So there is a little tension here this afternoon, Joyce Johnson is right now on her way to the Southern Arkansas Veterinary Clinic to find out if Bud has tested negative for microfiliara, the heartworm gene.
If he has, he can go on the truck tomorrow that is heading for Brattleboro, Vt. where we will meet him around noon and bring him home.
If he tests positive, then he must by law remain in Arkansas for at least a few more months while he gets his heartworm shots all over again. Heartworm dogs can no longer be transported North to most Northeastern states.
I believe Bud will be coming home Saturday, but I can’t say I’m not a bit anxious. We have been waiting for him for a long time. If necessary, I’ll wait longer. He’s our dog.
I hope he gets on that truck. But has been through a lot – although Carol Johnson is working hard to spoil him rotten – he’s ready to come home. We are ready for him to come home.
I have a good friend who loves her husband but who also has serious problems in her marriage. The two don’t communicate well, or often, and complain about each other to everyone they know.
When those Facebook birthday and anniversary pages come up, they practically drown in declarations of perfect life and adulation for one another.
I think they do, in fact, love one another.
But they would never dream of being honest about their marriage and saying it was complicated and somewhat difficult, but had survived.
Knowing them, i see how useful it would be to people to see how they have overcome their troubles and stayed together. But nobody who reads their Facebook page will ever know.
I see this all the time, people using Facebook to project an image or idea or belief but I rarely see people talking about the real complexities of their lives, or their flaws, faults and shortcomings. Not in their carefully crafted pages and bios.
Successful people who are loving and fulfilled parade themselves across Facebook News Feeds all day long, and they are rewarded with countless new instant friends they don’t even need to ever meet or take out to dinner.
But are they the real people or just the masks? Social research suggests the latter.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see a Facebook post that read: “To my husband and partner Jim, on our tenth wedding anniversary: I love you very much and I am grateful to your for struggling with me to resolve all of the complexities and challenges and sore spots of any marriage. I love you for that. We almost broke up 100 times, and sometimes i wish we still had. But that is the price of love.”
I would be eager to read that page.
A number of recent studies have found that people use social media like Facebook to present the best possible images and stories about themselves, Facebook is not about truth or authenticity.
People increasingly complain that they feel inferior just be reading other people’s musings about themselves.
“When my self-esteem is shaky,” wrote Jennifer Garam in Psychology Today, “which it often is, I have to be careful around social media. On Facebook and Twitter, everything is always wonderful for everyone and all their lives are amazing. Except for the people who deliberately cultivate cynical, snarky social media personas, and to my shaky self-esteem self, even this is something to be envious of; I feel like an insecure middle schooler looking up the tough high school girl with dark eyeliner who smokes outside metal shop and does not care about anything, and like I could never be that cool.”
Here is a new a tool that not only permits but encourages people to be false about their lives to their friends and anyone else on their feeds. On Facebook, we are all friends, and we all wish to message and connect with each other, even if we are not friends, even if we don’t even like each other.
As a writer, I have a different agenda, although I certainly try at times to put the best possible face on what I do.
But I am committed to the search for authenticity, and a writer who is not authentic is useless, and will soon be obsolete. On social media, we have the tools to present ourselves as we would wish to be seen, not necessarily as we are.
That can’t work for me.
I subscribe to John Updike’s belief: A good writer sees the worst parts of himself and shares them with his or her readers. That is, in some ways, the point of writing, at least for me.
It is of absolutely no use to you or me if I only show you only a sweet and noble me. If you choose to like me, how great. If you don’t, that’s life.
First, it would fall flat if I projected only love and goodness, and second, I would be useless to everyone. The very things people don’t like or relate to about me are the things we need to see and think about.
The very things many people want to talk to me about are the things that sometimes reflect my brokenness.
For me, there is no point in distorting my life, certainly not any longer. At long last, I am learning to be true to myself. For me, life is not about avoiding challenges, it’s about overcoming them. It isn’t about being perfect, it’ about dealing with epidemic imperfection.
I can learn from that, and so can you.
In our world there is great risk in being honest. Any stumble or mistake is magnified and transmitted like a runaway virus across the Twittersphere. It is easy to be misunderstood, and there are countless people eager to do the misunderstanding. So we make ourselves the smallest possible targets.
