In the 1980’s, during the farming crisis and a time of farm auctions and tight budgets, my father did a risky thing: he decided to pursue his lifelong dream.

Right in the middle of being serious and focused on keeping the farm afloat and off the auction posters that covered the walls of local businesses in much of small-town North Dakota, he decided the time was now or never. He became a private pilot. He, along with a neighbor, eventually took an even greater leap of faith by purchasing a 1964 Cessna 172 airplane. With those two decisions, a green and silver airplane and the view of the family farm from several thousand feet above the ground became entangled with all the other memories I have growing up.

The Neidlinger family farm.

He took us flying in the summer and in the winter. He flew over his crops for a better view, and over the local threshing show to see all the action. He flew to neighboring towns, took photos of farmsteads, and even flew over Grand Forks during the flood in 1997 before a flight restriction was put in place. My memories of the farm are as much the open sky as the grass and the wheat, as much the roar of the propeller as the chugging combine. It didn’t occur to me that flight was at all rare, that other kids weren’t used to the sight of an airplane landing in the back pasture and taxiing up to the gas tank in the yard. The green plane and the blue skies were locked in a dance; there wouldn’t be one without the other.

In 2007, my father experienced some health problems that put his private pilot’s license in jeopardy, and talk of selling the airplane surfaced. This was upsetting to me; it had become embedded in the memory and photograph albums of my family and the community. The familiar green plane with the setting sun glinting off of the aluminum wings on a soft summer evening — how could I say goodbye to that?

The old airplane is very much a part of my family's memory.

I repeatedly explained to a friend how upsetting this was to me, not only that the plane might be gone, but that my father wouldn’t be able to go up in the air and raise a fist to gravity. At the end of my long-winded rant, my friend asked me, quite simply, “why don’t you learn to fly?”

Why not, indeed, which is how I found myself in Bismarck in May of 2008, reading about airfoils and wind shear and carburetors and weather systems. I learned how to read a sectional chart, and use an E6B flight computer, which is, despite its name, less computer and more a circular slide rule. I sat up nights, watching the ground school DVDs and preparing for the FAA written test and memorizing flight maneuvers and panicking because, as my father gently told me when I announced my plans several months prior, “it takes some work to get your private pilot’s license.”

“Yeah, yeah, dad, I got this,” I had said confidently before heading down the road with a destination in the sky.

I am not going to quit, I told myself repeatedly those four and a half months, outlining notes from my text book, diagramming airspace rules, and filling out navigation logs at the library coffee shop. I spent nearly ever moment of non-flying sitting in my car or a chair or a bench at the mall doing some “arm chair flying”, practicing steep turns and stalls and probably looking a bit silly.

Never one much for talking around people I didn’t know, my flight instructor initially found, after several mostly silent and one-word answers during the post-flying lesson debriefings, that my blog was the best source to turn to to find out exactly what I felt had happened during the day. Lessons I described as “fine” to him were revealed as something much else.

As my training went on, the cartoons and blog posts on my web site became a stopping point for several people who worked where I was receiving my flight training, though I wasn’t aware of it initially. My intention was to share it with my distant blog readers, of course, but also my father. I didn’t want him to worry about how things were going, so I tried to find humor in the challenges and self-deprecation in the successes.

On my web site, I compared my landings to a satellite falling from the sky. I illustrated my struggle to handle the sectional and E6B and timer during my first cross country flight as borderline chaos theory. I wrote about nearly taxiing the training plane to Montana from the runway because I mistook my right foot for my left. I wrote about the day I thought I might have heard God greeting me on Mandan’s common traffic advisory frequency (CTAF). This was the only way I could process the simultaneous fear and exhilaration I felt while learning to fly, knowing that I was beating gravity but that it was certainly not down for the count.

“You’re blog is famous at the airport,” my instructor said jokingly, reminding me of the truth that it is easier to write when the audience who reads it is nowhere nearby.

I found this horrifying.

I thought I could keep my private humiliation within acceptable limits. As time went on, however, I was happy that someone could enjoy the humor of me bouncing down the runway and pulling three landings out of what should have been one, repeatedly banging my forehead on the ailerons during preflight, or my absolute inability to remember what the fuel vent was called.

