Sunset?

I can't decide if I want to resume blogging or not. I reread old posts and am pleased with them, and also with the memory of what fun it was to craft them, usually out of an explosive kernel of an idea that niggled and prodded until I gave it its due. The habit of blogging was so infectious. Once I got going, ideas piled up and popped all over the place, begging to be chosen, pinned down and expressed in words. It would be good to experience more of that particular pleasure. And to take on more of that kind of short-term, quickly gratified intellectual challenge.

I didn't deliberately turn away from blogging. For a few weeks after my last post in January 2012, I thought often about posting. After a couple months, I thought less often (and more guiltily) about it. After a couple more, the idea flitted vaguely through my mind every now and then. I took pictures on trips and composed descriptive paragraphs in my head, thinking to write travel posts, if nothing else. But the inspiration was never sufficiently compelling to prompt an actual post. Not even when it got to be November and December and I had to see that accusing January 2012 date looming at the top of my blog whenever I checked it to see if the bloggers I follow had posted anything new. (They had. Often. See "Interesting Blogs" in the sidebar to your right and look them up.)

Twitter was the same. When I tweeted regularly, my brain developed a whole Twitter compartment, a bustling, observant mechanism that parsed the world into 140-character bursts of revelation. Twitter, too, was fun. It, too, was infectious and challenging. And it, too, fell by the wayside in 2012.

Why?

It could be laziness or a sense of diminishing returns. It could be that I got busy with other, more captivating, things. Or maybe it was merely the end of a natural life cycle. Hobbies, interests, even passions come and go.

I spend the bulk of my time crafting words. For a time, a long time, the challenge of crafting blog posts and tweets complemented my writing work. It was hugely entertaining, it made me some great friends, and it honed my skills. Ultimately, though, blogging and tweeting stopped complementing and started distracting. At first, the distraction was a welcome diversion. I was at a difficult juncture with my book; expressing myself pithily elsewhere served as a needed outlet and a reassuring relief. But eventually the distraction was only a distraction. It lost its enticing appeal, and I turned to different side dishes.

 I rediscovered two former passions in 2012: baking bread and cooking. Like all good hobbies, neither of these can ever be entirely mastered. There's always something to improve on or something new to learn. They offer a constant challenge, and one that, unlike blogging and Twitter, is not verbal. You decide what you want to create, assemble ingredients, apply techniques, and - presto! - you very shortly have what you wanted and it's a tangible thing. This may be a metaphor for novel-writing, but it's the antithesis of writing an actual novel - and not only because you get to eat your results.

It's been cold and cloudier than usual in Las Vegas this winter, and the clouds make for gorgeous sunsets. As I was uploading photos of a recent beauty to my computer, it occurred to me that a sunset is a worthy and enjoyable phenomenon whether or not it precedes a sunny dawn. I may blog or tweet regularly again; I may not. For now, here's the sunset:

Ode to a Friend

I'm mourning today. I learned this morning of the sudden death over the weekend of my friend Molly. Molly and I never actually met. But the memories of her that flood my thoughts today, and the sorrow I feel, make it plain to me that she was indeed a true friend.

We met on Twitter, early in my career there. It's easy to dismiss social media as frivolous and shallow. I have often done so myself with respect to the great majority of the tweets I read. But it turns out that a genuine connection made via Twitter is as real and wholehearted as one made anywhere else. A connection is a connection is a connection, I guess.

Molly and I started with each other's tweets, moved on to include each other's work, and emailed occasionally as well. We shared a lot of interests: books, photography, the foibles of US, UK and Italian politics, feminism, the scenery and history of the Western United States. Her comments, unfailingly kind and supportive, are sprinkled throughout my travel posts and photos.

We knew the bare outlines of each other's lives - husbands, kids, backgrounds - but only as they came up in conversation. And what a conversation it was. Molly was old enough and sharp enough to have no qualms about voicing her strong opinions on a wide variety of subjects; conversing with her was alternately hilarious, touching, profound and validating, and it was always fun. For three years, we exchanged ideas, opinions, befuddlement, poignancy and even a recipe or two over Twitter, sometimes daily for weeks on end, other times sporadically. Nothing made me happier than to open Tweetdeck and see she was "in the room."

