What would my father think

Occasionally, I wonder what my father would think of my chosen profession. Then I shrug my shoulders and get back to work. Truth be told; it doesn't matter what my father would have thought about my profession.

My father actually learned that I wanted to be a writer before he died. He was one of the few relatives that I admitted the truth to. Even today, I avoid the subject with most of the relatives that I have contact with.

Now, he probably would not approve of how little progress I have made on my business over the years. Of course, he would also probably have a good idea about why I am moving so slowly. After all, he lost a business (it was an unhappy time).

He would also note that while I have been moving forward slowly, at least I have been moving forward. Like today, he would have given me credit for setting up a blog and a Facebook fanpage for my wife's jewelry and pottery business---Celtic Soul Jewelry and Pottery---before it was needed. He would be able to spot the fact that it was actually a hidden advertisement for my own stuff (it goes on the resume).

But I also know that he would be able to spot the worst part of that statement---that I am more capable and willing to work on (what is ultimately) someone else's business than my own. Of course, he would also remember why that is. And he would tell me that times change, and that I need to get back to work.

*sigh* There are days I miss my dad. And this was one of them.

Living in a Fishbowl IV

This last month or so, I learned another problem with living in a fishbowl. It turns out that the glass goes both ways; not only can everyone see what you are up to, but quite often you can see what other people are doing and saying also.

I discovered this on Facebook. As some of my readers know, the last relative still talking to me, one of my sisters, decided to throw a fit because I decided that plans made months in advance (plans which involve other people's schedules and feelings) were more important than her plans announced at what I felt was the last minute. There was the additional fact that they said some harsh words in my direction the previous year---basically, it boiled down to the fact that they felt my entire life was a waste of time.

I tried to come to an understanding with them, but got tired of being told that I did not measure up and that I was not allowed to have hurt feelings over how they were treating me ("That is just the way I am"). As my friends know, I do not respond well to anger, threats and blackmail. And if I can't tell you the truth, I quit talking to you.

Even more serious was I tried to take certain things private (emails) only to have them explode in public on my Facebook wall. I am still not sure what that was supposed to accomplish. Maybe they thought that I cared about my reputation...I know that they care about theirs (a habit that mom drilled into us kids).

Of course, the cherry on top was that they decided that they could not work around my schedule and started to make snide comments on their Facebook status updates. An example: "There are two types of people in the world: those who always have time for friends and family and those who do not." Ok, maybe I am paranoid; maybe that was not aimed at me. And if it was, well, the plans I had scheduled months in advance involved friends and my nine-year old god-daughter (who acts like she is related to me)---my crime was not having time for friends and family; it was that I refused to give my sister a higher priority after learning what she thought of my life and that I was required to change while she was allowed to continue being a PITA.

The snide comments went on for days. Now, she was not holding a gun to my head forcing me to read this stuff, nor was I forcing her to read my status updates (I generally went about my life as normal [sort-of]; I did get less writing done than normal).

Then when she got done with her vacation, she went on Facebook bragging about how wonderful her family was (including my abusive mother). I treated these updates the same way as the others, I ignored them (aka did not take the bait, did not respond).

So what did I learn from all this? Well, all public figures get to see what other people think of them. Besides Facebook updates from frenemies (you have to love that term), we also get to see unfavorable opinions about ourselves in the comment sections of articles, on forum postings, and (if you write books) in the review section of Amazon.

Of course, I do not have to read about other people's opinions of me. I can ignore other people's reviews of my work, and comments they make about me. It is easy to ignore one's bad reputation when your very own family set out to destory it before one's public career even started.

And in this case, I do not have to read someone's snide comments disguised as status updates. Why? Because they chose to defriend me yesterday. I guess I am no longer talking to any of my relatives (unless the relatives on my father's side of the family decide to talk to me now---can they be any worse?).

OMG I am a blogger

Last night, during the tossing and turning brought on by the most recent email from my sister, who I feel is trying to convince me that I am one hundred percent at fault for our bad relationship, I came to some conclusions. Not pleasant conclusions, but still they are conclusions.

