natalia ilyin

After writing about my reservations concerning Facebook, I felt I should join just so that I had a critical leg to stand on. My main concern was that I would waste time and become addicted to it, the two major concerns of friends who are on it a lot. But an odd thing happened. When I joined, after a flurry of activitiy setting it all up and being happy when people decided to be my friends, I got hit with a barrage of interesting tidbits about random topics mixed with PR stuff from a large number of intelligent and active people.

At first I scanned all of it. All of it is interesting, what's not to scan? But in a few days the whole thing became, well, something I began to avoid. "It became "too much information" about too much that really does not concern me. It became just one more opportunity to engage, when what I often need to do is disengage. Push in the clutch. Shut off the engine. Sit in the silent car and think thoughts.

As a person who gets paid to communicate in words, the Facebook opportunity may seem different to me than it does to a person who is paid to communicate in pictures and finds words refreshing. It may seem different to me than to someone who has little opportunity to communicate on the web, or to communicate with friends or family. I recognize this.

Yet I worry about that random information. Just as trivia is only trivia. Information that informs action is the only information I really need, and anything else is static, is noise. Teaching people to pay attention to large numbers of inconsequential facts is a great way to teach them to spend more time scanning and less time wrestling what they actually think about things. What their stand is. What their position is.

The last scan of my wall left a large jumble in my head : the encroachment of the L.A. fires; someone's passing her motorcycle license test; a teaser for Burning Settlers Cabin's current post; the death of type designer Edward Rondthaler; a call for incrementalism in design, (now I have to go find out what the heck incrementalism is); the proposal of Elle's September Issue as a weight-pumping method; the closing of Cafe des Artistes.

In the spirit of reducing my own personal complexity, I quit Facebook. I do not care that long-lost friends and family could have found me had I stayed. I do not care that I could have looked up college friends and gone somewhere and had a high old time with them drinking large red cocktails and disparaging former husbands.

Bottom line: send me the precis, the highlights, the executive summary.
If I wanted to sift, I'd be a baker.

What a summer. First New York and then an unexpected 6 weeks in Providence, and now this-- a week in San Francisco. I've barely spent a minute on my island, and believe me, my Peapatch Garden neighbors have noticed.

Most of the tenants of the communal garden are amazing and nice people. I've met some real friends there. The woman who runs the Senior Center. The woman who just retired as head librarian. But I also have an enemy in the Patch: the self-appointed duenna of the garden. Long retired from who-knows-what, white polo shirt and big fuschia walking shorts, helmet hair and a deep, abiding belief in herself and her views of Right and Wrong. Wouldn't you know it. Of all the plots in the garden, she has the plot right by mine.

When I started the garden with friend Janet, she made clear her doubts about our fitness for the job, and harrumphed contentedly when Janet had to quit because of her back. After Pete showed up at the plot a few months later, she put two-and-two together and hailed me with, "Are you married, yet?" for the next four years. Though my dog Jane died 3 years ago, she always asks me where my dog is.

For nine years she has been dissatisfied with my garden performance and for nine years has shown this disapproval through throat-clearing, mutterings and behind-back campaigns. She snorted for a month when my zucchini went wild by accident through an unfortunate miscalculation in the use of organic fertilizer. She rolled her eyes to all when I rescued a bird feeder from a house that was being demolished and stuck it in the middle of my patch. She believes that all bugs, slugs and varmints originate and procreate in my plot, and she recently called the Garden Authority to tell them that grass seed was blowing from my plot to hers and that it had to be put to a stop to immediately.

Every year she tries to convince the Authority that I have abandoned my plot. Every year they tell her I am still there, blowsy, illegitimate garden that it is, filled with tangled morrocan mints and lemon balms and fennels.

Whenever I come in for a quick blitz with shears and trowel, she is there, running down the errant leaf of grass, harrumphing.

Her small and obedient husband edges her garden with his gas-powered edger. He's edged it so many times that it has sunk a few inches below sod-level. My garden has never been edged. Every once in a while Pete would help me garden by donning a fraying straw hat and over-alls and standing in the plot talking in a New Hampshire accent about non-existent cows while I loaded him with weeds. Rounded and honed as this character was, it was not a hit with the Garden Duenna.

Her plants--small, wary zinnias and strawberries-- stand in perfect rows. My peonies explode out of the plot every spring. My daisies take over every August. Her fencing has hospital corners: My fencing looks like deer have lunged against it.

But after nine years, the Duenna is going to win the Pea Patch fight. She doesn't know it yet. I haven't mentioned it. But my life has gotten so involved now that even I realize I do not have time for a garden. This Fall, my peonies will be transplanted, my lavender will find a new home, my fruit trees will be removed, and my beautifully enriched soil will be covered with a perfect oblong of plastic, awaiting a fresh tenant. The harrumphs will take on a warm tone, order will prevail, and peace will be restored to the Pea Patch.

Ok. Here's the update.
Preliminary conclusion: it is probably one thing to have all your college friends sending you pix of themselves partying on the beach and making cute remarks when you are 21. It is another to have a bunch of fifty-somethings posting what amounts to a continuous PR feed on your wall.

Now, had I "friends" that were not in the communications business, perhaps this barrage would be less intense. But this is the nub: Facebook after forty is no beach party. It's a marketing fiesta, a mash of information that others hope you might just act upon.

Oddly, I do not find this mash all that appealing, although at first I assumed it would be addictive because so many people had told me it was. And it IS good for procrastination-- about on the level of dusting blinds and cleaning sliding door tracks. And I like the little pictures of everyone. That's cheery.

Perhaps I do not find these three-days worth of Facebook appealing for the same reason that I do not find fashion magazines all that appealing: my mind tends to put all the ads into some sort of narrative, though no story was originally intended. (That false narrative can result in observations about the current state of the culture, but I have to be on my game for that. Otherwise, it's just tiring.)

Facebook posts generate the same sort of related-unrelated narrative. Drenttel's auto-posts from Design Observer blend with Stefan's discovery of a Lobster Saint, Grant's trip to Harvard and Steve's New Mexican silver candlesticks show. It's too much information for a woman that likes to relax in cohesion.

I do find one thing interesting, though. The little wavy words you have to type in to defeat hackers-- these could be used as a generation tool for Eighties-style band names. My most recent favorite: 13,000 shellacs.

This morning, presented with yet another opportunity to join, my deep questioning weakened by flu and my resolve mashed by Thomas's thought that anyone who has a blog can't really trumpet privacy issues, I joined Facebook.

First thoughts upon joining.
1. The people in my friends area are very attractive. I seem to know no real dogs.
2. There's currently an ad popping up that offers to turn me into a cartoon.
Seems redundant.
3. Immediate procrastination-stopping techniques must be brought into play. I could noodle on Facebook for hours, avoiding all, proving what I originally stated: Facebook is like a baby with a piece of scotch tape. Back, forth. Back, forth.
Back, forth.

"...Designers who win awards for edgy design they did for a friend's business-- with a print run of one hundred or something like that? They've got no art director, no creative director, no client's representative, no agency person. Where's the obstacle to good design there? But take something like a cheese. When I see a really good package for a cheese-- I know what that designer went through to get there. It makes me want to fall on my knees and kiss that designer's feet, that cheese."

Ernesto Aparicio