Molly was a writer, as am I, so perhaps it's not surprising that we formed a true connection via written words. It's interesting to recollect that we never actually spoke because I know her voice well. Her turns of phrase, the smatterings of Italian and French interspersed in our tweets, the personality that was so evident in her intelligent, articulate writing all accumulated into a voice I could hear. I can hear it as I write these words. And although Molly herself is no longer here, I think I will hear it for a long, long time to come.

Honest Scrap Blogger Award

Rather to my dismay, Jamie Harding (a normally delightful person whose blog, The Life and Times of a Househusband, I love and who is a complete kick on Twitter) "honored" me with the above-titled award.

I don't usually react to honors with dismay, but this one comes with a suspiciously meme-like obligation. Here are the rules:

1. The Honest Scrap Blogger Award must be shared.
2. The recipient has to tell 10 true things about him/herself that no one else knows.
3. The recipient has to pass on the award to 10 more bloggers.
4. Those 10 bloggers should link back to the blog that awarded them.

I don't plan to follow these rules. What a rebel, huh?

I'm not one for chain letters; in fact, I can be counted on to break the chain, no matter the entreaty, the cause or the direness of the promised consequences. (Hmm, I wonder if this bit of explanatory narrative could count as one of my 10 things. So it will if it turns out I can't think of 10 others.) But, hey, I can be a good sport about Rules 1 and 2. We'll see about 3 and 4.

My 10 things (some of these aren't quite known by nobody; it's hard to come up with those when you've been married for over 30 years to someone you met in high school):

1. When we were children, my youngest sister ate French fries slowly. She always had some left by the time my other sister and I finished ours. We would ask her for a few, and she would command us to bark like dogs: Bark! Bark for French fries! Yep, we did. Woof.

2. I have never owned or come into contact with a toaster that worked properly.

3. No, I did not get married in high school. Or in college. I'm just older than you think.

4. If I had to choose one favorite song, just one, it would be "Roll Me Away" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band (as recorded for "The Distance" album way back when). If naming it meant listening only to it and nothing else, then I would choose the first movement of Schubert's Ninth instead because I'd hate having to get sick of "Roll Me Away" and I appear to have an infinite capacity for listening to the best first movement ever. (Just ask my husband or kids.)

5. I routinely slather my feet with Bag Balm, a lanolin salve meant for cows' udders, before I put on socks.

6. After knee surgery in 1989, I spent an entire week on the couch, determined to conquer Super Mario Brothers 1, 2 and 3. By the end of the week, my knee was fine, I could rescue the princess in every game, and I was very popular among my kids' friends.

7. I have been in every state in the U.S. except South Carolina and South Dakota. I don't have a problem with states named South something; this is just an odd coincidence. Oh, and by "been in," I don't mean drove through or changed planes in; I mean actually visited long enough to have to take a shower in.

8. I try to understand it and, failing that, to be tolerant of it (at which I also fail dismally), but I can't shake my sense that Facebook is the dumbest f*%#in' thing on earth.

9. I played Ado Annie in a high school production of Oklahoma! Lots of bizarre things inherent in that experience, but the ones I recall/care to disclose are the thrill of being cast, the surprising raciness of the old-time musical's lyrics, and the appalling smell of the costume (eau de years and years and years of sweating teenagers).

And ta da! Number 10 is that I always break chain letters. Now you know who deserves the blame for the promised riches that never arrive.

A Cheesy Clip Show

I got the nicest note from one of my Twitter friends a couple days ago. She noticed I hadn't blogged in a while and wanted to know if I was OK. She also said she missed me. This started me thinking about how oddly wonderful Internet friends can be.

The term "Internet friends" has more dubious connotations than anything else, at least for me - can't help remembering the end of Old School, when Juliette Lewis' character invites Will Ferrell's character to a party: "yeah, you know, just some Internet friends."

But I've found some of the most charming, intelligent and delightful people on the Internet. And it's weird: we've never met, we've never spoken voice-to-voice or face-to-face, but I have the sense we know each other. Turns out a lot can be communicated in the accumulation over time of 140-character snippets.