One of my conclusions is that I am NOT a writer, and NOT a journalist. No, I am a blogger.

Yes, this is a step down in the way I describe myself. I have always considered bloggers to be less classy than writers and journalists. Hence, in the interest of feeding my ego, I always called myself a writer or journalist, rather than embrace the truth.

The point of her email that made me realize that I was lower on the classiness totem pole than I thought was came when she asked me how I felt about everyone in the world knowing how she currently felt about me.

Do you see?

Yes, that is right. I didn't care. In fact, I thought it was slightly amusing.

That is why I have to turn in my union cards at this point. Writers and journalists are supposed to care, and do their best to keep their lives secret. Bloggers, on the other hand, tend to be like stand-up comedians, if we can get a good bit out of talking about our personal lives we will.

I always joke with my wife that if I ever do stand-up, she is going to end up with a starring role in my routine. And yes, she knows that I have blogged about her.

Obviously, I need to issue the same warning to my relatives. (I think that my friends, frienemies, and enemies know that they are fair game already---I hope.) And I probably need to add the stand-up creative license warning also: If the joke is funnier when I am not telling the complete truth, then that is what I am going to say actually happened.

I have been living in a fishbowl for a long time. I had the misfortune of going to a high school in a small town where everyone knew everyone else's business. For a long time, I did my best to conceal certain facts. Not that I think that it worked (in hindsight). I bet everyone back home knows the real reason that I failed high school (and it was not the reason that I was supposed to pretend was the reason---I am not a lazy moron---everyone probably knows the real reason why I was not doing homework and skipping classes, but shhhh---no one is supposed to know the truth; it might make someone else look bad and their reputation is more important than mine).

It gets better. My mom was horrified that people might find out what I was writing about. Hence my pen-name. A few years ago, I caught onto the fact that certain people back home were not surprised by what I was writing. And if they knew already...well, the whole town obviously knew. At that point, I decided to openly admit that yes, MDE and EME were the same person.

Of course, this is all just an aspect of my family hiding lots of skeletons in the closet. If my sister was really smart, she would look in the closet and ask what was in there that installed the vast distance between the two of us. I would think about telling her directly; but earlier in the recent spat I chose to keep something off the grid, and she responded by openly exploding about it in full public view.

(For the record, responding with anger to me when I am trying to be rational and am telling you the truth just makes me more more likely to mistrust you. And mistrust does not led to close relationships.)

There have been several things I have kept off the grid. For months, one of my cousins have wanted to know who said certain things. I have been ignoring the questions. I wonder if my cousin knows who it was now.

I will admit that I am impressed by the quick clean-up that my sister did. But it makes me wonder what skeleton in the closet has a poppet of her in its hand at the moment. And part of the dance it making her do blinds her to the fact that I am NOT the same person that walked out of that house in 1984---threats, blackmail and public explosions do not phase me. After all, I am a blogger and this is just the natural behavior of the envirnoment that I chose to write in. (Proof of that can be seen everytime I do another bad book review.) And I am going to continue sharing my personal life because it is part of my stock and trade.

Living in a Fishbowl III

This last week I learned another hazard of living in a fishbowl. One of my relatives pointed out that they could read about my life despite the fact that they were not actually a part of my life. Basically, they implied that I was being rude by writing about my life while refusing to confirm to their standards of conduct.

Now, given a year ago that this person declared that they did not want to hear about my business, my writing, my college experiences, my religion, and my involvement in Golden Dawn, I realized that this recent comment basically is going to give me a single very bad choice.

Either I can quit blogging about my life and quit using Facebook and Twitter, or I can make it hard for this person to easily see what I am up to. (I will never be able to make my life invisible from them---unless I am willing to go back to flipping burgers and completely give up writing and the internet---but I can do the magician's force and make sure that they have to google it and don't automatically see it in their updates [aka defriend them on Facebook].)

