videos, our lives becoming a music video.

The social media sites and Internet in general is used solely for most as a distraction, rather than a tool. That is not the fault of the providers. This is the same argument for gun control. You can't blame the manufacturers. You can blame the sellers if precautions weren't made, but guns are going to be here. It's what we do with them, it's what we do online. You can't limit free speech but we can prosecute crimes of Internet bullying, and Internet harassment. It's a different culture, and it came at us quickly. There is not the same protection and security that we had even a decade ago. The faster technology moves, the more quickly predators and criminals move through it. It's simply like adding more water and pressure to a water slide. Our policing can't keep up and are simply in a reactive mode and yet if they become proactive we will cry out that it violates our privacy. It's both. It's complicated.

Is technology good? Could I survive without a touchscreen smart cell phone? Could I live without Facebook and even this Blogspot? A Mead notebook worked just as fine before, but only I read my thoughts and opinions. Now I can broadcast them for all to read and view. Sometimes I feel I expose too much and I wonder if I do it for attention. Was it necessary to share that? Was that just vindictive? The platform we are given online is global. Anyone can surf for this stuff and even if you delete it, it may already be too late. What value am I truly providing on here? Is it better to hold a Kindle in your hands and have access to hundreds of books, or do you lose the value of actually holding a book in your hands and reading it? Don't we stare at computer screens enough in our lives? Isn't the smell of an old classic book or the feel of turning a page more satisfying? I don't know.

Free falling is anything but free

I kneeled in the plane overlooking the open world below me. I heard the snap of the buckle attaching me to the instructor with the parachute on his back. While I knew he was behind me, and as I assumed he didn't want his life to end on this day, I couldn't see him and could only hope that it was tightly fastened.The crammed airplane seemed to sputter in the air and its slow ascent in elevation seemed to turn a rambunctious crew of passengers into silently praying ones. If the intention was to put us in the most frighteningly small and ancient aircraft to inspire our bold descent out of it, it worked. I was desperate to jump.

In 2002 I was determined to go skydiving out of a plane. It was a late summer, or early fall, day in Snohomish, WA. I successfully gathered a crew of co-workers and friends at the time and orchestrated a trip I was determined would be life changing. I had been thinking about jumping for a long time, ever since my first love and high school girlfriend had told me of her tandem jump soon after our final break up some years earlier. It seemed to one-up me. Not only was she moving on to a new boyfriend back in CA while I was miserable in cold and rainy southern Oregon, but she was also pushing the envelope and expanding her horizons. She was the brave one. Here it was years later and I was determined to even the score.

What is it about break ups that inspire us to change our ways? Why do we do the things we wish we had done when we were in the relationship to begin with? This girlfriend was always so safe and passive, for her to jump out of a plane was completely out of character for her. While she was coping with our break and floating in the sky I was wallowing in my poor decisions. I seem to have the wallowing thing down. I've had my heart broken twice in my life. She was the first to do so. I even google stalked her a few years later after I moved to Seattle. She got married to the guy she started dating after me. Her life turned out exactly the way she used to talk about when we were together. She became a school teacher, he was a banker, she lived in San Luis Obispo. I'm sure they had a white picket fence and two kids. I'm not sure if I missed her so much as I envied her commitment to her life goals, and how she seemed to fulfill all of them. I was just a revolving part in her plan. Once I was no longer in the picture she just found someone else for the role. She was a director and myself just an actor in her life feature film. I also feel like I didn't fit the required bill for my last girlfriend as well. Maybe that is just my own insecurities talking, but I feel as though I didn't make the final cut. Perhaps the next guy auditioning will be the one that fills that role.

There is a feeling of complete emptiness as I fell from the sky. It was not life flashing before my eyes so much as my face getting pulled back by the g-force of me falling into the earth. My head cleared as I dropped. There was no time to think, just be, just fall. In the air there is nothing holding you up, there is nothing to hold on to. There is no balance. You fall, and fall, and fall...and then when you feel like you can continue falling forever the chord is pulled and you stop falling. Your heart is pounding so hard in your chest and your smile from the rush so intense that the world you peer down upon does look different. Your eyes see things differently. The colors more vivid. The air crisper, more invigorating. What I carried into that plane and into the sky now gone, replaced with gratitude, amazement, and wonder. Those were the same feelings I had climbing the summit at Havasupai.

