All it takes is a Christmas card

We got something in the mail from the U.S today.

This was a rather surprising event, Considering that no one has even taken the time to notify us of the fact that they can't make it to little Squeaker's Christening, which we of course knew when we mailed out the invitations; we just included the relatives over there to show them that they would be welcome should they have had the wish to join us.

It turned out to be A Christmas card and, a present´ for all of us from B's mom.

I appreciate the present very much, but I think both B and I value the card the most...

Funny, that just a little card can mean so much.

Maybe it's just us, but in this era of digital communication it means all the more when someone actually takes the time to physically put something in the mail. It makes one feel so much more important.

We're all so busy these days that we barely take the time to write each other e-mails anymore, much less letters and cards.

I am guilty of that too; I never send Christmas cards myself.

Part of the reason for that is of course that I'm blind, so it's a bit of a pain to do it. I can't just go and buy a card that I like and, I can't write the address on it either, since the letters might end up on top of each other. It takes the spontaneity out of the whole thing and, turns it into one of those chores that I have to have help with and, therefore want to avoid as often as possible.

So instead I send out a text message to all my contacts on Christmas eve, wishing everyone a merry Christmas and, I put the same thing up on my status on Facebook, but that's it really.

I use to put the same thing up on Messenger and Skype, but since I started using Facebook I've found myself getting on there less and less.

This of course means that I can keep up with what people are doing, but I don't communicate with them half as much as I use to.

Funny, how social media makes it possible to stay in touch with for example hundreds of "facebook friends" on a daily bases, but the real communication is going down the drain...

I realize that others have come to that conclusion before me, but with that Christmas card it suddenly had an impact on my own little space in the universe, so please bear with me even if you've heard this a million times before.

I'm one of those who have relatively few friends on there, as I've set up a rule that I would at least have to have met the person in real life or, have a darn good chance of doing so, if they were going to be in titled to a place among my Facebook-friends. That being said, I still have around 150 contacts on there.

A lot of them are from the sport that I'm playing; people that I exchange a few words with when we meet at the tournaments and, then there's of course the people from my past that I've reconnected with. That is one thing that Facebook is actually good for, it's very nice to find old friends again...

But most people don't seem to have any real-life-intentions on there. They have thousands of "friends" who don't even remotely care about them on their contact list and, I think a lot about what this lack of "real friendship" and "real communication" will do to our children....

Honestly... I've noticed that most people don't even take the time to leave comments on Facebook anymore; they just press "like" and they're done with it.

We have gone from:
writing letters, calling people and spending hours on the phone and, don't forget; having a date with the girls at a coffee shop or, just hanging out with our friends and play a game or something, to... Yeh to what exactly?

We hang out on Skype, send a thousand text messages a month, drop someone a line via e-mail, or click "like" on facebook...

My 14-year-old son and his friends hang out on Skype more often than they're actually physically in the same room.

He's got a cellphone of course... He's had one since he was 8 or so, but he almost never calls his friends on it. Instead he sends 5 thousand text messages a month; no I'm not kidding!

And yet I know how important this "online communication" can be. Trust me, I have not forgotten how me and my fiance met.

But I move easily between the online world and the real one. I distinguish between the 2. I knew that just because we got along well during those hours we spent on Skype and Ventrilo, there was no guarantee that we'd get along in "RL." But I'm not so sure that my son and his friends know this difference...

I don't have a solution. Perhaps there isn't one. There's no way to stop the development in the virtual reality and, for the most part I don't want to - technology opens up more and more possibilities every day for all of us, but I think even more so when one is legally blind...

But still I worry...

Perhaps because this online world has also opened up huge possibilities for people to let their evil side thrive and grow.

My brother is one of the nicest people I know and, Still my sister found a messenger conversation where he had been bashing some other kid he didn't know in real life...He had been calling him the most horrid names and, this was of course only because he could hide behind an online personality and, the other poor kid would never find out who he was.

And this is a common behavior...Not only among children you understand...

