AAAAAAAAUGH. Several people I recognise from the old blog are kindly posting FB links via the contact-me form.**
THERE’S JUST ONE SMALL PROBLEM. I CAN’T GET ON FACEBOOK. I suppose I could start a new whatsit with a new name and I can say I live in Outer Mongolia in a yurt and raise ponies, and the broadband is unreliable which is why I don’t write more blog posts or answer my email very well, BUT I’M NOT GOING TO. I DON’T LIKE FACEBOOK. I JUST RECOGNISE THAT A LOT OF PEOPLE USE IT. Including some of the new-blog readers.
This is a long, gory saga. When the Grand Matriarchy thing happened last autumn and I realised it was my electric cattle prod to get back on line with a new blog, Blogdad and I wasted a lot of time trying to break into my Twitter and FB accounts, which I hadn’t used in years***. We finally succeeded with Twitter. There should be a little working link stuck to my name there saying I’m not on Twitter any more, but you can find me at the Flying Piano. I planned to do the same for FB.
But we failed with Facebook. Big time. Repeatedly. The best was when, having fallen into yawning tiger pits and bottomless ravines and sucking mires, we hacked and blowtorched our way to ‘so prove who you are, you lowly techless peon,’ and I gave them my passport details, for pity’s sake, although I acknowledge that an American passport photo is so gazzleblatted to be proof against identity theft or what-have you that it doesn’t look like a photo of anybody†, it looks like the sort of thing you see hanging from the ceiling when you’re la-la-la out of your tiny mind on an interesting if illegal substance,†† still, passports are some kind of gold standard of identity, aren’t they?††† FB hoovered it all up, said some robotic version of ‘thanks’ and ‘we’ll get back to you’.
It got back to me all right. It refused my passport and locked me out because I was clearly a militant anarchist seeking to bring down the kindly philanthropic Facebook empire. Right on.
Blogdad said this is probably because my name(s) doesn’t/don’t match. I don’t use the Jennifer Carolyn on anything but passport and driving licence, Robin McKinley Dickinson is quite enough in private life, and on line Being an Author of course I’m mere Robin McKinley. Other people have different names for different aspects of their life.§ What do they do about tech train wrecks like Facebook?
I hilariously tried clicking through on one of the links that appeared in my Ask Robin email a day or two ago. It seemed to pretend that I was a legitimate person with a legitimate account. This pleasant fantasy didn’t last long, and I soon fetched up on a page that has a large gormless block of something with a chain and a padlock around it—so imaginative, Facebook—saying, your account has been SEIZED AND MANACLED because there has been funny business going on. The only suggestion it had for surmounting this fatuous technological folly is try signing in from a device that you USUALLY sign in from.
Have I mentioned that I haven’t used FB in years? And how long does anyone’s tech last these days?
So if any of you live human beings reading this blog post know any live human beings at Facebook—I realise this is a stretch, not so much that someone who reads me would know one, but that there are any, see first footnote—please tell me.
* * *
* The first question, of course, is, WHY are they working at Facebook? Are you SURE they are live, real and human?
** I apologise for the lack of a forum on the Flying Piano. I had one on the old blog but that was in another country and while the wench hasn’t died, she’s changed her name, address, hair colour and shoe size.^ While the Flying Piano is still more or less Days in the Life, I still haven’t settled into it yet^^. First time around, no big, the blundering was all part of the newness. But the interwebz^^^ have moved on. I think I’ve already said that I’m not sure a more or less aimless, days-in-the-life style blog still has a place. It’s a bit of a cleft stick. I’m supposed to have a PRESENCE on line, however odd and marginal, because that’s what things like writers have to do in the new on line world, but I haven’t really got the time or the brain energy to get focussed about it. When I finish DIARY properly^^^^ I’m going to want to sit down with the next thing. If it’s not ready to be written, or written at, yet,^^^^^ then I’m going to want to be filling that vast underground story tank up, not expend writing energy on an ephemeral blog. I grant you this may be my age and attitude showing, but my age and my attitude are what they are.
I like the idea of having a blog again, and it does give me that on line presence thing.^^^^^^ But at the moment I’m not getting the hits to make a forum plausible. And if I can’t figure out a sustainable way to be clever with the new blog, I probably won’t. Last time, blogs just had forums (or anyway that’s how I remember it. It was a long time ago). By the time I’d scrabbled into some kind of pattern for Days in the Life–which included posting every day, which isn’t going to happen this time–the forum had pulled itself into a thing too. For the minute, Ask Robin is the only option on the Flying Piano. ALSO ON THE TO-DO LIST IS TO USE SOME OF THE THINGS PEOPLE SAY IN THEIR EMAILS TO WRITE MORE FRELLING BLOG POSTS AROUND. Sorry. If I were any more disorganised I’d forget how to breathe, which probably wouldn’t make my memory for stuff needing to be done any better. I think I remember that your brain uses a lot of oxygen . . . And it’s not that I don’t appreciate hearing from you people. I do. Including a big YO. HOW’S IT GOING, to everyone I remember from before. I just . . . Gah. Feh. Arrrgh.
