Anne Giles Clelland

Using Skype

My husband set me up with Skype last night, the video and voice calls software.  We sat at our desks in our two offices and I felt delight at the immediate appearance of him on the screen, and, beside him, a little box holding my face.  We were laughing and he behaved appropriately, but I didn’t - until I saw the name of a colleague pop up on the contacts list and I wondered if Skype were a video Twitter where everyone could see everything so I settled down.

He couldn’t hear me through his speakers, so we switched places for him to check my mic.  I sat at his desk, which I rarely do.  I looked at his work papers piled on the left, a coaster his mother made for him on the right, and a photo of a friend killed in a bike accident on the top shelf.

On the screen, I could see his concentrated face and my little face boxed away from his.  And I began to cry.

This is my second marriage, only two years old, and I hadn’t realized I had kept myself modernly, and safely, independent until he called me earlier this week, sounding as if  he were speaking through a beaten mouth and face, trying to reassure me he was all right.  Before the connection got cut, I thought he said, “…attack.”

I went insane.  Fear, grief, rage obliterated all 16-month start-ups, all biz news vs. cat pic debates on Twitter, all enlightenment about mature, millennial relationships.

I was keening and, at the same time, grabbing my weapon-against-all-foes, my broom.

At dinner that night, after identification of the horrifying cell phone-voice distortion call and reestablishment of the continuing health of an age group champ triathlete, I told him the truth.  “Darn,” I said.  “I was trying not to be one with you.”

So there he was on Skype.  I could look but not touch, want, but not have.  I felt bereft with impossibility.

If he and I were truly miles apart, for a long time, would I use Skype?  I don’t know.

I’m not sure I could bear the distorted illusion that we were together.

Shadow Tweets

“Lighten up, Anne.”

Over the course of a half century of life, I’ve heard that plenty.

My reply?  No...

In Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, Jungian psychologist and analyst Robert A. Johnson defines “the shadow” as “that part of us we fail to see or know,” and asserts, “To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline.  It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.”

I tried most of my childhood and early adult years to have only a light side.  I discovered myself struggling to contain an unseen, unknown part of myself, living a half-sided, half-lived life.

Paradoxically, I find myself now feeling available to lightening up when I’ve balanced it with darkening down.

While the light side of me recoiled from one of the more amusing suggestions of Johnson to “do shadow work” by looking into the garbage, I consciously offer up taking care of the innards and outards of my cats to the dark side.

I find my light and dark sides titillated when @TweetsFromHell show up in my Twitter stream.  Poet Robert Olen Butler is tweeting one-line "value addeds" to accompany his new novel entitled, of course, Hell.

The tweeting poet has been covered in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere, according to a Google search.  I think I first read of the poet on Twitter in the Wall Street Journal.

The light side:  In another life, I was a student of poet Peter Meinke.  He taught me to write a fine line of poetry, and probably more successfully, to appreciate one, so I find Butler's up-to-140-character-one-liners exquisitely beautiful.

The dark side:  Hoo, boy, some of those tweets...  Well, my shadow, my dark psyche, my inner celebrant of the cat box all revel in the blackness!

Take a look for yourself at this one:

Telemarketers & phone-sex workers are one here, calling endlessly, selling their own body parts. Handling & shipping is the tough part

Dark, dark, deliciously dark.

I'm honored to say that I have a Direct Message - a DM - from the devil poet himself.

In the Database Twice

I appreciate the opportunities that arrive in my inbox to learn the latest news about company leaders, companies, and their products and services.

That said, I receive a dozen or more pitches per week to cover people and products on one of Handshake Media, Incorporated’s multiple blogs.  I am a target of the “Hey, let’s get a blogger to blog about this!” online marketing strategy.

I’m not a fan of “get” in the phrase “get a blogger,” because that implies that the marketer can get/make/force a blogger to write about a subject.  Nope.  I choose.

I am, by nature, a fan.  That means that if I write about something, I have a genuine regard for it.  In the film Jerry Maguire, Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s character warns Tom Cruise’s character away from taking advantage of single mothers, describing them as “sacred.”

I think fans are sacred, too.

I received a pitch via email from a marketing rep asking me to consider writing about a person and a product.  One of the first lines was, “I was checking out your site today and I was really impressed!”  I was impressed at the professionalism of the marketer for at least researching what I was doing before pitching me.

I was interested, I did due diligence online, liked and valued what I saw, and included the person and product in a post.  I didn’t know enough about the person or product to be a fan, but felt I could become one.  They were not clients and I was not compensated, either by payment or by a “blogger’s gift.”

A few days later, in my email inbox, I received this pitch:  “I was checking out your site today and I was really impressed!”

It was from the same marketing rep pitching the same person and product with the exact same words.  That I had already fallen for the "I was really impressed" ploy and posted about the person and product hadn't even registered.

Apparently my name is in the “Let’s get a blogger to blog about this!” database twice.

How do I feel about that?  Tricked and duped.  Used.  Embarrassed.  Caught, again, being naïve.

I will not give up my deep belief that people are good and that they tell the truth.

But, today, I feel sad.