After my first solo flight, the first person I called was my father. After I passed the FAA written test, the first person I called was my father. And, on October 31, 2008, after passing my checkride in Montana and officially becoming a licensed private pilot, the first person I called was…my father. I thought that the license itself might be the pinnacle; it was my goal, certainly, so that should have been that. Story over.

But no.

My father and his pilot friend from back home came to visit on a beautiful summer day and we decided to take the green airplane up for old time’s sake. We flew from Bismarck south along the Missouri River, up past the turbulence to a smoother piece of sky. Sitting in the left seat of that old familiar green and silver plane instead of the right — that was the moment that surpassed the checkride, the solo, the lessons, the tests, the doubts. Coming in for the return landing with my father indicating a bit more throttle to account for passenger weight in the back, perhaps, and me nodding as I pulled on the carburetor heat and put in flaps — that was what I had worked for.

Lacking even the standard six-pack of instruments, it's not everyone's dream airplane. But it's my dream airplane.

The old green and silver airplane sits out on the general aviation ramp here in Bismarck during the summer, and beckons. I do feel sad knowing that I cannot keep the plane since I cannot really afford to fly. There will be a time soon when dad will sell the green plane, and I won’t ride in it again. Life is letting go, whether that is letting go of gravity, or the the machine that helps you do that.

I haven’t accumulated as many flight hours as some private pilots, but I have no regrets in learning to fly. Now, when I talk to my father on the phone, we are able to talk about flying, and I am able to understand. We talk about aviation news, airplane maintenance, and the old green plane. It is no small thing to learn to share a passion as a way to connect, to make that effort to go outside of what you are naturally inclined to do, in order to build a bridge.

As I explained to a friend, there are some who learn to fly because they naturally love flying. I learned to fly because I love my dad. Neither reason is better than the other. They are merely different. The green plane and the sky can still dance.

Video: Landing on the grass “runway” at the farm

Despite providing depth and realism in drawings, chiaroscuro ideally has no place in real life.

Chiaroscuro, that blending of grays from near-white to all-but-black to round out the shapes. It transforms what was flat into something with dimension, showing the shadows and the light.

The shadows are as important as the light.
– Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

Shadows and light, one belonging to the other.

Having personal standards is easily entangled with personal pride, but there are some valid things I desire to do in my life that have standards not based in pride.

Certain levels of integrity, for example, in what I would and would not prefer to be involved in with my abilities and dealings with people. Maybe an idea comes about after reading an article and learning, perhaps, that I need to learn how to say “no” to people and watch less TV and eat better and I immediately agree that this should be so. Or, I think of what I’ve always wanted to do or try or create. But I fail. It’s the desire to say “no” to quicksand projects or to eggshell clients (break easily and cut as they shatter), for example, being exchanged for the desire to pay bills.

You gotta make that exchange.

I’ve often said that the only person who really gets to live by all these wonderful personal white-knight principles is someone with a trust fund. They don’t have to make that exchange, that compromise. How frustrating when empathy is defeated by usurping projects and towering to-do lists and the lurking monsters of Upcoming Bills, the resulting existence being one of apathy, out of sheer self-preservation.

The love of money is the root of all evil.
– 1 Timothy 6:10

While I might not love money quite enough to tip into the blackness of pure evil — I love having a roof over my head more than money —  my weak faith and a culturally-strong guilt-ridden unshakable Midwestern work-ethic means I spend plenty of time in the gray zones.

All of those shades of gray — it’s hard to get back to the clarity and much easier to let things get murkier. How quickly 10 percent gray leads to 20 and 30 percent. Personal dishonesty is brutal, particularly when it means you’re not breaking rules or laws or even doing anything wrong in anyone’s understanding but your own. There’s no explaining your inner anguish. So you murk and muddle about in the gray zone without the ability to explain your discomfort to anyone else, even yourself, and imagine things lighter.

So it is.

Mainly, I try to retain abject honest in dealings with other people. The lines are drawn there, and it is lines only; there is no chiaroscuro.

In the rest of life, I try to come to an understanding with that inner voice telling me I’m a fraud and a failure and a sell-out.

There’s no reasoning with that voice. It often gets loudest in the evening when a day has perched itself on my shoulders too long, or on a Sunday night when the weekend list of to-do didn’t get too done.