Games like World of Warcraft are barely playable anymore, due to all the trolls out there who are literally bullying other players by waiting around at the place where they are revived after they die so that they can kill them again and, there by make sure that they don't even get the chance to start playing. . And, this can go on for hours... Or however long it takes for a person to give up and log off.

The same goes for almost every forum out there in the internet world.

Places where women come for support after rape frequently get members who only come there to talk about how much fun it is to rape and torture girls and women.

Facebook Groups who are suppose to be taking a stand against pedophiles, are suddenly changed into pedophile-hangouts, where the member's pictures of children are stolen and, used in pornographic messages.

I recently read an article about an eighteen-year-old mom who had a picture of her and her baby put up up with a message that said something like: "Look at mommy's new little toy."

The worst I've actually seen myself so far though is a devastated mother who has been blogging to make it through the agony of slowly losing her son to "EB," a rare genetic skin disease which means that any type of friction on the skin or mucous membranes causes blisters. Not even her tremendous pain while watching him suffering and dying slowly for 2 years and 7 months, has awakened any kind of compassion in the heart of these evil people. Instead they have gone out of their way to leave her comments about how she is only keeping him alive to get attention in the media and things to that extent;WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU SICK CREEPS OUT THERE?!

The same kind of thing, but in a smaller scale is now also happening on facebook all the time. It's very easy you see, to click like on one person's status, while refraining from doing the same on another's. So as mothers we do now not only have to try to look for signs of our children being bullied in school, which they may hide from us because they are afraid or ashamed, but all the social medias and, a lot of the games have the same potential of being a breeding ground for hatred and misery.

More over, even if there's no bullying going on, there's an expectation and a measuring by the amount of texts, views, comments and, "likes." one receives during any given day.

Now don't you dare dismiss that until you've Tried to explain to your insecure teenager that just because you didn't get 15 likes on your status or, 250 texts today, that does not mean that people don't like you....

Lets just all go back to sending Christmas cards shall we?

Any takers?

1 cranky never sleeping baby for sale! Communicative teenager included in the bargain. His vocabulary consists at present of: "Chill out..." and "Who cares..." Don't miss out!

Oh the joys of motherhood

There have for a long time now, been days when I wonder if my sister's statement that: "becoming a teenager means turning into a big baby, but without the cute stuff to compensate for the excessive eating, sleeping and screaming." isn't all true. But now I must say that I've
been wondering for about 2 weeks; he's impossible!!!

He wants to quit the swimming practice, he wants to quit his job and, his homework doesn't get done without endless nagging on my part. He brings it home at the last minute, if he brings it home at all.

The worst example yet, is when he came home with 8 pages of math, and only 2 days to get them done, even though the teacher had given them plenty of time to finish the chapter.

He openly admitted that he had chosen not to say anything, cause he didn't want to do any homework during the weekend. I tried to help him in spite of that, but his attitude was attrocious. He kept accusing me of getting mad at him for no reason and, told me that the ones who ended up in his class were there for a reason, which was that they didn't understand math, so I could quit getting mad at him for not being a mathematical genious...

I have never gotten mad at him for that. But I get mad when he refuses to try and, this last statement was just so way over the top it passed the rooftops of the skyscrapers.

On top of that, we of course had an endless discussion about how he would have to start earlier unless he wanted to fail that class, but then just a few days later, he came home and had only 2 days to finish an article for swedish, which demanded a lot of research and, he hadn't even started yet...

After that he brought the wonderful news of an English test, including 4 chapters, that he had not known anything about until there was just one day to go. Oh yeah...Very likely...

Somewhere in the middle of that there was also a physics test...

The worst part, is that he's lying about it all the time, telling me that he doesn't have any homework at all.

I hate being lied to! Yes, I positively hate it! Especially when there's no reason for it other than that he's lazy and doesn't want to do the work.

I'm not having him fail his classes because of lazyness. If his grades go down the drain now, he'll have to spend the next 3 semesters trying to repare the damage and, he still might not be able to get into the program of his choice when it's time for the gymnasie, which is our equivalent of highschool.

I'm not having it! I'm just not having it...