Facebook Facts

Sometimes I want to be anonymous.

I don't want to be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, or

Twitter.

I don't want that guy I never liked in high school

Sending me a friend request.

I don't want that woman I worked with when I was 23,

Who probably remembers the times I screwed up in work,

And that I got fired;

I definitely don't want her as part of my

Network.

There's a reason I moved on with my life,

And didn't stay in touch with some of these people.

I thought I was done with them

Forever,

But now they're looking me up on social networks.

Friending me.

How can I turn them down?

What should I say?

"Sorry, I never really liked you

In high school, because

You gave me that embarrassing nickname that I hated."

Or, "Sorry, you must have forgotten that I had a

Shouting match with you in the office

Twenty years ago,

And I always suspected you got me

Fired.

So, no thanks, I don't want to be your friend now."

I'd rather present a different face to the world,

And list my many accomplishments, triumphs, and

Awards (even if I'm a little hazy about some of them).

I'm looking for a different network;

I'm looking for a different me.

I'd rather not chat about old times,

Because it's old times I'm trying to forget.

Didn't you see my profile picture?

I'm more distinguished now,

Somehow more, oh, professional.

That person you want to connect to

Is in a different network.

The stuck-in-a-time-warp network.

I'm not part of that anymore.

I hope.

No Tornadoes Here

I have moved around a bit in my life, but I still live less than an hour's drive from the town where I spent my childhood. This used to bother me, because I thought that it meant I had no spirit of adventure.

I should have moved far away, I told myself. I should be living in Europe, or Asia, or at least in California, instead of staying so close to my roots. How boring, how unimaginative. How safe.

Yes, but safety is not always a bad thing. When I look at news reports of the tornadoes that roared through the South in the last few weeks, and I see the pictures of flattened houses, smashed cars, and mobile homes that were lifted up and deposited miles away, I think maybe it wasn't such a bad idea to stay close to home.

I live in the northeast part of the U.S., a place that doesn't get extreme weather or natural disasters. We don't get tsunamis, earthquakes, or mudslides here. We get some bad thunderstorms, but we're far enough from the ocean that hurricanes have lost their punch by the time they reach us. What we call a tornado would be nothing more than a slight breeze to someone from Alabama or Oklahoma. If the temperature hits 100 degrees two days in a row during the summer the newspapers tell everyone to stay indoors during the "heat wave", but I've been to South Carolina and Florida in July and that's killer heat. As for snowstorms, well, we've had some big ones in recent years, but even the biggest accumulation of snow melts in a week or two, which is better than places where the front lawn disappears under a carpet of snow from October to May.

For anyone who loves extreme weather, yes, this is a boring place to live. You won't ever have to run for your life from a huge wave or a monster tornado. There are no volcanoes waiting to spew hot ash and lava in your backyard while you sleep. Then again, when I look at YouTube videos of some of these events I realize that I'm fine with boring. I'm okay with unimaginative.

Safe is not such a bad thing.  

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

Passing The Test

Today my daughter takes her driver's test. This is the third time I've taught one of my children to drive, and my last one will be coming along in a few years. At times like this I reflect on how simple Life was when they were small children, and how stupid I was not to realize that parenting was easy back then.

When my children were small I spent way too much time worrying about them. The things I worried about seem so ridiculous now. Whether they would fall off their bike and skin their knee. Whether they'd catch a cold if they were around another child who was sick. Whether they would get their feelings hurt if they weren't invited to a sleepover. I look back at those days and think, Was I crazy? Why was I losing sleep over that? There are way more important things to worry about when your children get bigger.

For at least the first year after every one of my children gets a driver's license my heart pounds whenever they go out in the car. I think about them constantly, and if they're not home exactly on time I break out into a sweat. If they're ten minutes late I start pacing the floor and trying to call them on the cell phone. If they don't answer my heart starts racing, although I'm also hoping it's because I told them not to talk on their cell phone while driving. When they get home I cross-examine them to find out what happened, and when I'm sure everything is okay my body goes limp.

Big kids mean bigger problems. Every time they leave the house you imagine what kind of trouble they could get into. It's complicated by the fact that as a parent you realize you're supposed to be giving them more freedom, because the teenage years are when children are learning how to run their own lives. When they were little I didn't have to fool around with this, "Let me live my own life" stuff. I was in charge -- end of story.