If you think differently, or if you think at all, you will be almost instantly assaulted by the hornet people who trawl online for targets, and who hate anything that is different from them.
People understandably learn to be wary, guarded and thus, false. Athletes have always learned to never say anything real in an interview, and politicians are learning to be banal every day.
Speaking honestly, or even unconventionally, is often quickly punished by the legions of angry disconnected souls who live to pounce on other people behind the safety of their screens. To be different is to be evil, an enemy, one of “them.”
The point is not that I am good, or better than anyone else. Quite the opposite. If there is anything at all interesting about people like me, it is our faults and flaws and contradictions and delusions.
People are interested in truth, because it reflects themselves and their own very real lives, and it connects them to the troubles and darkness of life, which are what people learn from.
It is hard to learn a lot – or anything – from perfection and the careful marketing of self. Social media are, in many ways, palaces of lies and deception.
Social media gives us the means to put a false mask on ourselves, and even believe it is true.
I don’t think I could present myself all that well any longer even if I wanted to, and if I tried, I would never get away with it.
We have three, perhaps four, issues to deal with in the Pole Barn, things got a bit out of hand in there.
That’s the thing about a farm, unless you are a rich person – they call them gentleman farmers – you can never quite catch up with all of the things that need to be done, and sometimes, they catch up with you.
I am not a real farmer, but I am not gentleman either.
First, the back wall has bowed to the point of cracking. The animals lean against it and too much dirt has built up. Secondly the donkeys were eating up the rear wall. The gates (left) were disintegrating and failing to hold the sheep.
And then, there were deep gouges and gulleys on the rear wall, we put too much gravel in and the animals lean against it when the sleep so we have deepening trenches all along the wall.
This morning, we dug out both sides of the rear wall, pushed it back into place with the tractor shovel, and then Ray built a post and crossbars so that if there is any further pressure, the wood will bear the brunt, not the wall.
Ray built two new gates and put hinges on the others. And Vince is using the tractor to lower the level of gravel and dirt by two or three inches and level off the gulleys. Like most farm things, it looks worse than it is, and I have the blessing of calm and competent and honest people.
They will take care of it. The Big Men In Trucks are used to moving the landscape around and making the earth bow to them. And it needed to be done, for sure.
If we didn’t take this on right now, we would be paying the piper down the road, and in a much more serious way. I have enjoyed the practice of radical acceptance. True peace of mind comes with accepting life as it presents itself, and not wishing for things it is not possible to have.
I will not ever speak poorly of my life. Or even of my barn.
Our barn crisis seems to be expanding. This wall is bowing, and needs to be straightened and shored up. To do that, Vince and Ray had to dig out both sides and then shovel them out further, to expose the wood.
We’ve been putting fresh gravel in the Pole Barn every year, but in the process, raised the dirt level too high, it was causing the wall to bow and leaving ruts along the back wall.
They have to be flatened, the dirt level lowered. Vince and Ray keep asking me what I think, and I keep looking at them blankly. Frankly, they are both vastly more knowledgable and confident then I am, and I told them to do what they think is best.
Looks like the whole Pole Barn has to be dug out. I’m retreating into my study with Red.
I guess we weren’t paying attention, or perhaps we were distracted, or maybe we just didn’t want to face it, but it appears our Pole Barn slipped into disrepair and potential disintegration over the last year.
The donkeys had gnawed big holes in the Pole Barn wall, and the North side of the PB had bowed out so badly it was about to blow apart.
We had to get Vince Devecchio in here with his digger and Ray Telford with his shovel, they had to dig out both sides of the wall and try to push the wall back into its proper place.
This will also require inserting posts and attached beams into the foundation to keep the animals from pushing it out again. They lean against the wall at night.
The sight of three skilled laborers and a huge tractor working out in the barn for hours definitely makes me uneasy, this will not be cheap or easy.
We realize that it is imperative that we do this work now, especially in advance of the Open House. We thought were were simply flattening out the gravel for the winter, but that is the least of it.
We already rebuild the boards in the back and two of the gates to the pasture. I see we are not done. One thing connects to another, and we want the Pole Barn to last a good long time. No big vacations this year.
On the other hand, we are fortunate to have been alerted to this mess in time. And you can’t do better than Vince and his son and Ray. The barn is in very good hands. I think I’ll go take a walk.