Anyway, I feel remiss about blogging, but I've been in a writing frenzy for several weeks. I'm working feverishly on my new novel; my characters have co-opted all the space in my brain. I have no unexpressed thoughts that aren't going into the book. Every now and then, I get a nubbin of a side idea, but both these and my will to explore them are too weak to flower into a blog post. They're barely enough to sprout a tweet.

So how about a clip show instead? (Cue the Simpsons singing about how lame it is "when a long-running series does a cheesy clip show.") Still, I'm always a little sorry old posts get buried in the past. Even if the ones linked below aren't new to you, I hope you'll enjoy the encore.

What it's like to write obsessively

Where blogging fits into life

Where blogging doesn't fit into life - or the value of privacy

A little tidbit about the new book

Glaciers

Why I dislike and try not to use the noun "bitch"

The dangerous silliness of political correctness

A spreadsheet approach to sex and parenting

Ode to a lost friend

For Your Reading Pleasure

Inspired by an invigorating literary conversation on Twitter with my friends @Amalari and @Angpang, I decided to compile a list of my favorite books in the categories of fiction and biography, the two categories I love best.

The list below is not even close to complete nor did I go about compiling it in any scientific way. I merely went to most of my bookcases and wrote down the titles of books that have swept me away - from my own work, my own world, and my own sense of time and responsibilities. These are the books that made me glad I was an adult and could stay up all night reading without parental interference or the need for a flashlight under the covers. In a few cases, they're books I did read with said flashlight when I was young enough to be told to get to sleep by said parents.

Because of the "swept away" criterion, I have not included books I think are very, very good, but which fall more in the eat-your-vegetables category of reading than in the tear-through-a-box-of-Belgian-chocolates category. (Don't get me wrong. I love vegetables. That's just a different list.) Mrs. Dalloway, for example, is a fine book, but for sheer delight and irresistible forward motion, it cannot compare to Michael Cunningham's extraordinary The Hours. (If you've only seen the dumbed-down movie in which the central plot complexity is given away in a very early frame, you've missed quite a treat. The book requires you to be smart as it magnetically pulls you in and along; the movie requires only that you be awake.)

Just so you know, it's killing me a little not to include mysteries, which I adore. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Sara Paretsky, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Sayers, Dick Francis, Elizabeth George, Elizabeth Peters, Deborah Crombie, Patricia Cornwell, Anne Perry, Sue Grafton, Nevada Barr - and many others whose names I'm sure will come to me the instant I hit "Publish Post" - have afforded me hours adding up to years of pleasure, puzzlement and revelation. But that's also a list for another day.

Finally, I didn't have time to go to all my bookcases this afternoon. Even if I had, there would still be omissions. I loan and give books to people all the time, so my collection doesn't begin to include all the books I once owned, let alone the ones I've borrowed from other people, loved, and returned.

For all these reasons, the list below is only the beginning. I doubt I'll ever manage to compile a truly complete list of my favorites, but I promise to get closer in subsequent posts. Will you add your favorites by commenting on this post, either with the names of your additions or with a link to your own list on your own blog?

Biographies (I think the first four are superb, the others very good):

Savage Beauty, by Nancy Milford (about Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Henry James, by Leon Edel

John Adams, by David McCullough

Emerson: The Mind on Fire, by Robert Richardson (about Ralph Waldo)

Frida, by Hayden Herrera (about Frida Kahlo)

The Lonely Empress, by Joan Haslip (about Elisabeth of Austria)

Eleanor of Acquitaine, by Alison Weir

Fiction (in no particular order, because I follow no shelving system. I rely on my memory when I'm looking for a book; the occasional frustration caused by memory lapses is more than outweighed by the adventure of running into something unexpected or forgotten):

Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper

Robert Girardi, Madeleine's Ghost

Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American

Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Time in its Flight

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

John Updike, Rabbit, Run

Gregory Maguire, Wicked

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Seville Communion

George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman

Yann Martel, The Life of Pi

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (short stories, which normally irritate me slightly, but these are a marvel)

