This morning I realized that I had only ‘deactivated’ my personal Facebook account, not deleted it. When I was deactivating it, I was asked, a bit threateningly I felt, “are you sure?” and below that were photos of people who would miss me if I wasn’t on Facebook – my son and my sister. I guess my son and my sister will have to find other ways to not miss me – such as have dinner with me or wash my hair for me! Sounds like fun. Anyway, that’s done. I received an email saying “Account Scheduled for Deletion” – it waits on death row. I can, however, grant it a pardon within the next fourteen days. I won’t. It deserves to die.

I do have a professional FB page however. I am a writer, and FB is useful to me as a tool for letting those interested know what’s new in my writing life, and for putting my work out there, and as a way for people to contact me. For these purposes, I am willing and happy to have and use all and any tools available, on and off the internet. So now, I have a website, a professional Facebook page, a blog that I regularly update, and both my books available for download on Kindle to whatever device you might own or want to read on – the Kindle itself, Mac, pc, blackberry, iphone, ipad… really, whatever. After all this, since the day my books went live on Amazon, I have sold less than $40.00 worth of books. Yes, forty dollars. So I just wonder if it’s worth it. It’s always worth it to write – I love to write, it’s who I am. But is it worth it to try so hard to get it all out there? Maybe some day it will be. But not yet.

It’s Breast Cancer Awareness month. So I made this pink button for Facebook, since they did not. Be aware, all you women, and all you men with moms, partners, friends, sisters and daughters out there. Be nice to breasts and breast owners, and contribute to the fight against breast cancer.

For those of you who are in Tallahassee ~ a fun way to help:   http://www.tmh.org/lucaevents

I was at the beach with a dear friend who is one of those modern, connected people who keeps his friends and family in touch with his every hour. As I sat in a tired heap on a beach chair after a dose of sun and deliciously warm gulf water, a pod of dolphins rolled by us, displaying their fins and re-energizing us all. I saw a black skimmer slice the water looking for food.

I am in a writing slump – this is not writer’s block really, more of writer’s  laze. I thought a day at the beach would bring me back to my senses, and it did. There is something about the ocean that is both validating and terrifying at the same time – and maybe they are one and the same thing – the simplicity and smallness of being human. We who live on or near the gulf don’t take it for granted anymore, if we ever did. So there is an added pathos to that beauty. I am constantly aware that it is not so large or robust an environment that an act of human greed could not damage it irreparably. I pay greater attention to every little thing, I treat each beach day as if it might be my last.

I returned home and told a neighbor excitedly that we saw dolphins. “I know”, she says, I read it on such and so’s face book page” (she means the friend who was with me at the beach). I am disappointed. I have no beef with the people who transmit their lives to their friends and family, it is a form of communication for them, and they are welcome to it. But I would like the choice to communicate my life in the way I want. I don’t know the solution to this – I am not disturbed by it enough to designate myself a Facebook Free zone, but I do wonder if it isn’t a kind of invasion of my privacy. I mean, there may be people to whom I want to describe my experience myself, and there may be some I don’t want to know that I was even at the beach instead of home trying to meet my deadline.

For those of you who might wonder what a skimmer is – here is a photo. Black Skimmer, Rynchops niger. The skimmer is one of the oddest birds I have ever seen, and one of the most elegant too.

Black Skimmer