Having a Girl is Scary
Yeah, it’s Dove. Which you may remember, I don’t like very much (I wrote about it here). But you have to admit, the marketing ploy is good. And scary. Especially if you have a daughter.
Privacy and the Robot
Privacy. It’s one of those serious topics I try to stear clear of on this site full of Space Camp pictures and really bad jokes. But, for some reason, yesterday I had an epiphany. Maybe it was because someone posted 60+ photos to a certain shared site from my drunken birthday fiesta. Maybe it was because I read this essay over at Rockstarmommy. Or maybe it was because I was up most of the night as a police helicopter circled my neighborhood looking for who knows what. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because I was so freaked out about the police helicopter and it’s hour of shining a spotlight right over our house that I actually let my husband show me how to load his gun in case of an emergency. And I effing HATE guns! And I HATE that he has one in my house. But I was so scared, I just let him show me. Ah, the joys of living in an urban area.
Anyway, I started thinking about all I do to keep my family safe. We have smoke alarms, burgler alarms, carbon monoxide detectors and a Rottweiler. Trent keeps a bat by the front door and a baton by the bed. We babyproofed the whole house and keep a video monitor by our bed in case Lu wakes up during the night. When I head in to work at an un-godly hour, I get a security guard to walk me from my parking garage to my office building.
But then, I hop on my computer and upload hundreds of photos for anyone and their mother to see. I upload pictures of Christmas, Easter and Labor Day. I upload pictures of my daughter, my nieces, my nephews. And yesterday I started to think about how these photos of those gorgeous kids could be used in the hands of the wrong person. And what was I doing to keep that from happening? Nothing. Actually, I should have just said, “Hello, creepy internet prowler, would you like a picture of my daughter in her swimming suit? Maybe just in a diaper? Great, enjoy!”
So, in lieu of my strange awakening, I’m trying to decide what to do with all of my thousands (seriously, thousands) of photos that I have stored on Flickr. Now, I love Flickr, and I’m going to continue to use it, but I’m just not sure that anyone who wants to login or search the site should be able to do a search for “baby” and have a picture of Lucy pop up. So yesterday I took drastic measures and made all 2500+ of my photos on Flickr private. When pictures are set to private, you have to login to Flickr and be denoted as one of my “Friends” to see them (you can join Flickr, and add me to your Friends by clicking here – if you already have an account on Yahoo!, then you can use that same ID for Flickr by clicking here…damn corporate sellouts).
I know this is just one more site for people to belong to, and, trust me, I get it. Between MySpace and Facebook and my four internet-based email accounts, I’m just about sick of signing up for crap. So, after a few more hours of deliberation, I came to a compromise. I’m going to keep pictures public if they can be found in my Most Recent category or My Favorite Photos category (these can be found on the left hand side of this page). Once a picture is moved from Most Recent, I will probably make it private, unless it is a Favorite Photo that I’d like more people to see.
I’m not sure if this is the final solution, actually, I will probably revise this a zillion times before I decide what to do permanantly. I just think that Lu and the other kiddos in my life didn’t ask to be a part of this site, and it isn’t fair for me to post photos of them when they can’t object. As for myself and the other adults around me? Well, if you don’t want your picture up here, you’d better let me know, and I’ll take them down right away. If you don’t care, then be prepared for photos of yourself doing the robot on the internet for everyone to see.
Update: Looks like I’m not the only one freaking out about this topic…it’s got the whole Internet up in arms.
Best Birthday Gift Ever
I know I’ve already posted today, but I just received the best birthday present ever. My good friend, Theresa, gave me a $25 gift certificate to Kiva, a non-profit that loans money to entrepeneurs in the developing world. I ended up donating to a 25-year-old woman in Africa named Lilian, who has started a pharmacy to help her community and is also taking care of her entire family as her mother died 2 years ago. The wonderful thing about Kiva is that when the person you donated to pays off their loan, you get the money back to either keep or redonate to someone else. If anyone needs a gift idea, a gift certificate from Kiva is a wonderful idea. It, by far, was one of the best gifts I’ve received in years.
Update: In the last 10 minutes since I donated my $25 to Lilian she raised the full amount she needed for her business.
Jetlag
I’m out of town at a conference for work and MY GOD I’m tired. So tired. So very, very tired. Instead of being smart and going to bed early in my clean, expensive hotel room, I stayed out waaaay too late. And now I’m sitting in a meeting about to die. Just die. But I have to pretend I’m not because everyone else is waaaay tired too, but they look like they’re fresh from a weekend at the spa. How do they do that? I look like I was just hit by a mack truck!
And in a few hours I have to go get my daughter and baby from the airport, so, really, my opportunity for sleep has passed.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. And so very, very tired.
Today
It’s so strange for me to think that Lucy will never know a world where 9/11 is just another day on the calendar. That she’ll never understand the freedom of thinking that we are so far away (physically, politically, socially) from those who disagree with our way of life that they would never be able to harm us. To her, the attacks on September 11 will seem like the Kennedy assassination or the attack on Pearl Harbor. It will be a chapter in her history book.
I don’t like to write too much on this day because it seems cheap. Lazy. Never enough. I didn’t lose anyone close to me on that day, so who am I to talk about it? I was only 18 when the two planes slammed into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon and yet another into field in Pennsylvania and changed everything I thought about the world. Up until then, the biggest world events for my generation were the killings at Columbine High School and the murder of Tupac (seriously, I remember a journalism class in 2000 where these were the discussion topics). I always felt I was was pretty well informed, I was even taking two classes on Islam that semester. The year before I had befriended a Muslim man and even considered converting. To me it was, and still is, a deeply spiritual and wonderful religion. I was amazed at the similarities to my own Catholic upbringing, and how much I felt I could relate to it’s teachings. I had never expected what would happen that day. Who could have?
So, today I hope we can all put aside our arguments, our political wars, our disagreements, and remember those who died on that day. Those people who, on the day I sat in my warm sorority room, glued to the TV, were dying in those towers. Those who ran in to save others. Those who sat on doomed airplanes. Those who fought back. Take a minute today, despite what you may think about the wars we’re fighting now, and pray for them. I’m sure they’d do the same for you.
And someday, I hope Lucy can once again live in a world a bit more naive, so much so that an attack like this is unfathomable. I hope she can grow up being proud to be an American and really understand what it stands for. Hope. Love. Independence. Freedom. And I hope this world will welcome her with open arms.