Alice McDermott, Charming Billy

Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons (all her books are highly readable; these are my favorites)

John Irving, A Prayer for Own Meany, The Cider House Rules, The World According to Garp (ditto the Anne Tyler comment)

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Kent Haruf, Plainsong

William Faulkner, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying (my all-time favorite writer; these are the best of the best, but all his books are glorious)

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Pat Conroy, The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides, The Water is Wide, The Lords of Discipline

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy

Anthony Trollope, The Barsetshire Novels

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (in my opinion, THE Great American Novel)

Mary Renault, The King Must Die

Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina

Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

Julia Glass, Three Junes

Michael Malone, Handling Sin

Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast

J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (the sine qua non of short stories)

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

John Fowles, The Magus

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Louisa May Alcott, Little Men, Jo's Boys

Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Jane Mendelsohn, I Was Amelia Earhart

Now Appearing on a Blog Near You

I've written another guest post, this one for M-BRANE SF, the creation of Christopher Fletcher. In addition to being a blogger, Christopher is a chef, a magazine publisher, and a fiction writer currently living "in self-imposed exile in OKC." My thanks to him for the opportunity and to GUD Magazine for introducing us on Twitter.

My guest post - "For Writers: A Story & Three Tactics" - is about my evolution as a writer of fiction, my writing process, and a few of the ways I polish my work. Please click through to read it. While you're on the M-BRANE SF site, be sure to take a look around; you'll find a lot of interesting material.

Lawyers & Their Careers

No one who knows or has worked with me would call me an apologist for large law firms. I have written, in some places scathingly, about the many, many things these firms could do better relative to their workforce, to their clients and to running themselves like sensible, for-profit businesses.

(If you're interested in reading any of my constructive criticisms, check out The Productive Culture Blueprint or browse the Careers and Feminism posts here.)

But when I met Ron Fox on Twitter and surprised him by saying that I thought large law firms, despite their many shortcomings, were still the best places for new law grads to learn the craft of being lawyers, I found myself limning the positives of what Ron calls "BigLaw" to explain what I meant.

Our ensuing email conversation was quite spirited, and Ron suggested we break it down into separate posts for publication on his Lawyer Satisfaction Blog.

Here they are:

Post #1 BIGLAW FOR NEW GRADS: FRIEND OR FOE?

Post #2 HOW DO LAW STUDENTS MAKE CAREER DECISIONS?

Post #3 ARE LAW SCHOOLS MERELY FUNNELS FOR BIGLAW?

Post #4 WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?

Frontiers, Crossed and Crossing

My Twitter and Facebook friend Raul Ramos y Sanchez is the author of AMERICA LIBRE, a novel coming out this summer that is already an International Latino Book Award winner and one of USA Today's 2009 Summer Reads. Raul is thoughtful (in both senses of the word), and his passion for exploring issues of ethnicity in American life, culture and politics mirrors mine for exploring issues of gender. He is always posting provocative questions along these lines, and we have enjoyed stimulating conversations on Twitter, on Facebook, and here on my blog.

(In fact, Raul is the reason I now brave Facebook once or twice a week. The nicest thing I can say about Facebook is that I don't get it. The interface makes little sense to me, I have better ways to stay in touch with people I already know, and all those sophomoric quizzes and applications may well, it seems to me, put the final nails in the coffin of Western civilization (and, for all I know, Eastern civilization too). But Raul's thoughtful conversational prompts are great, and I can't stand the idea of missing one, so into Facebook's shallow, silty waters I now wade. I should also acknowledge, before I close the parentheses on this paragraph, that I recognize I'm standing in a glass house throwing stones when I diss Facebook. Twitter can certainly be sophomoric too, but I've found it much easier to tailor my own experience there. To each his or her own.)

Anyhoo, Raul asked today whether President Obama will name a Hispanic to the Supreme Court and whether achieving ethnic balance on the Court should even be a factor. I answered that it should indeed be a factor given our current circumstances, which are that there are eminently qualified Hispanic (and female) candidates for Justice Souter's seat. It is not necessary to relax standards to appoint a replacement who is not a white man. Given that, and in light of US demographics, I think achieving ethnic and gender balance on the Court is a completely appropriate goal.

