Double-goer

So, much to the horror and chagrin of a dear friend and colleague who will cosplay at the drop of baldric, I am a bit of an Ebeneezer Boo-ooge when it comes to Halloween. I don't relish costume parties much*, don't do scary movies much, and haven't even mentioned Halloween much on the blog (go search).  In fact, as I was typing this, the doorbell rang and I ignored it because we don't have any candy in the house. Seriously: I could hear crabby children's voices through the open window.

At any rate, I have to mark the occasion of this particular Halloween because I was witness to - nay, party to, at least in a way - perhaps the greatest instance of an in-office costume I have ever encountered.

I am noted for my monochromatic wardrobe palette - generally all black, with perhaps a splash of color in the tie. I also commonly wear a hat - sometimes a porkpie, generally a beret. The wardrobe choice is just what I do to limit the number of decisons I need to make each day. The hat is to keep my bald head warm.

So today, this happened:

That's me on the right, of course. The taller, fitter doppelganger is a colleague from the building who had apparently been hatching this scheme for some time. He actually shaved his full beard to match mine as well as graying it from its natural dark brown; he found matching eyeglasses on the Internet; and of course he has the beret as well as the black shirt and jeans.

But the piece de resistance of his Walaka cosplay was this:

The sneaky so-and-so surreptitiously took pictures of me during meetings so he could even copy my tattoos!

On the one hand, I am flattered; on the other, I wonder if I should set up a secret code word with my assistant so she'll know it's really me.

All in all, in was a fun day around campus. The aforementioned pro-cosplayer came as a picture-perfect new Dr. Who, there was a gang of Pink Ladies in the business office and the entire Riverdale bunch in Registration. Our budget analyst was Medusa and my assistant was Abby from NCIS.

I wore black.

*Shortly after coming to Bellingham, I was invited to The Halloween Party hosted by my costume-crazy colleague. I was told the bar was high for costumes. I asked whether, if we fell short, we would be openly mocked; I was told no, just silently judged.

Shouting down a well

So, I deleted my Facebook account the other day - not deactivated, suspended, or whatever but full-on deleted. It take thirty days to take effect, and if I log in it gets canceled (not a problem of that happening), but soon that facet of my social media identity will be no more. Good riddance to bad toxicity.

I am still active on Twitter. I think I have a decently curated feed that keeps me informed through links to important news stories and offers some decent analysis. I was looking at my profile the other day, and it said that I had all of 79 followers, so clearly I am much more a consumer of tweets than a provider.

I thought about what it would take to become a real Twitter celebrity with thousands of followers - how much to tweet, what to tweet so that you get retweeted - there must be a strategy - and then I asked myself why would you want to be a Twitter celebrity? I didn't have a good answer right away, and still don't. I think there's something about needing that affirmation if you're going to participate at all - I mean, why be one of the crowd when you can be one of the stars? But I don't think I really want to be a star, either.

About that same time, something on Titter caught my eye and I wanted to bring it to an internet buddy's attention, but I couldn't find him - no Twitter profile, no LinkedIn, his blogs shuttered. Another pal tipped me to his activity on GoodReads, so I went there and logged in (turns out I have had an account since 2012) just so I could message him. Looking at my newly-reactivated account I realized that it appeared as though I had been on the site for six years and had read only two books. That wouldn't do, so I spent about an hour culling through my old blog posts, marking off books I had read and linking to the reviews I had written until I had a decent library listed.

Who was I doing that for? No one on GoodReads was going to go looking for my account to judge me, at least no one I knew or cared about. But there was something compelling about the very context of the site - why be there at all if you weren't posting about books you have read?

Why be on Facebook if you aren't going to get likes?

Why be on Twitter if you aren't going to have followers?

For that matter, why write a blog post when your pageviews per day rarely break double digits?

I'm not sure I have the answer, but when I was going through old blog posts to find those book reviews, I realized something: I did a lot of writing back when were all blogging regularly, and some of it was pretty darn good - from the readers' perspective, that is. From the writer's perspective, all of it was worthwhile, at least for the exercise in composition.

So maybe I'll give up the social media sites completely and stick with a blog aggregator for my news - with just BBC and Al Jazeera English, I'm halfway there.

And maybe I'll keep writing this blog, even if I am shouting down a well.