Sloppy gray. Is that what got me to this point, or is that where this point is, just for now?

Friends that mean so well are unable to grasp the finer points I’m not able to express, and while they tell me things that are true and useful, I keep thinking that two roads diverged in a black-and-white wood, and I decided to try and take them both. My personal conscience is further stretched the further I go down these paths.

Perhaps this is just the song of a perfectionist that I am imprisoned in.

For those needing it, the best demonstration of chiaroscuro can be found here, about a minute in, ever so briefly.

I started with the whiteboard on my wall, and then moved to my notebook when I ran out of room. The craziness of trying to manage social media finally required a map.

I like maps, but this was getting ridiculous.

All of these social networks have their own audiences, valuable and different, but none of these networks really get along that well. They prefer to be in their own walled garden and while some throw a bone to another and allow authorization and sharing here and there, they do it begrudgingly and with caveats. It’s a messy tangle.

I had to put it on paper to figure out what the best solution was for keeping my personal social media apart from my business social media, maintaining a constant and consistent presence, and not giving up in exasperation.

I drew a diagram.

Can't we all just get along?

This diagram doesn’t even contain how I use an RSS reader to locate the content I want to share on the different social networks, or use as a place to get ideas. That’s a whole other branch off of this debacle. The yellow areas represent the weak link in the chain as far as having to double up efforts. The key to putting it all on paper was so that I could determine the optimal entry point to cover the most ground. Too much redundancy would lead to me letting one network slide.

I’m not keen on Pinterest, especially since it doesn’t fit in anywhere and always requires a specific trip to the site. However, it is hugely important. I rather like the Google+ network (it’s very different from Facebook) and because it is playing into search, I can’t ignore being on it with my business. So far, though, Google isn’t really wanting to play nice, either. I have to use a Chrome extension to avoid some of the double up, sending updates to Twitter. As you can see in my diagram, that doesn’t really fit the chain well for my business; I still have to make two trips with the same content, once for Facebook and once for Google+.

This “chain system” of social networks works poorly for several reasons:

1. The system is hacky. You have to find plug-ins, outside software, setup authorizations, and rig up a complex chain to make it work. It’s easy for it to break if one system throws out a Fail Whale.
2. Complexity breeds mistakes. It’s easy to forget what feeds what, and keeping two identities — personal and business — gets to be tricky. I have to constantly ask myself where a post on one system will ultimately end up. Even with a tool like HootSuite, I find myself staring at a bunch of same-looking columns and it’s easy to slip up.
3. Each system punishes outside usage. Outside attempts, even when officially authorized, aren’t always favored like content put on the network itself. The resulting posts on each network don’t always look right. For example, Twitter to Facebook looks ugly. People want to see pictures, not shortened URL links. No one clicks on those.
4. You have to know your map. If you don’t have a map, you don’t know the optimal place to enter the chain and which ones are outside of the chain.
5. You have to play favorites. With a chain, you still have to pick a favored network. The chain has to end somewhere. It might travel through all the other networks, but you’re still mindful of the ending network and will optimize for that.

My map is relatively simple. I know others who have a much more complex ecosystem of social networks that they are babysitting and trying to maintain. You have to figure out if you’re using a plugin, a feed, or an authorization, and how that will work with the others.

Ideally, there would be a Master Control. It would contain three key ingredients:

1. Your own content. You select which networks it will go to. It doesn’t travel a chain or get diluted. It goes from prime source to end source, all at once.
2. Outside content. Including the RSS feeds and Google Alerts I’ve set up to keep tabs on certain topics would save me a trip to yet another website.
3. Scheduling. That’s why I signed up for HootSuite in the first place — the scheduling. I don’t like the interface, but I wanted the scheduling. I wanted to be sure I didn’t miss a day of #365DaysOfVerizonSucks.
4. Conversation. What’s more difficult than maintaining content on a bunch of social networks? Staying on top of the conversation. You don’t talk to people, it kind of kills your effort. A tool that helps me respond to conversation on top of all the rest of this would be great.

Is there a solution for that Master Control?