Parents always try to shield children from making a mistake. When they're little you make sure they fasten their seatbelts, don't drink Pepsi before bedtime, and look both ways before crossing the street. Those instincts don't go away when they get older. Every parent would secretly like to keep making decisions for their children even when they grow up. Don't drive that fast, don't go to that party, don't go to that college, don't marry that person -- I could hear myself saying all those things. I have to back off, though, and realize that it would be a sad situation if my children were still taking orders from me when they're 30.

That doesn't make it any easier, though, when they come back from the driver's exam with that big smile on their faces and say, "I passed! When can I have the car?"

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

College Admissions Madness

Big sigh of relief today. My daughter in high school got her scores back from the ACT test she took in March, and they look good enough to get her into the college she likes.
This is my third experience as a parent with the college admissions process, and it seems to get more stressful all the time. When my older kids were applying to colleges, I remember their school counselors saying that they were unlucky enough to be born during a mini Baby Boom in the late 1980s, and that meant there was more competition when their generation reached college age. The counselors said that when this demographic bump passed through the educational system it would not be as competitive for the next group of kids.
I don't know what happened to that idea. Every college I research seems to have raised its academic standards and lowered its acceptance rate. It seems harder than ever to get into one of the elite colleges. I talked to a parent recently who told me his son was president of his class, scored over 1500 on the Math/Verbal sections of the SAT, was a starting left tackle on a state championship football team, did hundreds of hours of service work during high school, and still got rejected by the college he wanted to go to.
It's madness, and it's contributing to some very stressful times for a lot of young people. When I was a high school junior many years ago, my father told me my college choices were limited to the schools I could commute to, because we couldn't afford room and board costs. I don't remember perusing any lists of "50 Best Colleges" and agonizing over my SAT scores. In fact, I only took the SAT test once, and only applied to one college. I got my acceptance letter and didn't spend one more minute worrying about whether I was going to a good college or not.
There are a lot of good colleges out there, even if they're not on the "50 Best" lists. The important thing is to get a degree and then go out and live your life to the fullest. I've worked with people who went to Ivy League colleges and made a mess of their lives, and I've also worked with people who went to community colleges and were a success in every sense of the word.
When I get too caught up in this college admissions craziness, I have to step back, take a deep breath, and tell myself that college is just a waystation on the journey through life. What the station looks like is not as important as where you go once you leave it.
John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

My Desk Is A Work Of Art

I don't understand people who are neat. I know they exist, but they are like some exotic form of life, like bacteria that live under the ocean at steam vents, or deep underground in Antarctica. How do people like this stay organized? How do they keep their desk clean? How can they keep track of all the paper in their life? My desk attracts paper like a magnet attracts iron. Every once in awhile I bring out the trash bags and start tossing paper in them, or putting the important papers in file folders, and for a brief moment of time my desk becomes clean and neat.

It never lasts. Little piles of paper start to accumulate, and before I know it my desk looks like the aftermath of some natural disaster. A neat desk intimidates me. I have had bosses who kept a neat desk, making sure that there were no loose papers on their desk each night before they left work. I was afraid of them. I recognized in them a ruthlessness, a willingness to cut ties without remorse, that I do not have. After all, who knows what stray piece of paper may come in handy sometime in the future? Parting with a receipt, a memo, a document of any kind is hard for me, because I never know when I might need it again. People who can throw documents away with reckless abandon are much too confident, too self-assured, too domineering for me. They must assume that if they get rid of a document and they need it again, someone else will make them a copy. The world will rearrange itself to do their bidding, in other words.

Not me. I assume that every piece of paper holds the key to my eternal happiness, and that if I lose it I will be condemned to an eternity of fire and brimstone. That's why I let these things pile up in my life, and why it is agony to let go of them.

Isn't there a famous quote about a messy desk being the sign of a creative mind? Maybe that's why I like those piles of papers stacked everywhere, why I don't mind sorting through them several times a day to find something, why I can live with the inefficiency and disorganization. I'm creative; that's it.

Maybe I should look at my desk as a piece of modern art.

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

Sins Of The Fathers

It seems to be the fashion lately for children of famous male authors to write tell-all books about how mean and nasty their fathers were. The newest one is "Reading My Father: A Memoir", by Alexandra Styron. In it she reveals that her father, William Styron, was an ogre, a verbally abusive bully who drank too much and may have cheated on his wife. The fact that famous authors are sometimes unpleasant to their families is not news. However, Alexandra Styron's book seems to be part of a trend. In the last decade there have been books by the children of John Cheever, James Dickey, and J.D. Salinger, telling stories of their parents' nasty behavior at home. 

