Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Christmas List

What do I want for Christmas?

This is the time of year when I get asked that question a lot. I don’t generally celebrate this holiday anymore. I mean there are a few folks for whom I buy a small gift* but I don’t generally decorate the house and do all that stuff anymore. Once in awhile I get a wild hair and will hang Christmas lights but then again, I might do that anytime of year. That said, I still get asked a lot what I want for the (insert Holiday here). The questioner may be asking in anticipation of gifting me with something or merely being curious.

Generally I don’t have anything on my list. If I want something I either get it myself, start a fund to purchase it at a later date, or write it off as a pipe dream. This year I actually have something on my list. This item on my list is something that I want more than anything I have ever wanted in my life and yet it remains elusive. I can’t save enough money to purchase it nor can I simply write it off as a dream so I am stuck. So here it is, my Christmas wish list for this year.


My only wish this year is that the coming year might find my entire family both happy and healthy.


That’s it. That is my list. I know it is asking a lot but if Santa could somehow find his way to drop that in my family room this year it would be lovely thanks.

Generally we are a pretty happy lot but I suspect that this year has taken its toll on us all. There have been a plethora of health concerns that have weighted heavy on us all and in addition there have been things that have dragged us all down to an abnormal level of unhappy. There have been challenges to try our spirits, triumphs that lift us back up, and health concerns that have run the gamut from minor annoyances to major life threatening ones. I hope to see that in the coming year, we all return to good health and good cheer.

So Santa, I hope this isn’t asking too much and if it won’t fit down my chimney, please feel free to drop it in the yard.



*Gift: an item purchased and intended to be given to another. Said item is to be something that the receiver would never buy themselves but something that so perfectly fits their personality as to be made for them.

Friday, December 5, 2008

What?!?!?!

In the course of looking for something last night, I found myself rummaging around in some old pictures on my hard drive. There I came across a picture. It was not an unusual picture per se, it was a screen capture of a former internet friend of mine. I had kept it at the time for an amazing similarity to someone I knew. What struck me as unusual last night when I looked it was that I suddenly realized that it bore an amazing resemblance to several OTHER someone’s I know. That thought combined with a thought that had already been niggling around the edges of my mind really yanked up a whole lot of paranoia. Not sure if this has EVER happened to me to this degree before so I am just going to toss it out there and see what it does.

One thing we all mention from time to time is that how it seems that because you have more people with whom to associate, you seem to pick up more compatible/similar people here on the net than you do in real life. We don’t all live in huge cities with millions of potential friends to choose from but here on the net we virtually do. I myself have a lot of very good friends here who share a lot of similarities to me as well as a lot of compatible differences. These friends are spread out across a variety of platforms (blogs here and there, social sites, and the like) so this will be posted in several of those places as well and I won’t be mentioning any specifics here.

One friend in particular has become quite disturbing. Not in any overt way but in a rather subtle makes you go hmmmm kind of way. It had been in the back of my mind lately how very odd certain things were. Most specifically that at any one point, a story that I had blogged or written about somewhere publicly was noticeably similar to a story coming from that friend as something happening in their now. The story was not verbatim of my experience but rather a retelling of it in someone else’s words. At first it was more of a “wow small world, aren’t we similar, I felt that way too thing but then over time it began to seem to be a bit TOO much coincidence. Then it began to be a whole lot too much coincidence.

This was not the first time something similar had happened. I have in the past, stopped associating with someone who took my words and used them verbatim as their own, I have stopped associating with people who seemed to want to become me, and others who simply gave me the willies. One such person had profoundly spooked me at one point by casually mentioning something near my house that I had never mentioned at a time that I knew I had never given away where I lived. I shut down most of pages and went friends only after that one for quite some time.

It is only in recent times that I have become more open with things about my home but only on the sites where I was still friends only. That set of former issues has been in my mind lately because I happened across an old blog of a friend of mine where someone had been posing as someone else. I had been mulling around the possibility that this particular friend of mine was not as they seemed but was rather a clever imposter. It was nothing specific rather just a feeling.

That is until last night. I ran across that picture that had borne an uncanny resemblance to an old friend of mine and noticed that it not only bore an uncanny resemblance to a current friend of mine but could in the right light be ME. It was a very surreal moment. Why? Because in all cases the resemblance tied in with one of the afore mentioned former friends. The plagiarizer, the wannabe, and the willies-giver ALL looked like that picture and that picture also looked like it could be ME. The friend who was supposed to be in the picture had disappeared from my page at one point when I mentioned a stalker. I was NOT referring to that friend (it was not an internet person at all but someone IRL) but the timing looking back NOW is sure suspicious. That friend sure seemed to know an awful lot about me, where I lived, and showed some amazing insight into what was going on IRL. I also recognize that the person who was in fact stalking me ALSO bears a resemblance to that picture (and to me) and has MORE than once expressed a desire to “have my life”.

I have been doing a lot of thinking on this issue recently and am not really sure where to go with it from here but it sure has me wondering how many people out there are not who they seem to be. While I accept that we ALL filter our lives to a large extent here, I am thinking more along the lines of are totally and completely NOT who they say they are. You hear stories about men pretending to be women, women pretending to be men, children pretending to be adults, adults pretending to be children, and all sorts of combinations I guess I just never considered the possibility that they were in MY life.

Interesting concept and one I hadn’t really thought too much about before. Now it does make me question my innate gullibility of taking everyone at face value until proven otherwise. I doubt this will really change anything about how I interact with others because I can’t see myself being that way but it will most likely make me quicker to question the odd faster in the future.