Summertime and the bloggin' ain't so easy...
I'm working on my retail tell-all memoir, originally titled "Tales from Aisle Ten" like several Breadbin posts (I'll be going with a different title, though). Because my discipline is non-existent, I have enlisted the services of a writing buddy to keep me honest. The deal is we each write every day, even if it's only two sentences. So far, I've skipped one day due to total work-related burnout...I could barely put two sentences together verbally. But otherwise it's coming along. I basically scrapped it and started from scratch and I've now surpassed my old word count: I'm sitting comfortably above twelve thousand words.
Blogging necessarily takes a back seat to that.
However, there's something that came up in the news the other day that tweaked my bloggerbrain.
Read and react...
To summarize: Married D-string actor removes his ring, hits on model on redeye flight. Model strings him along, tweeting the whole time, until her followers--armed with her hints--are able to identify the cad....whose career and marriage are most likely in tatters now. Model realizes (too late) what she has unleashed.
Actor is one of those 'washed in the blood of the Lamb Who Is JAAAAAY-SUS types (it almost goes without saying), but I'll refrain from further comment on that part of the story.
What interests me is that the reaction, which is split seemingly exactly in twain. Half the people whose comments I've read think the actor (Brad Presley) fully deserved the crap he's getting: serves him right for surreptitiously removing his wedding ring and then trying to cozy up to a woman not his wife. The other half says of the model (Melissa Stetten): what a bitch!
If you're interested, I heavily favour the former interpretation (and I did even before I found out how "Christian" Mr. Presley is). Being hit on by someone you're not interested in poses a real dilemma for a woman, especially when you have a few hours of proximity to look forward to. Telling him off is out of the question: some men won't take no for an answer, and you never know which ones those are by looking at them. Caving is equally unthinkable, especially when you know (as Melissa did) that the guy is married. So that leaves you with a hybrid "be nice but not too nice" strategy that is acutely uncomfortable to prolong.
What do we do with acutely uncomfortable things? We share them, because shared pain is lessened. And we have a sharing culture now, don't we? Connected as never before, even at 30,000 feet?
Tweet...tweet...tweet...
People need to wake up. They need to understand the society that's a-building. We are moving towards a world of sousveillance....not Big Brother, but millions upon millions of Little Brothers who reach just as far. Some people find this terrifying. It need not be. There are many positives I can think of given a world extrapolated from current trends. One is the almost total elimination of crime. Only a very sick mind indeed would even consider murder, say, if his every action is likely to be seen by at least one camera, and probably many more, the locations of which he can't determine ahead of time.
In private is increasingly a meaningless term. Hitting on a woman in the privacy of your airplane seat is fraught with peril if you happen to be, ahem, married. Unbelievably, Presley had his own Twitter account. How stupid do you have to be?
2 comments:
You'll have to let us know when we can order your book, any idea of timing? It's a perfect project for you.
Thanks for that, it'll be a while because not only do I have to run the publishing gauntlet, the manuscript will have to be reviewed to make sure I can't get the pants sued off me.
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