Maybe. Stay tuned…

Several thousand years ago (or maybe just five) I was embroiled in all kinds of blog wars. Were you, the innocent blog reader, to fall haplessly into the trenches of the comment sections of these blogs, you’d be certain to become entangled in the barbed wire and wit. In one particular battle — so important and significant that I can’t even remember what it was about — I was referred to as the “Prairie Princess.”

It wasn’t meant in a necessarily pleasant way.

Our Lady Of Blessed Time Wasting, Don’t Fail Me Now

I can’t remember the particulars of what led to that nomenclature which, frankly, leads me to again realize the waste of time those blog comment section wars really were.

“WE’RE NOT LEAVING HERE UNTIL WE DETERMINE HOW MANY ANGELS CAN FIT ON THE HEAD OF THE PIN, AND WHETHER OR NOT A CALVINIST HAS BEEN CHOSEN TO USE A PIN AND IF AN ARMINIAN IS LUCKY BECAUSE THEY CAN CHOOSE WHICH PIN TO USE!!!!”

Stuff like that.

I think someone at some point stressed I ought to be wearing skirts only, to which I’m sure I had several unruly responses.

Q. Which is the best option to waste the maximum amount of time in a given day if both trains left the stations and jumped the shark at the same time?

A. Argue on a Poli-blog or Theo-blog that has unmoderated comments.

Blog comment sections can be gaping black holes which extract the pleasantries right out of a person one Grammar-Police-moment at a time. Sooner or later, with enough participation, you will — YOU WILL — become a Flame Warrior.

(I’m going to stop here and pause a bit, to give you a chance to click on the link and see which Flame Warrior you identify with. Take your time. Trust me, you’re in there.)

By participating in the comments section of political and theological blogs, you can’t help but feed the trolls, since we all become trolls by participating.

I am not joking.

The EULA

After a decade of blogging, my blog EULA (end user license agreement) had grown to rival the final draft of Gone With The Wind and was, itself, oddly full of wind.

While the early blogging years were filled with the wide-eyed belief that free speech meant wide open comments on my blog, a bare minimum of comment moderation, and no editing or deleting of posts once published, it degenerated into something quite different after fending several waves of Theoblog hordes which found me through my own comments and writing on other blogs. For example, my first guest post on an all-male Theoblog was entitled “Are Women Human?”, based on Dorothy L. Sayers short book of the same title.

That was a dumb idea.

My blog EULA manifest destiny began right around then, starting with a section to deal with the concept of “freedom of speech” when I realized some were having difficulty understanding concepts of private property and wondering why there might be constraints on their speech.

“Where is my blog post?” they would demand.

1. This my blog.
2. I pay for website.
3. I make policy.
4. I enforce policy.
5. You welcome to read, to comment.
6. I no like comment, I delete. See #3. Get own blog.
7. Quit crying. Life not fair.

I also broke the freedom of speech concept down in several jurisdictional frames of thought, including accountants, simpletons, people who liked corn, and those who had read Thomas More’s book Utopia. It’s all about being inclusive, you know.

It’s Personal Because It’s Personal

Running a personal blog is tough.

If you write about the things that mean the most to you, you’re a bit vulnerable and inevitably you’ll attract a comments section filled with people telling you to stop taking it personally while they eviscerate your ideas. There is a blog post in existence on the glorious God-blessed Theoweb that discusses a particular post of mine and has about 400 comments, 75 percent of which discuss my single status, my appearance, my level of old-hag bitterness, what my issues are, how to solve my issues, my level of hypocrisy, and why can’t she stop taking this so personally? Ever read a huge paragraph response by “Joe45″ — whom you’ve never met — discussing your mental state in a derogatory manner, later following up with an apologetic email?

“What if we really did love our neighbor as ourself?” — email signature of “Joe45″ who had just finished shredding me publicly on a blog, but later felt guilty and wanted to apologize privately. Who then later repeated the same cycle three more times.

So fabulous.

I shake my head at how long it took to extract myself from that pointless behavior. You want a comments section so your blog doesn’t seem echo-tastic, but oh, what a Catch 22.

Just last week I received an ill-conceived and free-form-spelled response on Americans blowing up their children in the comments section of the Nixon’s Pyramid post. I saved it in my “this guy is an idiot” folder of blog comments and never published it. And a battle still rages, also unpublished, regarding celiac disease, gluten-free living, and those who are insensitive to the plight over on a post featuring a recipe for almond cake. Several of the unpublished individual comments have exceeded the size of a week’s worth of blog posts, and I had to put a stop to it by closing the thread.

