Trina Machacek: Speaking of nuts

Over the Christmas season — I know, no more about Christmas — I’ll be quick. Hey, I can be quick! Over Christmas produce departments sell mixed nuts, in their shells. I don’t buy them, but my grandparents did. There was always a nut bowl with nut cracker and picks set out and nuts were there for the taking. I wonder why?

Seems it would be so much easier to pop the top off of a can of nuts and eat them as fast as you can. Hearing that ffffrrrreeeesssshhh surge. Smelling the goodness of nuts! Salt! Fat! Of course, there are those among us who will pick out their favorite nut (uh, salted pecans, but don’t tell anyone), leaving nothing but the peanuts and those hard little nut nibs that fall off peanuts when two halves are separated. But, yes, a nutty “but” cracks in here…

But I wrote once about the correlation between each finger and the people around us. You know, the little finger, the delicate flower we all know. Prim, proper and can’t do anything without help. Ring finger people have a need to always have some bling upon themselves. The bird finger — well, self-explanatory! Suffice to say, they are the center of attention.

Pointer fingers are sometimes covered with a foam number one. Your number ones are the guys you go to, to pick you up. I’m not getting into why it’s “picked” as number one. (Think about it!) That leaves the thumb. Your thumb easily reaches all your other fingers and will happily vote with you, aka a thumbs-up. Or against something with a thumbs-down. All held together by the palm. Close your fingers into your palm and you find that all your fingers will nicely come together — just like people do when you send up a flare in life and need help. But what, for crying out loud does all that have to do with nuts?

Nothing really. Ha, ha, I am just trying to get to a place where I can talk about Facebook friends. I am fairly new to Facebook and I am trying to grow my list of friends. In doing this, I have been friending friends and requesting friends of friends to be friends. Like that bowl of mixed nuts, I am finding there are several different kinds of people in my bowl of life. I’m amazed at the number of great responses I’ve gotten from new friends who have reacted to my posts. Very interesting, heartwarming and several other adjectives, for sure. I’m also happily surprised by younger people who have joined my bandwagon and friended me. Not to mention that several of my new young friends first asked me who I was, what I wanted and why I was knocking at their Facebook door. That’s very savvy from where I sit. I want to know the people I ask to friend me so I do some recon before I send a request and I am more than glad to answer when someone asks me to explain myself.

Now that I’m trying to expand my writing career, I am seeking out ways to do that from my little corner of the world. I’m finding that the fear of the electronic world is, of course, real and I do not take my responsibility lightly. I am, however, enjoying learning the ways of Facebook. Did you know, for example, that you can poke somebody and they can poke you back? Not only that but they can poke, poke, poke you until the cows come home! Now just where else can you get that kind of action while sitting around in your living room watching reruns? I wasn’t sure what a poke meant, so I Googled it. Of course, there have been several things I’ve had to Google to learn. Like how to unfriend, unfollow, un-messenger, un-post… I found in my unlearning that there is a lot of undoing to do until you learn to do things that you don’t need to undo.

Like that bowl of nuts. You have to dig to find what you want to keep and learn to pick out and squirrel away the stuff you find is just not to your liking. Oh, liking. I’ve hit thumbs up and liked a lot of things in my short Facebook life. I have noticed, though, that there isn’t a thumbs-down icon available. I finally figured out why. You don’t need to thumb down things. You just unlike them. So simple even this writer can do it or undo it!

In keeping life friendly, send me a friend request and friendily request your friends to friend me.

Trina lives in Eureka, Nev. Find her on Facebook or share with her at itybytrina@yahoo.com. Really!