Curry no one’s favor.  Suck up to no one.

Stand or fall on your own merit.

Name drop no one.  If you’re not worthy on your own, you won’t be worthy on someone’s shoulders.

Be you at all times.  This will not always be easy: relearn.

Not everyone will like you.  Deal with it.  It’s better to like yourself, than to be liked and hate yourself.

Keep writing.  Stay in the flow.  The more you write, the more you have to draw from.

This is your life.  You can’t guarantee that you’ll get another.  This is most likely it.

Do not suffer regrets.  Be the most amazing you that you can be.

Get rid of fear.  Just drop it.  Do it.  A little bit keeps you from walking off the edge.  Keep a little bit, but only a little.  Don’t let it control you, because knows exactly how to do just that.

Do the best you can at what you do and let the judgers judge because that’s what they’re going to do anyway.

Excel, and know that you can kick ass when you set your mind to it.  And excel at all things.

Detach yourself from The Bastard Machine*.  Be you.  Be proud to be you.  And most importantly, EVOLVE.  You have not even begun to reach your potential.

Not even. ♥

(* Not a reference to Tim Goodman.  At the time I was thinking of those forces in our life that convince us to keep our head down, our mouths shut, and our hopes caged.)

                        

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And yet, I am walking in the street alongside the curb because this city has apparently given up on the idea of sidewalks.

If I should happen to get struck, though, you should be able to find a photo of it on Twitpic within a few minutes. Ah, technology!

It’s worrisome how looked-down-upon walking is becoming in the States. I’ve actually overheard someone say that they never notice someone outside unless they’re in their car. What a sad thought! Being a pedestrian is really a statement of independence, but for Americans, it seems increasingly interpreted as “I can’t drive”, or “I can’t afford a car”, or “My car is broken”, or “I’ve had my license suspended”. Never “Wow, that’s healthy!”, or “Sure beats high gas prices!”. You certainly see a lot of things that you would normally miss, driving past at 55 miles per hour.

Unless you have your face stuck in a cell phone.

Oops.

                        

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We don’t like to hear the word “vampire” around here; we’re trying to improve our public image. Building a kindly, avuncular, benevolent image; “interdependence” is the keyword — “enlightened interdependence”.  Life in all its rich variety, take a little, leave a little. However, by the inexorable logistics of the vampiric process they always take more than they leave — and why, indeed, should they take any?

Avoid fuck-ups. Fools, I call them. You all know the type — no matter how good it sounds, everything they have anything to do with turns into a disaster. Trouble for themselves and everyone connected with them. A fool is bad news, and it rubs off — don’t let it rub off on you.

Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, “I am not paid to listen to this drivel — you are a terminal fool!” Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.

- William S. Burroughs, from “Words of Advice”

(I can’t believe I typed the name in as “Bukowski” originally. I knew it was Burroughs, and had the recording of this when I was a teenager. Thanks to WSB for pointing it out.)

                        

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As I look back on three years as a virtual being, and what appealed to me the most about Second Life – the promise of greater self-discovery – I realize that I know about as much about myself as I did when I signed up in December of 2007.  I could interpret this as validation that I have been true to myself all along.  Either that, or I could interpret it to mean that I’ve spent most of my life hiding behind a mask.

Those who have known me for any period of time know that I spend most of my Second Life in the form of a rabbit.  While I make no secret about the fact that I am a “furry” – and I will be more than happy to answer questions or challenge preconceived notions of exactly what that means – my form is truly a metaphor of the one who dwells behind the face … and the whiskers, and the ears.  Unlike many SL furs, I enjoy being a human in Second Life as well.  I don’t know that I would feel complete being just one or the other, nor do I feel compelled to choose.  I will often pick one or the other based on where I am, or what I am doing, or with whom – although I am more likely to feel comfortable being “Marxibun” around other humans than I am being human around other furs.  Confronting this fact as I write it out leaves me feeling rather unsettled, actually.  I love my human aspect.  Why be self-conscious about being human in a furry environment?  Am I being discriminatory?  Projecting my own insecurities on others?  If I’m the same person inside, should it matter?  And if someone judges me based on fur – or lack thereof – should I be overly concerned about their opinion?

While growing up, my mother was my greatest influence – a strong woman with a passion for fairness, justice and compassion.  She helped define the liberal values that I cling to tenaciously.  After my father died, my mother married a dyed-in-the-wool Texan and her worldview took a hard right-turn.  Before too long, the views that I embraced were now under constant withering attack by the very parent who had instilled them in me.  The change was – and still is – quite a shock to me.  The night before I created my Second Life account, there was a particularly unpleasant confrontation between me and my mother over my continued opposition to the War in Iraq.  Near the end of our conversation, she declared that I was “a godless Marxist Communist who needs to get on [my] knees and pray to God for forgiveness”.  (Did I happen to mention that my mother had moved to a remote area of Texas and relied on Fox News as her window to the outside world?  Yeah, that.)