^ Oh, well, I guess I haven’t changed my name. It just feels like WIDOW is stamped on my forehead, passport and the lintel over the front door. And my hair probably still counts as dubious light brown, but forty years later I’m still cranky I got through most of my 30s more or less blonde, ish+, I thought if you got through your twenties still blonde (ish) you were safe, and then suddenly in my forties I’m light brown. Feh. As it goes grey if the light hits it right you’re almost blonde again . . . but mostly you’re just really old. And feet do spread as you get older, especially if you put in as many FRELLING MILES as I do++, and I was quite resigned to going up a shoe size when buying Converse . . . and then I unearthed a box of old, pre-Nike All Stars, looked at the sizes and thought, I used to WEAR these?!? Well, yes. Most of them I can, in fact, still wear: they’re the same length as the new ones in a bigger size. One more misdeed to lay at the, ahem, feet of the Nike takeover. I don’t know enough about the controversy over working conditions to have an opinion about that, but I will say that in my big-footed long-armed experience, shoes and clothing made in, say, China and Vietnam, is smaller and shorter-sleeved than stuff made in the UK or America. Nobody seems to have messed up inseam measurements for jeans yet. I live in fear of cold ankles and looking like a dork. And I thank the fashion gods that someone invented wrist warmers which go a long way toward solving the short-sleeve conundrum.+++
+ Although I used to pour household bleach on the ends during those long Maine winters= when I wasn’t getting any help from those UV rays we’re now officially supposed to be hiding from. Personally I take my chances with the sun over the ingredient lists of most sunscreens. And yeah, I was less crunchy-granola in those days, okay? But I still only put it on the ends. It didn’t get near my scalp.==
= Long MAINE winters????, says the woman who now lives in Scotland. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
== And only RARELY on the shoulders of my sweatshirt. ARRRRRGH.
++ I realise there are other ways to thud out 1,000,000 steps a day than owning a German Wire Haired Perpetual Motion Machine,= but the GWHPMM is a very reliable method. Furthermore it’s Baby Seagull Season, baby seagulls are dumb as rocks, and I’m starting to look like Sylvester Stallone in his heyday from wrestling with my blasted animal==, while the detestable feathered baby waddles mindlessly down the middle of the road wearing a sign saying I’M DUMB AS A ROCK and mom or dad divebombs us, shrieking. I object to losing more hair to being whacked or trodden on by frelling seagulls. Menopause was devastating enough.=== GO FIND A NICE CLIFFSIDE TO RAISE YOUR FAMILY ON, LIKE BETTER MANNERED SEABIRDS, I SAID SEABIRDS, AND TEACH THE WRETCHED KIDS TO FLY.
= Or, say, a pair of hellhounds, who also exhaustively dragged me around a different local countryside. Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. Every critter owner must learn to live with cognitive dissonance. The fact that I adore my current manic idiot doesn’t stop me from missing the flaming doodah out of previous generations.
== Yes, this happens every year. Anybody who’s ever lifted weights knows this. Boys bulk up fast but they lose it fast. Girls bulk up diabolically slowly but once it’s there it tends to hang around, looking for an excuse to pop into existence again. Possibly with fury-throbbing veins on the forehead. The shrieking of imprecations is probably optional, but my one real weight trainer, back in Maine, used to ENCOURAGE his students to yell as an accompaniment to greater effort. No baby seagulls required. It made for an interesting workout atmosphere. I try not to think about my local reputation in this small Scottish town. ~
~ Although getting patronised by people with either small dogs or no dogs is not my favourite experience. ::mrghlzzzgluggnch::
=== YES. IF YOU’RE A WOMAN, MENOPAUSE WILL PROBABLY MAKE A LOT OF YOUR HAIR FALL OUT. ONE OF THOSE THINGS THEY SURE AS **** DIDN’T MENTION TO MY GENERATION. I HOPE YOUNGER GENERATIONS ARE BETTER INFORMED AND BETTER BRACED. Apologies if I’ve ranted this rant more than a few dozen times before.
+++ Would I have invented wrist warmers if some clever person hadn’t got there first? I don’t know. I might have, however, because knitting rectangles is my best knitting trick, and I don’t do fingers, as in gloves, at all. AT. ALL.
^^ Yes. Sorry. Stating the obvious.
^^^ Oh, phooey. Do I have to give up ‘interwebz’ because it’s rude and means stuff I don’t mean it to mean?
^^^^ I’ve promised the LATEST AND LAST tweak-fest back in Merrilee’s inbox by the end of this week
^^^^^ Historically I don’t start the next thing on the heels of the last thing, but I’ve been so long since the thing before DIARY there seems??, maybe??, to be kind of a queue. Check back in a year or two.
^^^^^^ I know. I haven’t got back to updating the web site. AT ALL. It’s on the list.
*** The short form is that my life came to a halt when Peter died, and reinventing myself has taken a while. Of course it’s not that simple, but . . .
† or possibly an evil AI who works for Facebook
†† Not that I would have any personal experience of this.
††† Well AREN’T THEY?
§ I remember the cold blank terror of trying to pick Diana Wynne Jones up at the Bangor, Maine airport when her name on the passenger list appeared, as it appeared on her passport, with a ‘D’ and her husband’s last name.^ We found each other eventually.
^ This was long before Facebook, however. I think Mark Jerkface was probably still in diapers.