Writing prompt

Why befriend me?

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My friend asked this question on her Facebook feed and I thought it was a great one to muse about: “What would be 5-10 things you would tell prospective friends about why they’d want to befriend you?”

I’ve decided to do 6 of them—3 about why they’d want to friend me in real life and 3 about why they’d want to friend me on social media.

In real life

  1. Keeping my word—to you and to myself—is important to me.
     

  2. “Being there”—in whatever way that manifests—is important to me.
     

  3. You might have a laugh or two—or just a good time—hanging out with me.

On Facebook

  1. About 90-95% of my Facebook posts contain original content.
     

  2. I don’t allow any political discourse on my timeline. In the very few instances that I post something political, I remind people of the warning in my “Intro” section: “I delete all comments (positive or negative) on my political posts. If you have something to say about it, copy it to your own timeline and say it there.” And then I follow through with that.
     

  3. It doesn’t happen regularly, but it has happened more than once, that I get this kind of feedback from a friend, “I just wanted to say I enjoy the things you post on FaceBook. Most of the stuff on social media is just awful, but you create and share interesting things.”

What are some reasons why people would want to befriend you?

Prompt: Perfectly clear

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Writing prompt: Start with “It’s all perfectly clear now.”

It’s all perfectly clear now that I will have a successful career. With a 41-year career behind me, even if things go south in my remaining 8 months of working, that won’t change.

It’s all perfectly clear now that I will be “lucky in love.” I’ve been married to two smart, ambitious, self-sufficient, loving, companionable, honorable, and easy-to-love people. In each case, we’ve had shared values around work, religion, and finances. During my time here, I’ve been lucky to find not one, but two, people who were emotionally, physically, and financially healthy. And I’m grateful.

It’s all perfectly clear now how I’ll handle the deaths of my parents. It’s a great source of comfort to know that they had a good life, that the end was quick and peaceful for both of them, that I stepped up to the plate when I was needed, and that I won’t spend my entire old age tending to theirs.

What’s perfectly clear to you now?

Prompt: Strangest habit

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Writing prompt: What is your strangest habit?

I’ve written about this before—it’s probably making an entry on my Google calendar when I change my razor blades. (A quick search shows that I’m probably not even halfway through this one’s life.)

Thinking back on why I started doing this, it was once when I noticed how often other guys seem to change theirs and thought, “I wonder how often I change mine. I know it’s not nearly as often.” So I made an entry in my calendar the next time I did.

In what I was going to call a non sequitur, but is actually tangential, since razors are naturally associated with shaving, I can’t think of shaving without still being flummoxed about this incident 45 years ago:

I’m in a suite in the college dorm, in a bathroom shared among four rooms, and I’ve just lathered up my face to shave. One of the suite residents walks in, looks at me, and says with a critical tone, “That looks like something a cat licked on.”

What’s your strangest habit?

Prompt: Unrequited love

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Writing prompt: How do you feel when you love someone who does not love you back?

From reacting this way in high school:

“Let me play this 45 over and over and over and wallow in it: ♬ ‘I can’t live, if living is without you. I can’t live, I can’t give any more.'” ♩

To saying to myself now:

“Pick up the shattered pieces of your life and move on. Their loss.“

5 30-minute talks without notes

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These are 5 things I could talk about for 30 minutes without notes:

1) Scoring bowling manually.

This one is also on my list of “3 knowledge domains that I have that are now useless.

2) What it’s like being retired even though I’m not.

I was retired for a little over a year 7 years ago, so I have stories about all the things I didn’t get done on my retirement “to-do” list.

3) Implicit affirmations.

I like looking for these, like this one: When someone walked by me without my seeing them but still said, “Hello, John.” It would’ve been easier for them to just slip by without a greeting, but they made the effort in spite of that, so I must be important to them.

4) Writing 3 50-word stories every day for a year.

Since I actually did this in 2021, I could talk for hours about the process of writing them, the engagement with readers about them, and the sense of accomplishment of keeping your word for 365 days.

5) Having a total knee replacement.

It’d be tempting to make this a rosy 30 minutes, but the actual tl;dr is: it hurt way more, and took way longer to recover from, than I wanted it to. But 3 months post-op, I can now say sincerely that it was worth it.

Thanks for reading. What are some of yours?