Monday, April 23, 2012 at 2:24PM | by Otter 
If you have insomnia (Father Otter told his disciples), I will not tell you how to fix it. But I will tell you what I do…
Book of Otter, Facebook Sunday, April 15, 2012 at 6:40AM | by Otter 
One of the fundamental mistakes of our time is how we’ve confused “worthy” with “newsworthy.” In the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ (and yes, the self-published personal blog), every event in our worthy lives is also newsworthy, publishable in real time [… .]
In Facebook, the ideal is the real. And idealization is the enemy of real relationship. For those of us with any hope of developing our hearts in honesty, the noise and clutter of such idealizations is a tremendous distraction. Putting it bluntly, I can’t be myself and what always looks good.
But the famous, cynical newspaper slogan runs, “If it bleeds, it leads.” What’s newsworthy about things is not their inerrant idealistic qualities, but the ways in which they fail, fall, are unreliable, need fixing. We treat our lives as news: so what if we had a day in which we only reported honestly on one another (or even ourselves)…?
Community, Facebook, Love in Culture, Relationships, Technology Friday, April 6, 2012 at 9:55AM | by Otter A friend writes, curious about my response to an atheist on Facebook who has made the following claims in a status update:
The Bible (and for that matter Christianity) depends upon 4 basic concepts: Creation, Original Sin, The Exodus and Mosaic Law, and the Resurrection of Jesus. Science has debunked all 4 of these pillars, leaving the religious house of cards in a pile on the floor.
A few cursory responses…
Saturday, March 24, 2012 at 12:45PM | by Otter 
We live in a strange time: you actually have to defend the decision to stay offline. In times of stress, clearing the head really needs to involve a cessation of online activity. And the constant who’s-on who’s-written who’s-doing-what is just a dissipation of the energy that it takes to compose the self after a shock.
Apart from writing this blog, I hardly ever go online. There’s too much to do (my grading stack is high and demanding), and the days are good. Prayer, quiet reflection, joy, and meditation are the anti-addictions.
Lately drama has descended on my life… no, that’s not right. Lately, the drama I have called down into my life has grown up.
My friend Claire did a Tarot spread for me about two and a half years ago. My personal character card, The Fool, is known for following his own rhythms, his own intuitions. Sometimes that works well. But the dominating card in the spread was the lightening- struck tower: catastrophe.
When the lightening strikes in a relationship or career or personally, the best thing you can do is cultivate solitude, quiet, and communion with your god(s). You’re alone once the lightening strikes. Two nights ago during a furious lightening storm, I dreamed about the afflictions around me, and woke sure that the tower was crumbling indeed.
But the Tower is what you make it: each ending is a beginning, and need not be an erasure of the past. Sometimes the tower was asking for it. Sometimes it needed to be rebuilt from scratch.
But then too (to get confessional for a minute), I suffer from limerence: I have to protect my headspace as much as I can. Hopeless and unrequited love (particularly when it’s been cultivated for any length of time) really forces a person to step back and find what solitude can do. There’s a great description of this in Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels: not coincidentally, The Tower card plays a huge role in it. I first read it in college and was struck by the description of a middle-aged professor (who was represented by the Fool card) and his unrequited love. In some relationships, Davies’ wisdom has guided my actions at times. In a lot of cases, it should have and didn’t.
Books are better than internet. Sunlight is better than indoors.
iPhones are a distraction.
Facebook is a nest of people trying to get to know people who are trying to also know and be known.
But love and strength grow in solitude. I have to remember that. I knew that once. I need to remember.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:00PM | by Otter A year ago I jettisoned the Facebook presence of Riparian Church.
Some of my best friends are sort of prone to forming and reforming their personalities on Facebook and in other social media, and I was thinking about this today and the effect it has on relationships.
The trouble with Facebook, as I see it, is that it takes an inordinate amount of care and work to distinguish between a trusted relationship and one that you regard with some suspicion.
Ex-girlfriends nestle right in amongst your kids; people who want your affection sit comfortably next to those who have your affection; and those who are jealous of your affections look on the whole time.
In the revolving door of friends, you admit people (because more friends is a form of status), you group them laboriously into categories so you can control what you reveal to various levels of trust.
It’s an enormous amount of work, really, for those of us who actually do attempt to distinguish between the trustworthy and the untrustworthy, or who think that our relationship status is not rightly a matter of public record but of intimate knowledge.
As a certified and certifiable introvert, I am fascinated by those extroverts, or exhibitionists, who like their business out there in cyberspace. But I do not Like. If I wanted you to know, you’d know, or you could ask, and you could risk me telling you, “It’s none of your business.”
A new study by the University of Cleveland supports what lots of studies are showing: that social media stress relationships in extraordinary ways. I can well believe it: to be in love is to be jealous, and all those friends in the friend-list can make ordinary stresses feel huge.
I keep my G+ account as a sort of bulletin board. I use Twitter the same way.
But Facebook feels like sleeping with prostitutes.
Not that I would know: all the prostitutes around here think I’m a health risk. But what are you gonna do.
Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 8:20PM | by Otter 
I think that we need Google+ in case Facebook ever springs a leak. It's like a digital lifeboat so that Stupid Bullshit can be saved when Facebook falls victim to subversive squads of hackers who decide that we've gotten too self-absorbed.
