Asking for what you want

I just saw the best customer service prank ever. You can complain about the expense, what the money should have been used for instead and all kinds of things, but really, this just made a whole bunch of people happy. Take a look.



What it drove home to me was this: Ask for what you really want. You never know who might be listening. There is rarely any harm in asking and I think the world could use a little more honesty, including honesty about our own hopes and dreams. If we don't dream big, ask big, hope big, what can we expect to find, have, accomplish? If we're too afraid to tell anyone what we want, will we even tell ourselves?

All that being said, what do you really want for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/Solstice/etc? I'd love to know.

(c)2013 Laura S. Packer

When social media becomes real

I don't know about you, but I'm connected to thousands of people via social media. Between Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr and other social networks, I have the opportunity to interact with countless people every day. I will never meet the vast majority, but I enjoy the glimpses they give me into their lives and equally enjoy opening up selected pieces of my own life for viewing. I relish the mediated experience and interaction. It's just enough for a Meyers-Briggs introvert like me.

This is all well and good most of the time. Sometimes it loses the comfortable gloss of the virtual and becomes starkly real. Sometimes I am forced to remember that behind each tweet, each status update, each pin, there is a real person with a real life and real feelings. Like now.

I have a Facebook friend, one among many, whom I have never met. This is common for me, I use Facebook as a way to connect with other storytellers and writers. This Facebook friend posts a lot and often content I don't want to read - really personal stuff, rather than the story and performance related content I look forward to from him. For that reason, I didn't connect with him on Twitter. So it was through a common Facebook friend that I found out he'd gone missing.

Two days ago he posted the following string of tweets:

• Thanks for the memories, folks; it's been real ... something. G'night ... goodbye.
• There ... now we wait ...
• I do wish I could've seen the ocean #1lasttime.

He's posted nothing since. His friends have started Facebook and Twitter campaigns, urging him to check in, urging anyone who may have seen him to contact the police. They are worried. We all are.

And yet... and yet. I have never touched or seen him, but my heart twists with concern. Here I am, worried about someone I have never met. Checking for status updates or tweets, hoping he will let us know he is alive. I do not know this man personally. I have never met him or heard his voice. And yet. Because we are connected through this tenuous medium, through the aether of the internet, he is real to me. I hope he is well. I hope he has found help. I hope he has found hope.

And this is the case for so many of us. Those of you who read this blog and have never met me care enough to read what I write. Those of you who have contacted me are real people, though we may never embrace, may see each other smile.

For all that pundits bemoan the disconnection created by our love affair with the screen (for all that I have wondered who we will be in a generation, if more and more of our communication is mediated) the connections we create are real. And that is a testament to the enduring power of the human heart, our yearning to know we are not alone in the darkness, our need to hear another voice - even if we hear it in pixels - that says, "I feel this way, too. I love these things, too. In the midst of the aether, through millions of electrons racing through cable and across oceans, we are connected."

Jay, if you're out there, we are here. You are not alone. You are loved. Come home.

(c)2012 Laura S. Packer

Mailbox wonder prize

I don't know about you, but whenever I get something in the mail other than a bill, junk or an expected package, it feels like I've won a prize. My day has a little more surprise and wonder to it as I read a postcard, open a note or sit down to savor a letter. But we don't write letters anymore, we rely on email or text messages or voice mail.These are all very efficient, but they are transitory, moments in time that rely on pixels and electricity to exist.

I recently stumbled across a challenge, put forth by Mary Robinette Kowal, to write a letter every day for the month of February. And I thought, yes!

Ms. Kowal says, "When I write (letters) back, I find that I slow down and write differently than I do with an email. Email is all about the now. Letters are different, because whatever I write needs to be something that will be relevant a week later to the person to whom I am writing. In some ways it forces me to think about time more because postal mail is slower. 'By the time you get this…' It is relaxing. It is intimate. It is both lasting and ephemeral." She's right. Letters are far more intimate.

She then offers this challenge:


1. In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs.  Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.
2. Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

I'm in. If you'd like to receive something in the mail from me, email me your address. I'd love to write to you. You might get a letter, a card, a hand-made postcard, a leaf, a swatch of fabric I thought was beautiful, a marble or something else entirely. Give it a shot, your own mailbox wonder prize awaits.


(And, for the person who never received the last thing I sent, I promise to mail everything from the post office, not relying on the local letterbox.)


(c)2012 Laura S. Packer

Flash mob in South Africa

By now you've seen some YouTube video of a flash mode, heard about one on the news or even participated in one. They are a lot of fun, an opportunity for play we sorely need in our busy lives.

Most flash mobs make me smile. This one made me smile and brought tears to my eyes. It's a lovely singing moment in a mall. In South Africa. With black people, white people, all kinds of people, singing and marveling together. This wouldn't have happened 20 years ago (20 years ago I was fasting to help convince my university to divest from South Africa). Ten years ago I don't know if there would have been only wonder on these faces.

Music is powerful. In this context it becomes more. Let us all sing and wonder together.



(c)2011 Laura S. Packer