In answering Raul's question, I lifted some ideas and paraphrased some sentences from A MERGER OF EQUALS. I concluded long ago, somewhat shakily, that quoting myself without attribution is not plagiarism. I feel...I don't know, derivative, I guess...whenever I do it, but I do it all the time anyway, secure in the knowledge that no one but I has read, let alone committed to memory, virtually every sentence I've ever written.

Today, however, my character Charlie keeps interrupting the writing I've been trying to do (on another book altogether) with a strong message to the effect that I didn't do justice to the point I lifted from him. So here it is (redacted to delete spoilers, for those of you who haven't yet read the book):

That created the first vacancy on the Executive Committee since the coup, and I felt strongly that we should fill it with a woman.

At the time of the coup, I had regretted that our slate didn’t include any women. But there were none of sufficient seniority at the Firm and we’d decided we had enough to manage without adding the effort of identifying and recruiting someone from outside, then selling her to the rest of the Firm. One step at a time, we’d told ourselves.

There was something about [recent events] that made me feel our “one step at a time” approach, however practical, had been essentially a rationalization. Women seemed to me to be able to handle just about anything, and it started to strike me as shabby that we hadn’t yet managed to handle getting even one into the Firm’s management.

The Firm still had no women positioned for appointment to the EC, although we had made good progress in the last year. I had no doubt that in another year or two several women would be good candidates for the EC.

We considered naming one of them to fill the EC vacancy even if it was premature. A couple were probably strong enough to make their voices heard even without a more established power base. But we weren’t looking to put a woman on the EC just so we could say we had one. The goal was to realize the actual benefits, financial and otherwise, of inclusivity and diversity – and to demonstrate that it wasn’t necessary to relax standards in order to include women.

Putting a token woman on the Committee satisfied neither of these goals. We needed someone with proven leadership skills and either a client base or some other equally credible value to bring to the Firm. All the EC members had strong client relationships; most were (or had once been) group heads and also chaired important Firm committees or held other administrative leadership positions. Naming a woman without these qualifications to the EC would undercut both the purpose behind our stated diversity goals and her ability to feel and act like a full-fledged member.

Because we’d have to look outside to fill the immediate vacancy with a woman, there was a fair amount of discussion at the EC about waiting for the next opening or seeking a woman for the open spot but filling it with the best candidate we found, irrespective of gender. As far as I was concerned, this was just so much bullshit designed to put off diversifying the Committee. I argued hotly that there was no reason we couldn’t find a qualified woman unless we failed to look seriously for one and that we shouldn’t settle for filling the vacancy with another man.

As I said to Raul, I applaud President Obama for taking into account the goal of achieving ethnic and gender balance and developing his Supreme Court candidate list accordingly. As Charlie reminded me, there is no reason we can't find a qualified and diverse candidate unless we fail to look seriously for one.

I'm a Guest Blogger!

Charlene Kingston, who will always be @Kinchie (her Twitter handle) to me, asked me to write a guest post for her elegant and useful blog, From the Crow's Nest. Obviously, I was thrilled, and today I am also feeling quite honored as I see my post up on her site, along with her generous introduction.

Pleas click over and read my post "Finding Career Happiness." I'd love it if you'd leave a comment on the post, but even if you're not in a commenting mood, do take the time to browse around and learn more about Charlene and her company, Crow Information Design.

The tag line for Charlene's blog is: "Finding the shortest distance between your message and your audience." Her company provides services that help companies and freelance professionals present themselves in writing for online and print media. Do you see why I'm so delighted to be guest blogging for her??

Ever the Iconoclast

I've decided to buck the social media trend and reduce the number of people in my online crowd.

I was never in it to rack up numbers anyway. My goal was and is conversation, not reach. I also don't mind the amount of time it takes to interact with my SM community even though it often takes more than I expected to spend.

