Musings

I started this blog as a way for me to ween myself off social media. This was my intention from when I started #100DaysToOffload after reading this post by Kev. I'm cutting the 100 days short and quitting Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, starting now.

I'd still love to stay in touch, but directly via phone or email.

I feel somewhat guilty for leaving the church, but I also needed time to heal and it wasn't possible there. A church is not a place for dissenting opinions and beliefs. I'm a witness and a victim to scriptures being used to manipulate families and drive them apart. Having heart to heart and human to human conversations becomes impossible when one party always appeals to authority, the scriptures.

I'm a bastard child and I grew up believing it was my moral imperative to save my dad so that he wouldn't go to hell. You can read my exact thought on this matter from a blog post twelve years ago, when I was spiritually well-endowed. At that point in my life, I went a year listening to only Christian music, fasting regularly, and striving for 100% righteousness.

When you meet someone and you shake hands and make eye contact, there's a human connection. In that moment, in that space and time, there's only two people and no one else.

When you connect to someone on social media, there's Facebook or Twitter in between you.

There's an amount of trust you hand over to them to facilitate your connections. Maybe this is good, maybe this is bad. They serve as a shield to protect you, but they also have their own agenda. I won't speculate beyond that for now, but you do pay for these services with your data and these services know you intimately.

Hey, you! Yes, you. I'd like to chat about phones and computers without getting way too... geeky about all of it. Your phone is a very powerful computer, so I'm going to only refer to computers from here on out, just remember I'm also talking about your phone.

The premise is that you've been getting ripped off by nerds for years and I think that's wrong. You probably knew this already, but just haven't had the right words to describe it. I'm happy to help, if you'll continue reading.

I'll keep this brief. Spoiler: He didn't

I'm proud to be an American. I am ashamed of our history, but I'm hopeful for our future. I believe in a free and a just society, but I see there's a disconnect in our country right now, where some things are free for me, but not for thee.

And other things aren't just, like the prison-industrial complex and for-profit prisons. Or publicly traded health insurance companies. Or that we literally have concentration camps on US soil right now.

My last post took a lot of energy out of me emotionally, from both writing it and the ensuing conversations that followed. To get back on the proverbial writing horse, I decided on a lighter and shorter topic to press onward.

I very frequently find myself thinking about how much data companies demand from us as consumers and how much they actually need it. I'm not talking about all the surveillance and hidden tracking, but the times we're actually filling out a form and providing data directly.

Let's start out with I'm racist and move on from there. This is dedicated to anyone who has ever said #AllLivesMatter.

Where were you, when you first heard #BlackLivesMatter? Was it on twitter or was it on the news? Did you view it as a statement or the slogan for a campaign?

Let me clear it up: It's a cry for help. It is a plea to see injustice and how just leaving the house while being Black invites a fear that this might be the last time.

I'm not quite sure where to begin here.

Great, now that that's out of the way, let's begin.

For years, I've felt uneasy. Deep down in the pit of my stomach, I've felt ill, the same feeling I feel when my conscious has been stricken. When I know I've done wrong and I know I need to do better. I've lived this feeling of guilt or of shame and I've struggled to articulate it and I still do. But let's try to unpack this together.