I know that life has a plan for me, I still don't know what it is. I know that I'm unable to grasp the concept of fulfillment when I'm not sure what it is that will fulfill me. I do realize though that life can not be a free fall from a plane. That is an escape. It is a rush that can be revisited but it cannot be a lifestyle. Otherwise I will just rob banks, surf, and jump out of planes with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves like in Point Break; I'll wear the Obama mask. No, life has to have balance and something to grab on to. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to make sense to everyone. It doesn't need to be so damn structured and planned. And if this life of mine so far was planned then I'm a sick puppy. Obviously we control some aspects of our lives but we can not control them all. We just adjust and make do and overcome obstacles and keep a positive outlook on life. In the end it is not the possessions that we remember in our final breath but the life we saw unfold before our own eyes, even if the view was straight down from 12,000 feet.

Fall term

Tomorrow I start school again on my 14 year degree program. By now I should have a doctorate right? Nope this will be a BA, as in I've been in school Before Amazon; also before Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I started at Southern Oregon University in 1996 a year after I moved up to Oregon from Central California. I was an idealistic communications major. I was a journalist. A year removed from winning a top writing award in LA for all high school journalists. My journalism teacher gave me the word "vision" when he handed out words to his seniors. My vision was my direction in life and where I was going. Someone should have told him I have bad eye sight.

Somewhere between the Alanis Morissette CD playing in my car and my rebellious attitude with my professors I discovered I wasn't going to enjoy college as much as my senior year in high school. In high school all of my papers I finished in English were automatic A's. I could write them in ten minutes and garner wide acclaim from my English teacher on my natural brilliance. In college I was dirt. I was just one of many bright writers now forced to conform to a structured piece of writing that if I deviated from I was failed. Follow the guidelines. Conform to our rules. Your freelance nature means nothing here child, you are just another mind for us to manipulate. I realized then how corporately structured universities were. They didn't want free thinkers. They wanted free listeners. Free to listen and absorb and follow instructions or feel free to fail. I battled with all my might to adjust to this new way of thinking, but I did fail. I told off one professor and discovered that the next one after was no better than the last.

I could not accept this new way of thinking. I bolted to Seattle in early 1999 and into a more structured model than the university: Corporate America. There I stayed for the next eight years. I couldn't transfer my credits up to a university in Washington because there were holds on my account with SOU for not finishing required classes. They held me hostage. The only way I was going to finish my degree was moving back down to OR or starting all over again somewhere else. When I moved back to Southern Oregon in 2006 college was the furthest thing from my mind. I just wanted a healthier lifestyle. I had found activities to distract myself from the cold soulless embrace of the corporate structure but they were not healthy activities. The habits I started to fit in and move up the ladder actually stunted my growth. Maybe not career-wise as I was rising, but my creativity was dying a slow death. My "vision" was now being clouded in all sorts of liquid: rain, alcohol, and tears.

I've had friends drive through Southern Oregon from Seattle and say with disdain that there is nothing here. It is definitely not the metropolitan of Seattle. One friend said she would just keep on driving. Maybe I felt that way too a few years before I moved here, maybe even a couple after. And yet Southern Oregon has a different feel to me now. There is a balance I have here I didn't in Seattle. There are four seasons. There is more lightness in the air and maybe even more smiles from people you come across. Those are small things, but they are huge. Seattle is big and shiny. The buildings glow and sparkle at night. The Needle illuminates the sky, but it is cold. It is a cold and structured city. At least it was to me. I have friends who live downtown in different districts that love it. Maybe it is just perception. Yet that was a perception I couldn't get past in the time I lived there. I felt that people were more guarded and even friends. The openness was minimal and emotions much more calculated. I couldn't live a lifestyle like that. I would act out just to feel anything. Almost like a child desperate for attention from their parents.

Back to Medford and Ashland and school and slow days. I started back at SOU in 2008. I switched my major to business and found I could conform a lot easier. I had been doing it for the past 12 years anyways! Corporate America made me a good student for corporate university. I definitely noticed the professors treating me differently. It seems age and experience are more highly esteemed than youth and individuality. At least then and now. Maybe SOU went through an awakening themselves in the 10 years since I had last attended. I know that the required courses I was supposed to take to move forward in '98 were no longer required. Maybe they just needed the revenue.

I'm a year and a term away now from finishing if I go 16 credits a term. It will be difficult to do that and work full-time, yet I'm also committed to completing this. I also though realize that a degree won't complete me. Sure, it'll make job prospects in this economy more accommodating and it will be a burden off of my back, but it is just a piece of paper. It is just a reaffirmation that I can follow instructions and conform to rules and guidelines. I've done that. It doesn't prove anything more to myself than that. Does that make me a sell out? I don't know. Am I selling my passion to prove I can conform, or am I being realistic? Does this just provide a back up plan? It certainly isn't the "vision" I anticipated.