Month: August 2016

Donald Duck is my spirit animal

Donald Mug
My new Donald Duck mug. Waak!

I took one of those stupid online quizzes and was told my spirit animal was the deer: “When you have the deer as spirit animal, you are highly sensitive and have a strong intuition. By affinity with this animal, you have the power to deal with challenges with grace. You master the art of being both determined and gentle in your approach. The deer totem wisdom imparts those with a special connection with this animal with the ability to be vigilant, move quickly, and trust their instincts to get out the trickiest situations.”

Balderdash. I’ve long known that Donald Duck was my spirit animal, because of his ability to continually get in his own way and fly off the handle. Yet for some reason other ducks trust and accept him. He’s the guardian of three young triplets and Daisy Duck, who is undeniably hot even though her fashion sense is rather outdated, can’t get enough of him.

My long time friend and colleague Carol Worthington Levy knows all this, and occasionally delights me with a piece of Donaldana like the mug she just sent for my birthday. Each time I sip from it I will rage at the stupidity of the world and think about how things would be better if people would just let me fix it. If your name is Donald, or if Donald is your spirit animal, that’s what you do.

You can’t hide in social media

Over the last few months I’ve been involved in two situations which could not have happened before the advent of social media. A friendly acquaintance had made a commitment (in one case to do something, in the other to look into it) and I emailed at the appropriate time to remind them about it. There was no response. I then took to other means—Facebook messaging in one instance, Facebook plus LinkedIn in the other—with the same reminder in case their email wasn’t working or I ended up in their spam folder. Still nothing.

At this point, you have to assume that the other party is receiving my messages and for whatever reason is ignoring them. Presumably they’re no longer able to meet the commitment, but why can’t they just come out and say that? It’s not that big a deal. I’m a bit inconvenienced, but not to the point of being harmed or angry about it. We can still be friends. I should also say there’s zero possibility I have done anything, directly or indirectly, that would make either of them not want to continue a relationship with me.

Now, the lack of follow through has led to a social media radio silence. I know these folks are okay because they continue to post on Facebook about the usual stuff. I’ve rattled the cage by liking or commenting on a couple of their posts. In the normal course of events we would have had a bit of back and forth on one topic or another. But, possibly because they’re embarrassed, these two people are unable to engage with me in any way.

I will add that one of these folks is a copywriting colleague who moved out of state so it’s unlikely anything will happen to resolve the issue. But the other is someone I regularly see at local events. It’s inevitable I will run into her sooner or later at which point I expect I will ask her about it face to face and she will give me an answer and an apology for not responding sooner. But why can’t she do that online?

Has anything like this happened to you? Of course it has. What do you do about it? I’m interested because it’s a social phenomenon that could not have existed in an era when letters got lost in the mail or voicemails got erased by mistake. Now that we have no place to hide, is there a way to make ourselves selectively invisible? If not, should we even try?