So, click forward one day ahead, and I am being pressed by an online friend of mine from Norway to sign up for Second Life.  After dismissing it as something I had already tried earlier that same year and found to be boring, I was asked to give it another chance.  Unable to remember the password for the first account I had created, I made a new one.  With the previous evening’s argument with my mom still fresh in my mind, I snarkily typed in “Marx” – figuring that this foray into Second Life would be as short-lived as the first one, so it really didn’t matter what name I picked.  (I chose Dudek simply because of how it sounded, because it was similar to “Brubeck”, who is one of my favorite jazz musicians.  I later discovered that it means “twenty” in Esperanto.)  Knowing now what I didn’t know then, would I choose a different name?  Not on your life.  I love it.

Remembering my first year, I am equally horrified … and proud.  I began my virtual life as the biggest tomboy you could imagine!  I sported short-cropped hair, an awkward body shape, and an almost militant opposition to makeup.  I was also quite stridently an intergendered avatar.  My SL look, and body, and mannerisms reflected a longstanding ambivalence toward gender roles – one which followed me from my real life into my virtual one.  In Second Life, however, the body I had chosen for myself often left me feeling awkward – particularly at those moments when I disrobed in front of others.  (I am not particularly fond of the word “hermaphrodite”, but in the interest of being easily understood, that’s what I was for the first eight months of my Second Life.)

It was during this time that I met the person who has become my partner, my equal, my mate and the habit I have no intention of breaking.  She never showed any intention of wanting to change me – she loved me as I was, without hesitation, condition or exception.  When I decided to place my virtual self clearly on one side of the Gender Divide, she neither criticized nor celebrated.  She continued to do what she had done from almost the moment that we first met.

She accepted me.

Do I regret my decision?  That is a difficult question.  Expectations of gender can present a burden, especially when you don’t feel as though you belong to one or the other – or worse, when you feel the Battle of the Sexes raging within your own body on a daily basis.  Living a gender-neutral life does afford a certain freedom that is lacking in society’s feminine/masculine roles.  It does put a strain on me – as Marx – sometimes – but why should it?

That’s a very good question.

(To be continued.)

                        

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Two months ago, I spent L$50,000 – yes, about 200 US dollars – to have Damien Fate design a custom furry avatar for me.  To be fair, I paid for it with proceeds from my shop.  Still, earned inworld or not, that’s a substantial sum of money.

Tradition has it that someone once asked Martin Luther what he would do if he knew the world was going to end tomorrow, and he replied by saying, “I would plant a tree today.”  In the midst of all of the hand-wringing over the uncertainty of Second Life’s future, we act as though the end is a fait accompli.  Yes, it feels like the end is nigh – but how much of that is our own baseless speculation, and how much of that is fact?  What we know is “not much”.  Even attempting to piece together what information we do know – as Avril Korman has been doing with her fascinating “Tinfoil Hat Theory” series – is still speculation.

And no amount of speculation will change what will come to pass.

I don’t know that our virtual world will end tomorrow.  It might.  Still, I’ve planted my tree.

I plan to continue to live in Second Life – and love, and grow, and discover.  I plan to do it as though tomorrow is a certainty.  I plan to do it as though tomorrow will never come.

As much as I complain about it, Second Life retains a considerable amount of “shiny” for me.  And I look forward to new shinies.

                        

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Of course, Second Life is by no means a homogenous culture.  However, there are rites of passage, rituals, and experiences which are common to all of us that are to any other culture – real or virtual.  There are those things that, regardless of our language or our surroundings, we all eventually learn to accept as norms of our shared experience.  Assimilating into Second Life is, admittedly, not easy – and insisting that it can be or should be is, quite simply, an insult to our cultural evolution.  Those who undertake the admittedly sharp learning curve and come out on the other side have completed a rite of passage – an experience common to all of us.  Grasping that Second Life has a genuine micro-economy, and thinking about purchases and sales and earnings in terms of the local L$, rather than mentally translating their value into our local RL currency is another.  Learning that work in SL is, most often, genuine hard work – and that you are about as likely to earn a RL living in Second Life as you are working in a third-world country to pay your bills back home in America, but you should be able to pay your virtual expenses.  Realizing that, no, Second Life is decidedly not an anything goes, clothing-optional environment, despite what a lazy media has been spewing for seven years – but rather one that is generally tolerant of diverse and divergent lifestyles and offers areas in which most of those lifestyles can be experienced, should one choose to do so.  Discovering that you are free to be whatever gender, color or species that you wish to be – and accepting that the right to be a glowing pink raver-leopard does not trump the right of a realistic 1920s-themed-speakeasy club to turn you away at the door.  Distinguishing and respecting the differences between immersionists and augmentationists, and so on.