No, my problem is that the prize isn't currently worth the price. My cost-benefit ratio is off. I'm irritated and annoyed too often. Sometimes, I'm actually angry. There may or may not be an upward limit on how many people one can legitimately befriend/follow/interact with, but too many of my folks aren't holding up their end of the bargain I thought we were making.

I want conversation. I want reciprocity. I want to read interesting, humorous, intelligent updates and click on thought-provoking, well written articles and blog posts. I want to be acknowledged and treated courteously.

I don't want to be bored. I don't want to be told the same thing 20 times. I don't want to feel obliged to read back in time to make sure I haven't ignored a friend, knowing and resenting that the friend has never once extended the same courtesy to me.

I don't want friends who recommend sophomoric or banal content. I don't want to read the work of writers who are evidently unaware that "it's" and "its" are not interchangeable, who think "lot's" is a word, who don't know the difference between "affect" and "effect," who can't spell. (I'm not talking about typos; I'm talking about people who "die" their hair or seek "resoprosity.")

In short, I want intelligent, interesting friends and requited friendships. Not numbers, not users, not talkers who never listen, not nonstop profferers of the self-congratulatory social media Kool-Aid, and not illiterates.

But wait. Who the heck do I think I am?

In social media, as in life, there's no percentage in holding other people to my personal rules of engagement. For one thing, it's not fair. One size doesn't (and doesn't have to) fit all. For another, no one died and made me king. Other people aren't wrong by reason of not defining friendship the same way I do. They're absolutely entitled to their own definitions, their own rules of engagement. The only person I get to be in charge of is me.

As I see it, I have three choices:

• I can roll my eyes and wonder what's wrong with people. Resent them for not having the kind of manners, writing style, intellectual sophistication or attention to detail I'd consider ideal. Feel ignored, unacknowledged and taken for granted as I meticulously read everything they offer even when it's obvious they are not doing the same in return. [Insert loud "Wrong Answer" buzzer sound effect here.]
• I can accept people as they are. Enjoy what they do bring to the party. Adjust my expectations and meet them on their terms. [Ding, ding, ding.]
  
• If my crowd includes people whose terms I can't manage to meet without excessive teeth-grinding and tongue-biting, I can walk away. Social media is to friendship what Las Vegas is to blackjack tables; it's always possible simply to get up and move to a more agreeable and satisfying table. [Ding, ding, ding, ding.]
  

How stupid of me to have spent even one minute choosing Option 1! How arrogant to hold others responsible for not making my choices while I blithely ignore my own responsibility for making them. How nice to have woken up!

So I'm culling my list. No judgment, no hard feelings - it's just a matter of placing the responsibility for tailoring my experience squarely where it belongs. On me.

Atwitter

We met in the fall. It was not love at first sight. At first, I wasn't sure I even liked you. You struck me as frivolous, noisy, possibly shallow. A bunch of your friends rushed to introduce themselves, and I wasn't crazy about them either. They were talkers, not listeners, very full of themselves. They seemed awfully pushy. Self-congratulatory, too - always telling me how great they were and getting all agog over some personal "discovery" that anyone not so self-absorbed could have told them has been around since Socrates.

I was cool toward you. But I couldn't shake a sense of fascination, a feeling that you were trying to offer me something great.

So I decided to see you more often. I opened up and let you in on who I am, what I'm interested in, what I care about. Almost immediately, a new bunch of your friends introduced themselves, and this bunch was amazing: impressive thinkers, fascinating talkers, enthusiastic listeners, generous supporters. They introduced me to more people and our circle expanded exponentially.

Suddenly, our relationship was incredible. Every tryst offered a newly woven tapestry of glistening conversational threads, an unending kaleidoscope of ideas, humor, music, poetry, news, recipes, opinions, and intriguing personal tidbits.

I couldn't get enough. I started thinking and answering emails and even occasionally speaking in your unique 140-character cadence. I was tempted to abandon my usual pursuits and spend all my time with you. I couldn't stand the thought of missing even one thing. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I noticed the kind of amusing, eccentric, newsworthy miscellany that I knew would tickle you.

I was crazy about you. After every absence, I eagerly backtracked through our time apart to see what you'd been up to. I listened to everything. I responded, commiserated, offered experience and knowledge, joked around, objected, supported. I was totally exhilarated.

