Moriartians Unite!

-


I've lived in Moriarty now for ten years. I've loved it since the beginning. It's a redneck town...farmers and ranchers who work hard to make a living. People hold the door open for each other at the post office. Drivers wave as they pass. 

It's also a two-truckstop town and a short commute to Albuquerque, sitting on Rt 66, which is 100 years old this year. 

There are quite a few history-filled museums and two city parks with lots of trees. It's good energy all over the place.

I was here for about three years when COVID hit...living with my pets... no car. I felt isolated and depressed. I turned to social media, Facebook primarily. 

At first, I used it like I used to a daily journal -- I whined about my life and shared waaaaaay too much personal information. I fought with family online. I reached out to total strangers -- people who weren't really real to me, just online entities floating around out there -- for friendship, sometimes resulting in scams. Some people I met were looking for "romance".  I wasn't. 

I made a mess of my social media experience but I learned from it, too. I vowed to continue using it but in positive ways. After all, I also met people who were to become dear friends after years of interaction online. 

At this time, too, I grew anxious and began having panic attacks. Then my blood pressure shot through the roof and I was in the hospital a couple of times for possible stroke. The anxiety only made my BP worse. 

I've been on meds for both conditions for a bit, and they are working well. I walk every day and changed my diet. I find I can concentrate better, hence this first post on my new project, Moriartians Unite! (Moriarty Martians)

My goal for the blog is threefold:

1. Encourage kindness 

2. Use social media to build a stronger sense of community statewide 

3. Help our young people and each other learn effective ways to find calm in an anxious world 

That's it for now. I hope you like what I'm saying. I hope I makes sense. Kind, constructive comments welcome. Until next time 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"You are", "you're", "your"..."ur"?

-
Image
You might think that someone like me, an educator with a degree in English, would be preaching correct grammar and spelling, holding onto traditional ways of expressing ourselves in the written word.  Lately I've been bitching about the misused apostrophe in the word "it's".  I'm not insisting, however, that we relearn it all and do things traditionally; I'm saying let's move with the times and make new rules that reflect change. Might be easier that way.  After all, once upon a time, contractions were not allowed to be used in academic writing. You could not smoosh two words together to make one, even though we did that when we spoke. That changed quickly. It was impractical not to.  We're looking at the same thing as we progress to an even more technical age. Ideas are more important than spelling. Conciseness is valued.  Most importantly, no one can spell anymore. I mean, why the hell do we continue to spell it "though", "enough"...
Read more

Spring shouldn't be known for standardized testing

-
Image
I'm sitting at my desk, looking out the glass sliding doors at an incredibly beautiful Spring morning. Yes, my allergies are killing me but right now, at this moment, I don't care. They won't really be bad until I step outside. Unable to pull my millions of fragmented thoughts together to create a cohesive blog, yet feeling the need to write, I started my morning by looking at other blogs and checking out some websites. I took a look at my hometown school district's site and noticed (it was hard to miss) that the kids there are taking the PARCC for the next two weeks, starting today. My sympathies and prayers are with the students, teachers, and parents as they endure this unnecessary ordeal. I know that it is a hard thing to do, but I really really hope that someone --ideally more than one person -- will simply not show up to take the test . I hope that parents will opt out their kids in the hundreds. I hope that at least one teacher. like this one in Tulsa , ...
Read more

The apostrophe... punctuation without a purpose

-
Image
You would think that with my background and education, I would be a stickler for correct grammar and punctuation. Quite the opposite. I studied the English language and its history for my BA, and I have come to realize over the years that language changes and we need to stop holding on to what doesn't serve us anymore. Punctuation for example. Let's start with the apostrophe. There are actually two reasons we use apostrophes. The first is to take the place of a missing letter or letters. Contractions are a good example.  When we smoosh two words together to make one word, or when we shorten a single word, a letter or two are dropped and the apostrophe takes their place. "Do not" becomes "don't", "cannot" becomes "can't", and "we are" becomes "we're." Sometimes we drop the last letter of a word to make its tone more casual. "I'm just thinkin'," again, a missing letter. Another u...
Read more