The reason why I am thinking about this today is simply because I so want to talk about what I did yesterday. Unfortunately, it is deep in the 99% of my life that this relative never wants to hear about ever again. So I am now standing here with a skull and asking the Shakespearean question "To defriend or not to defriend, that is the question."

And no, I am not going to drop out of university, give up my religion and Order involvements, and cease to be a writer just to please them. I refuse to spend the rest of my life flipping burgers just because they do not like my lifestyle.

Family myth time---There can be only one

Between reading Seth's blog today (Surely not everyone), and David Shenk's book (The Genius in All of Us) yesterday, I am reminded of one of my family myths that drive me crazy. There is an unspoken belief in my family that only one person can have any particular talent or skill.

I wasn't particularly conscious of this rule while I was growing up. I did not stop and think about the implications of "Oh, XYZ is the artist in the family." Nor did I notice that only their artwork got praised and everyone else's artwork was generally ignored, if not picked to death for not being as good as XYZ. Heaven forbid if it was actually better.

As an adult, and a member of Golden Dawn who has fought to get people to recognize that all members can bring something to the table, I have examined the effects that this particular family rule had on me; I have also kicked around the effects that similar rules might have imposed on other people.

I suspect that sometimes when I fail to follow up on a good idea that it is because I am not the person that the family rule says should be pursuing that goal. I suspect that part of the toxicity I recieved from my sisters is based on the fact that I am ignoring the fact that I am NOT the writer in the family. And I really should not be thinking about picking up an ink pen and drawing either. And let's not mention going to college and running a business.

What is my role in the family? Oh, I am the criminal black sheep of the family. Not that I have ever served a day of jail time, the statement probably still stands "Oh sooner or later, [Morgan] is going to end up in jail. It is only a matter of time before he does something stupid and gets caught."

Outside of some petty shoplifting as a kid, some minor damage to private property, and a couple of druken fights (ironically only in one of them was I personally drunk), I am fairly innocent. Another family member has screwed up worse, but it does not matter---I am supposed to be the criminal in the family, not them.

I am NOT the writer, the artist, the business person in the family, or even a decent human being. Or at least, that is what the family myth and rule says. It is just too bad that I am running out of patience and refuse to humor this idea any more, isn't it? After all, I would be such a better human being if I just accepted my place in the universe, and let others do what they are best at.

Inconvenience and tornado warnings

Just a few minutes ago, the tornado warning siren went off. Living near the city golf course, I am well within earshot of the tornado warning siren tower that they have set up over there. It was a good thing that I heard it. I actually got up and hauled in the recycling bin before the rain and hail started coming down.

When I was a teenager living in Brush Colorado, I once got in trouble for watching a tornado form. It is not that I was putting my life in danger that got me yelled at; it was the fact that I was not home on time to babysit my brothers and sisters that got me into trouble.

Let me be clear.

The fact that I put my life in danger was a non-issue. My mother could care less that I might have been blown away to Kansas. What made her upset was that I inconvenienced her. I am not sure what my mother needed or wanted to go do that afternoon (I pretend that I have no idea), but I was damned for causing her inconvenience.

(My father never heard about this incident. He wouldn't have cared if he did. Dad used to drive around with us kids in the car chasing tornados and bad weather. Explains a lot about me, doesn't it?)

Thanks to my childhood (there are many other examples of this behavior), I am sensative to the fact that people get upset when you inconvenience them. It is not getting their order wrong that gets them yelling at you; it is the inconvenience.

Do you want to drive people away from your website? Make it inconvenient to use. You will drive them around in droves.

Of course, my childhood also instilled in me the idea that I am never to inconvenience anyone. I fight against this idea. My feud against one of my sisters rotates around us fighting about who should be inconvenienced for the sake of the other. (The extent of this inconvenience might be a blog post for another day.)

And I suspect that I am not the only one programmed to act this way. It would explain the number of pagans and wiccans unwilling to do certain forms of magic (see my zero sum game posting on my Golden Dawn blog). What we all need is a siren warning when we are inconveniencing ourselves, as well as one for inconveniencing others.