With a personal blog, you sometimes have to forcibly take back your comment section whether they want to give it up or not. On the Lone Prairie, silence is a feature, not a detriment.

Free Download

You’ve heard of Flat Stanley? Download Flat Prairie Princess. Take a photo of her doing something (this is a PG blog, keep in mind) and post it on the Lone Prairie Facebook wall.

• Flat Prairie Princess (PDF)

Your profile is not about you.

I about closed my Facebook account for good a few years ago, after choking down another News Feed story from a young woman I knew growing up. She seemed enthralled with portraying her own beauty and perfect life on Facebook, her only status updates being the healthy food she just ate and her procurement of organic tofu and the three hour spin class and the marathon she just ran and photos of such things, and lots of exclamation points. Clearly, she was perfection.

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
– Winston Churchill

There were lots of photos. Of herself. I mean — there were a LOT. It’s that moment when you’re looking at someone’s Facebook page and see they’ve uploaded yet another photo they took of themselves in the mirror and you realize you’re really tired of seeing their bathroom.

Perhaps she just has a really good camera and likes to use it, I thought, trying to be magnanimous. Someone should tell her it works just fine and to give it a break.

The last straw was a photo album of engagement photos. It was one of those modern vanity sessions in which over 50 percent of the photos didn’t even feature the guy but were mostly black and white images of her in different dresses and hair styles, running through a field or looking pensively in the distance or leaning up against a trendy urban brick wall sucking her cheeks in and pouting for the camera. She was in love, that’s true, but that love had nothing to do with her fiancée. He was just there to pay the photographer, probably.

I was embarrassed for her just looking at the photo album in the News Feed. It felt as if she’d bought all the proofs and uploaded every single one instead of just picking one and saying “hey everyone, we’re engaged.” People weren’t saying “congratulations!” as much as they were saying “you look so pretty” and “you look beautiful” and “gosh, look at you” which seemed weird for an engagement announcement.

It wasn’t, of course, an engagement announcement. It was a person trying to build the allure of being the most interesting best fabulous person in the world.

My Facebook profile photo section consists mainly of my artwork, my family, LOL cats, friends, and stuff like A Visit To The Zoo (With Inappropriate Captions), or Things I’ve Picked Up In My Bare Hand. About the last thing I want are photos of me, and even more last last thing ever wanted would be an entire album of me sucking in my cheeks with my head at a three-quarter angle. Gross.

I unfriended her. I didn’t feel that unsubscribing was quite enough of a statement to my own inner “harrumph.” I’d had enough of her attempts to make herself the most Interesting Facebook Profile in the World, and really couldn’t stand to see how horribly she was failing at trying to go about it.

I believe in the Montgomery Scott philosophy in life and on Facebook: go for the undersell (and avoid Dyson Spheres, but that’s another story). If you can get the job done in an hour, tell the captain it will take you three. You’ll look like a miracle worker. In the Facebook scenario, don’t tell everyone how awesome you are by posting 35 vanity photos in order to beg for compliments. Because you look completely not awesome. Undersell, not oversell. 35 photos is way oversell.

Facebook asked me to tell about myself. I have enough of a god-awful mess on my ‘about’ page on my website for “proof for hire” purposes. I can’t imagine throwing such dredge onto my Facebook page. And so, channeling Scotty, I went with “I am uninteresting.” I really can’t say that I’m not. I also didn’t do a Google search of famous quotes and pick something obscure to prove how well-read and fascinating I am. Who really cares?

I do some stuff. My family and friends know. They do some stuff. I know. The world keeps spinning. That’s good enough. I don’t have to list 35 Nietzsche quotes to prove anything. No one likes a braggart, a blowhard, or a buffoon, in real life or on Facebook. You know how you end up with the Most Interesting Facebook Profile In The World?

Make it mostly about anyone but you.

Share fun things, care about others, connect, take time for others. It’s your profile — your “story” — to be sure, but no one reads a novel for a soliloquy. There are other characters. You need a thirst for putting others first.

Stay thirsty, my friends.