What's up with this rash of tell-all books? Is there something different about this generation of American novelists that made them so unpleasant to their loved ones? The "abusive" tag is what interests me the most, because I have often thought that what young people today call "abusive" is a far cry from what that word meant years ago. I grew up with a father who would be called verbally abusive by today's standards. He yelled when he was angry, and many things made him angry. He was not shy about telling the people around him when they did something wrong, in picturesque language. He was liable to explode without warning. Alexandra Styron tells about how her father flew into a rage when her mother burned the dinner. I remember a similar scene in my house, and it was not pretty.

But so what? The world was different 40 years ago. The men of what Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation" had quick tempers, some of them, and maybe it was because of the world they grew up in. They had to deal with the worst economic depression in our country's history, two World Wars, and the threat of the atomic bomb hanging over them. They were under a lot of pressure, and at times they released that pressure by yelling at the people around them.

We survived, and most of us learned not to act that way around our loved ones. I rarely ever raise my voice to my children, and I'm proud of that, but the unintended consequence of that is they can't tolerate criticism as well as I can. If I mention some little area in their lives where they're falling short, if I raise my voice just a half tone, they tell me I'm yelling. "Yelling?" I say. "That's not yelling. You don't know what yelling is, believe me."

What's "abusive" for one generation is not for the next. Definitions can change based on circumstances. My father probably thought he was using kid gloves in raising his children. From the stories I remember about his own childhood, with a father who was prone to using a strap on his sons when they brought home a failing grade in school, he most definitely was a kinder, gentler Dad to me.

I'm sorry if Alexandra Styron has so many bad memories of her father, but I'm sure she'll survive.

I'm also sure she feels she's raising her children in a kind, loving, non-abusive manner. It remains to be seen if they'll look at it the same way when it comes time for them to write their own memoir.

John McDonnell's Smashwords Page

Easter: A Time Of Renewal

After a typical Philadelphia Spring with weeks of cold, cloudy, wet weather, I woke up this morning to see the sun streaming through my bedroom window. Somehow this happens every year around here: the cold, gray weather breaks on Easter Sunday and we have brilliant sunshine, the flowers bloom overnight, and the deep green of the trees and lawns pops out from the background of blue sky.

Something special always seems to happen around Easter. I got engaged on Easter Sunday, asking my wife to marry me on a glorious morning after Mass, in a park with azaleas blooming everywhere. Several years later we found out just before Easter that we were going to have our first child. Today I got a phone call from my nephew that his wife is pregnant with their first child.

It is a time of renewal, rebirth, hope. There are new possibilities afoot. Springtime brings hope -- yes, for folks like me it brings allergies also, but let's focus on the hope.

I am brimming with confidence about the future. I want to write books that are full of hope, passion, renewal. I have grand plans today, I am dreaming great dreams.

And why not? When the Lord has risen, anything is possible.

John McDonnell's Smashwords page

Road Trip

By John McDonnell

Okay, I'm going on a road trip this week with my daughter, and I'm going to post diary entries here. We're visiting colleges so she can get an idea of what schools she might want to apply to next Fall. She's a high school junior, and we've only visited three schools so far, so this is where Dad clears the decks and spends some bonding time with daughter, while we drive around the South and look at schools.

This is so different than when I was thinking about college, so many years ago. I basically looked at one school, LaSalle College (now it's a university, but back then it was just a punk college). I never visited it; I just looked at some brochures that came in the mail, and said, "Okay, this place looks good, I'll apply there." I took the SAT test one time, racked up a pretty decent score, sent in my one college application, and got my acceptance early in my senior year. I never took an SAT prep course, never spent a minute researching schools, and -- thank God -- didn't know what was an elite school and what wasn't.

This was in the innocent days before the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, before the mania to get in the "right" school, and before parents got so deeply involved with the whole college admissions process. All my folks cared about was that I went to a college that was local and not too expensive. No, I'm wrong: all they really cared about was that I got a college degree. My father was the first person in his family to get a college degree, and he was determined that all of his children would get one too. He didn't give a hoot about "top 50" colleges, or anything like that. He just wanted that degree for his kids, so they could get a good start toward making something of themselves.

Today, it's all so complicated. I think that's sad for the kids, because it takes some of the joy out of the experience. They get so bogged down in getting the right grades, compiling a list of activities to put on their resume, and making sure they get all the right recommendations, that they can't relax and enjoy the experience of finding a college that's right for them.

Well, that's enough pontificating. For the rest of this week I'm going to try to make this a fun, joyful experience for my daughter. Hopefully I'll succeed. I'll post about it here.