Costumes and Facebook

Spike and Drusilla (aka our Samhaine
Costumes this year). Pic from here.

It’s been several months since I have actually written a meaningful, lengthy post. I have had a plethora of experiences in recent months—hell, in recent years—that keep pulling me away from my many hobbies, such that I find myself increasingly having to pick and choose what to pursue at any given time. I am slowly working my way into another bout where writing takes my primary focus (at least, when I am not at work), but I still have a handful more of sewing projects and art projects to complete before I can dive in unencumbered. My hobbies have always rotated in cycles of prominence, even when I have been blessed with enough time to properly pursue more than one at a time. With work being what it is, as well as the increased workload at home with recovering from all the wedding-related crafting aftermath and preparing our household to bring in a new furry companion by way of adopting a retired racer from a local Greyhound rescue, I have barely been able to pursue more than a reaction-based project management. By which I mean, “Holy crap it’s already October and I haven’t finished making my Halloween costume yet and our friends are hosting a housewarming/costume party that night and we’ve been planning on being Drusilla and Spike for AGES!!!” followed by “Holy crap it’s already Renaissance Festival Season and we already purchased tickets but I need a new corset and I bought that evergreen stretch panne velvet to make a dress out of to go with a new corset but then I never got around to it!” and so on and so forth. Reaction Crafting. I prefer pre-planned crafting, although having a purpose beyond that of “I want to make this just because” is sometimes helpful with enforcing a completion deadline.

So anyway, life has been more or less pretty good lately, apart from this recent bout of Facebook’s latest shenanigans with closing the accounts of people who don’t use their legal names in their profiles (because that totally makes sense….not. Evil Facebook Monster.) While I have not personally been affected by this situation since my personal page is in my legal name and only my public artist page is in the name I use online/professionally/in the Pagan community, I am seriously considering deleting my accounts altogether. There are several reasons I haven’t yet, chiefly among them that I want to maintain my public page as Anden Jade and to do so, I have to maintain a personal account to be the admin. However, there’s also the convenience of using social media as a means to stay in touch with my distant friends and family. People I know, love and care about are spread all across the world. They are scattered across time zones, countries and continents, even hemispheres. Long distance phone calls are expensive, and I suck at talking on the phone anyway (I prefer to plan what I am going to say plus I am not good are picking up on tone, so conversations in which I cannot physically see the person I am talking to and use their body language to further interpret their intent are difficult for me). Even with those drawbacks, I think I am going to send a blast message to all of my Facebook friends, telling them that I am finally deleting my account so if they want to keep in contact, they better send me a working email or phone number, and if they want pictures or more thorough updates that require little effort on their part…I can link them to my blog.

One day when I am a big famous artist/musician/writer/crafter/Pagan/General/feminist/et cetera I will be able to affect some real change.

In the mean time, I will just have to spill out some semi-intelligent blog posts about why this or that is annoying, or look at what I made today, or hey these are my thoughts on puppies. Speaking of puppies, do keep posted for updates about the retired racer we are adopting! There will, of course, be pics.