And understanding that, for whatever reason, the disappearance of a familiar name and face from the grid can and may cause the same feelings of grief that we associate with death.

Of course, this barely scratches the surface.  But it underscores the trepidation that a good many of us feel when we are told that efforts are underway to dumb down our cultural experience, all in the name of population growth.  Second Life is not for everyone, and it’s not even for most people.  And while improving the “first hour experience” is essential, this is achieved most successfully through real person-to-person contact.  Making Second Life iPad-compatible is more likely to be adopted by existing residents than by new ones.  Having someone to meet new residents as they arrive on the orientation sim, determining whether they are new to SL, actually helping them with the basics, answering questions, handing out landmarks and information pertinent to their own interests, and clueing them in on the fact that, yes, they’re going to meet nice people and not-so-nice people, and here are the basic ways in which to respond to problematic residents and griefers.  Identify new people who may have a helping-teaching temperament and groom them for what could easily be an inworld-paid first SL-job as new-resident greeters.  You don’t need to outsource to RL companies, and the results will be so much better when you use someone who is truly excited about our world – not a call-center staffer.

The best ideas are going to come from those of us who live SL every day.  Yes, some are grouchy and will never be satisfied under any circumstances.  But some of us are simply grouchy because we feel our voices aren’t being heard and that our ideas don’t matter.  Existing SL residents could easily be the best advertising the Lab has at its disposal – word-of-mouth has always been the way that most people find our world.  Stop forcing new policies and procedures on us – involve us in them.  This is our world, too – it can’t exist without LL’s server farms and collocation facilities, but it also can’t exist with the wonderful, bright, talented, creative people who make themselves a part of it because they love it.  Without the residents, Second Life is nothing.  Without happy, involved residents who believe they genuinely matter, Second Life will fail – and no web-based client will save it.

                        

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Making things is one of my greatest joys in Second Life.  Sometimes I daydream of winning the lottery, or finding some generous philanthropist with whom I strike up a conversation about virtual worlds.  I give such a winning testimonial about Second Life that I am awarded an endowment, so I can work eight hours a day at stretching my creativity to its limits and creating dozens and dozens of lovely virtual things to brighten the lives of others.

Oh well, I can dream.

This dream has had me thinking a great deal about what is truly important in life.  How many of us labor in the service of a job that we truly love – the kind of job that we would willingly do for free because it is just that fulfilling?  Does SL fill that void for us, let us live the dream of gainful self-employment – or maybe not even necessarily profitability, but something that we love doing?  I know that the things that I do in SL right now – designing T-shirts, making furniture and various knick-knacks – would totally be something that I would love to do in RL.  My little brownstone in Paxson (Zindra) even mirrors the comfortable old building in which I’d love to set up shop, with my own little cozy living space on the top-most floor.

I think about this a lot – perhaps too much – when I’m at work.  I think about designs.  I think about layouts.  I think about patterns and cushions and woodgrains.  For a while, I worried that perhaps this was obsessing over SL.  However, I realize now that my heart is yearning for something as artistically and emotionally satisfying in “real life” as I have in my virtual life.  Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for the job that I have, and a boss who seems to see potential within me.  Still, as I sit and stare at folders, and purchase orders, and spec sheets and legal documentation, I wonder … is this where I’m going to be in five years?  Ten years?  And if so, will I still be feeling the way I’m feeling right now?

Right now, in this economy, it’s not the time for me to rock the boat.  My RL is somewhat burdened with personal debt that I need to get under control.  Capitalism runs on credit, and credit is a cruel and harsh slave-master once you submit to it.  One thing that I’ve found Second Life has done for me is cause me to spend less money.  When I can find similar creature comforts in virtual goods in a micro-economy, there’s less temptation to overspend on real-life things that I really don’t need.  Since I’ve had the shop in Zindra, which has been about a year now, I have not had to deposit a single dollar of my own money into Second Life.  I even have a comfortable little nest egg.  This was the first year that I was able to pay my annual premium membership entirely from in-store sales and still have a substantial balance left over.  Sales have dropped off quite a bit in this past month, but that’s to be expected as we crawl into summer.