But then a few cracks appeared. Some days, you were more annoying than interesting. You didn't always interact. Sometimes, you took without giving. One of your friends stole something. Another tried to bully me; I stuck to my guns and we patched things up, but it left a bad taste. I felt crowded, pushed, pressed for time. Little, unimportant things started bugging me (who would have guessed that so many smart people can't spell?), and I started to resent your constant bombardment.

So I pulled back - not wholly, but enough to rediscover the joys of my life independent of you. I reduced your claims on my time. I kept listening, but didn't respond every time I had something to say, content to let some opportunities pass. I stopped being offended when every gesture was not responded to in kind. I gave to give, not to get. I got over expecting you to be something you're not and just appreciated you for what you are.

Now we're content, you and I. Our relationship is comfortable and easy, inspiring, educational, fun, challenging, stimulating, non-judgmental and, best of all, reciprocal. Just like a happily married couple. Twitter, I love ya.

Pleasures Expected and Unexpected

I finally finished the last of the items on my current to-do list that fall into the "obligation" category. Since mid-September, I've had more than my usual complement of these things. They're not all bad. Preparing for and giving speeches, co-conducting a business development workshop, writing articles, etc. are all fine. But they have deadlines, and so they usually end up creating some pressure for me. I get all enthusiastic when someone makes a request and I tend to say yes too quickly and then regret the feeling of obligation, the knowledge of a deadline, the compulsion I feel to do a bang-up job. These pressures don't really get in the way of what I consider my real life, but they do take up space in my mind and eventually, even as I resent the distraction, it becomes more trouble to ignore them than it does to handle them.

Finishing the last of them this morning felt absolutely fantastic. I decided to celebrate by writing a poem in response to a prompt from a new Twitter connection. It's amazingly difficult to try to be pithy and rhyme at the same time - and totally gratifying to come up with something you're not too embarrassed to post. My poem is quite bad, if slightly charming, but it does manage to express how I'm feeling about social media at the moment. Just when you think it's all one big self-serving infomercial, you find some cool, interesting people and get inspired to do something unexpected.

(In case you're a glutton for punishment, my poem and several others may be found in the comments to the December 13 post on Blogging Roads, an interesting and thought-provoking blog from a person whose Twitter bio endearingly reads "Marketing Copywriter, Professional Blogger, Mom, Soc Media'er, Lover of Butter.")

Distracted & Slightly Reluctant

How can it be so long since I've posted? I knew it had been a few weeks, but apparently it's been a month and a half. Yikes! I guess I can stop trying to get used to writing 2008 on things and just start thinking about writing 2009 instead.

The last couple months have been crazy with travel and responsibilities, very much like having a job. And they've been packed full of things to write, too: my new book, two speeches, an article, a treatment for a web-show, stuff for my website, and about a zillion emails (many of them relating to the thrilling election; three conversational threads with new friends/penpals; one renewed conversation with an old friend normally on the opposite side of the political spectrum). I've also been experimenting with Twitter and Facebook. (Feel free to follow/befriend me on either or both. I use my actual name.)

All that was evidently enough writing to stem the flow of blog post ideas. Also, my mind tends to move less along blogging lines when I have a lot of interaction with real people, and I've been face-to-face far more in the last couple months than my life normally requires.

Well, and to be honest, the few times I've thought about blogging, the topic - or my view on it - has been controversial enough to be better spoken/written to friends than blared without context into cyberspace.

I've realized a few times before that I censor myself here, not so much to avoid offending someone (I have no doubt I've already done that, however unintentionally, via some of the things I have posted), but because some opinions and ideas can't be properly conveyed out of context to total strangers. All evidence in the blogging world to the contrary, this is not a private diary. It's also not a written chat among friends who know each other and can recognize inflection and resolve disquieting concerns based on familiarity and shared history. I don't pretend to be someone I'm not here, but this is a public face, not my whole face. And expressing in this forum certain of my "what the hell is the matter with people?!?" views on the ideas and causes my fellow human beings hold dear is something I just don't feel comfortable doing.