Good for my sister and there can be only one

Yesterday, I learned that my sister XXX has officially registered her business with the state of Oregon: XXX.

Good for her, I say. Which is about all I can say.

Why? Simply because I have no idea of the quality of her work, or her expertise in this field.

We do not talk about our businesses with one another. It should be noted that I technically don't have a business because I have never filed official paperwork beyond the simpliest of tax forms. There is also the fact that...well, I am a hack as everyone else in my family will quickly point out.

I was not blessed by any of the muses. And in my family, there can be only one. Literally and metaphorically.

There is only one artist in the family. There is only one writer in the family. There is only one business-person in the family. There is only one scholar in the family. It is an unspoken family rule. Introductions used to go "This is XYZ, and they are the little fill-in-the-bragging-right child in the family."

No one ever brags about me. I fill in the vital black sheep, oh where did we go wrong slot. I am a pirate and a criminal, an addict and a fool, or whatever other evil is needed to make someone else in the family look better. Or feel guilty. And several of the stories are either not true, or so badly changed from what really happened that truth proves illusionary.

Or at least, that is how it was. And may still be; last fall events make me positive that I am still being used for this despite the fact that I torched the bridges and refused to talk to several family members over a decade ago. Needless to say, last fall events made me add to my list of family members who I will never have a conversation with ever again.

So good for my sister for starting her own business. And if any of my friends see me venturing into PR work or marketing, please remind me to stop. After all, I am not the marker guru in the family.

Edited on 23 June 2010 to protect the interests of the innocent.

Living in a Fishbowl II

One of the tightropes that a working writer, especially in today's social networked Googlized environment, gets to walk is how much of your life do you allow to be known. In many ways, all of us are living in a fishbowl today. Every social networking site we join, every article we publish online, every web page we make, every blog post we write: All of them decrease the amount of privacy we have as writers.

For instance, if you play games on Facebook, do you really want the whole world to know that you are wasting that much time everyday...and if you need to spend that much time playing them, what does this say about your mental state? (Feel free to comment about my game playing habits in the comment section.)

In my case, the concern started early in my writing career. I was still a member of the print market at that time (technically I still do the print market)...well, the internet hadn't really begin yet...anyway, the important part is that I had to decide relatively early how much of my life I wanted to make public.

Or rather a member of my family decided for me. Horror of horrors, not only did I chose the wrong religion and set of spiritual beliefs, not only did I chose to pick the wrong profession, I actually chose to combine the two. For her sake of mind, I decided to write under a penname.

In recent years, due to various factors, this has became a problem for me. I want to send people to places to read my writing, but often they know me by my legal name and not my penname.

I decided to give up the whole pretense a couple of years ago when I realized that it was probably an open secret that Emil Michael Eckstein and Morgan Drake Eckstein was the same individual. If I could figure it out using Google, I was sure other people could too.

And honestly, I gave up caring a damn about it. Having your sole source of income be your writing tends to do that to a person. I still introduce myself to people as Morgan (except on campus, where I am Emil), but my Facebook page is under my legal name. I write my honest opinions about my religion (I am Egyptian/Norse pagan/Wiccan---feel free to comment about that combination), my involvement in Golden Dawn, my experiences in magic, my opinion about my college classes and professors, my gripes about my friends and family, my lack of ethics (if you read my Golden Dawn blog, you know what I am talking about), and anything else I feel like talking about.

The amazing part is that outside of a couple of members of my family, no one seems to care about how big of a lunatic I am. The people I went to High School with already knew that I was weird...therefore the whole town knew already (it was a small town; everyone knows everybody). Everyone in the local esoteric community knows that I have a few screws loose, but could care less (I am classified as a harmless nutcase). Heck, I am even married (don't ask me what she sees in me, I have yet to figure it out).

So in my case, living into today's internet cached Googlized fishbowl is not so bad. After all, I have been doing it my entire life without realizing it.