When the economy picks up, though, and when I get my personal credit crisis a bit more in control, I’d like to start making some RL versions of some of the items I sell in Second Life.  Actually, I could start selling T-shirts now, through Cafepress or Zazzle – but I’ll need to test-order something first, to make sure I’m comfortable with the quality of the finished product.  I’ve also had one or two Second Life-themed books in mind.  I just wonder, and worry a little, how many years our grid has left in its lifespan.  For all of the talk about constant quarterly increases, I’ve seen a slow-but-steady decline in concurrent users.  They’re down to an average high of 50,000 from 80,000 just a little over a year ago.  Granted, quite a few of those were campbots – but I can’t believe that bots made up around 30,000 users.  Perhaps a third of that, I’d think.  Of course, I could be wrong.

I want to follow my heart in as many aspects of my life – of both lives – as possible.  I’ve let several decades slip by me as I’ve tried to find happiness and fulfillment in relationships, only to come up empty on the other side.  I’ve lurched from job to job, very rarely unemployed but also very rarely overly enthusiastic over the type of work I’ve found myself doing.  While I don’t buy into the myth that success is available to anyone who truly wants it – Capitalism can’t succeed if there are more millionaires than there are laborers – I do believe that you won’t know if you can succeed unless you try.  It’s all a matter of keeping the proper perspective, and knowing that failure is a real possibility – and knowing that, allowing yourself the freedom to fail.  To paraphrase the wonderful Douglas Adams, successful flight involves aiming for the ground … and missing.

                        

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I am starting my blog over.  Again.

The past year and a half in RL was difficult for me.  It left my mind in a very unhappy, unsafe and uncomfortable place – a place from which I am only now truly stepping away from.  I won’t delve into details.  Those who need to know, know.  Those who knew, helped me through it.  Those who helped me through it have earned a very special place in my heart.

And now, I find myself emerging again.  Finding my own limits.  Making my own boundaries.  Deciding what I’m okay with.  Determining to be genuinely true to myself, and to others.  Coming out of my shell – a little at a time, perhaps, but making slow and steady progress.

In SL, I am happily partnered to a very caring, very sincere, very loving individual.  Someone I have had the wonderful good fortune to have flown across the Atlantic to meet in person.  Someone who has become an integral part of my every morning, and an essential part of my weekends.  Someone I cannot imagine having to do without.

In RL, I am now single for 18 months.  Healing.  Hiding.  Surviving.  Deciding whether a life in the company of another is preferable to a life of solitude.  Not particularly rushed to find an answer to the question.

In SL, I am trying to find myself again, to reclaim myself and rediscover the wonder of self-exploration that made Second Life such a wonderful experience to begin with.  Sometimes I wonder if that’s possible.  Part of the magic was the newness of the experience, the ability to immerse myself fully in a world where it seemed anything was possible.   I still want to believe in that.

I realize that baring my soul in a public forum places me at risk of ridicule.  In a world where names and faces can be as real, or as unreal, as the names and faces behind them, our virtual life can be as honest or as dishonest as we will it to be – and indeed, the virtual lives of those around us.  So few of us in Second Life share our RL identity to more than a handful of people – that “hiding in plain sight” often makes a person hyper-sincere.  Sometimes that hyper-sincerity manifests itself in intense malice, mockery or bullying.  A good friend of mine wisely said, “Second Life is not a utopia – it’s not because there are people in it.”  No matter how perfect any locale may be, no matter how far we run away to get there, that part of us which we desperately seek to run away from catches up with us.  Some even bring it with them willingly.  So the glitch that is greater than any server malfunction, greater than any asset crash – is that of simple human nature.  Be it the tendency to share too much, or not to share enough – or to point the finger and laugh at the one caught in a moment of vulnerability, or embarrassment, or anxiety, or shame.  We have seen the enemy, and it is us.

And yet we live in a world where the broadcasting of every minute detail of our lives has become the norm.  The concept of privacy seems almost alien, as Facebook does what the CIA and KGB could only have dreamed of accomplishing – convincing people to hand over not only their papers, but their receipts, their whereabouts, even the key to their diary – all willingly and with a smile.  Our accomplishments and our failures are on display for the world to see.  It seems almost trivial that walking around without clothes is still indecent – we have never been more naked as a society than we are right now.

So, even as I buck against the trend of RL full-disclosure, I seek to share my experiences as a virtual being.  In doing so, I realize I am sharing even more of myself than I would if I were pouring this all into a first-life LiveJournal.  I am rather disappointed that I did not maintain a continued and unbroken written record of my two and a half years of virtuality.  I can, however, try to start now.

Hello.  My name is Marx Dudek.  And, inspiration willing … this is my life.

                        

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