The art of sitting still

When I attended college back in the 1980s, I majored in nothing. Well, it was English Literature and Rhetoric, but essentially, my primary focus was after-hours parties and social networking.

Once freed from the yoke of parental rules, I quickly made my own. Most of them involved leisure. Huge swaths of free time. Time to contemplate Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and the merits of Guinness for breakfast. Time to sit on the rickety upstairs porch and listen to Liz Story. And after that, a nap.

In retrospect, it wasn't the most productive use of my tuition funds. And my stunning lack of direction did lead to spending the next five years wandering from one aimless job to another, even less interesting, aimless job. But it did teach me a valuable lesson that I've carried well into adulthood, and now parenthood.

In a world of multi-tasking and laptops and Blackberrys and soccer practice and dance lessons and in-your-face, up-to-the-millisecond updates on everything and everybody I know or might want to know, tuning out is the new turning on.

I could have gone to law school or grad school or started on the bottom rung of some corporate ladder after college, but the truth was I had no idea who I was and what I wanted out of life. And I needed those five years of downtime to figure it out. So I worked as a secretary and an office manager until the divining rod finally pointed in a direction.

When I realized that I wanted to be a reporter, I poured all my energy into making it happen. And within six months, I was working as editorial assistant at a national magazine, and 21/2 years after that, I was working as a reporter for a national wire service.

What caused me to choose journalism as a career? Damned if I know. It was something that gradually dawned on me during all of that free time working in jobs that I knew weren't going to be my life's work.

When my twins were born in 2000, I started gunning for the role of Supermom. I would tandem-nurse them, freeze my own strained peas in ice-cube trays, teach them to play soccer by the time they were 3, and get the old piano that came with the house tuned and ready for little fingers as soon as they turned 5. And work five days a week, too. Lesser women may not have been up to the task, but I knew in my soul that I was different.

Short story: Didn't happen.

Instead, I quickly understood why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture, my babies were sick for 50 percent of the first two years of their lives (causing my then-boss to complain that he couldn't count on me anymore, causing me to start looking for a new career), and in my darkest moments, I felt that not only was I not Supermom, I was not-even-adequate-Mom.

When I wasn't working, I rarely left the house - and essentially spent the first three years of my daughters' lives barricading them in the living room with sofas and dog gates, and making sure they didn't kill themselves.

Once those years were behind me, and they started school, I toyed with the idea of signing them up for soccer or T-ball or dance. In Pre-K, I did sign them up for ballet, but their first recital (complete with pratfalls and giggles, poor tutu etiquette, and a complete lack of awareness of what they were supposed to be doing) made it clear that this was not their calling.

So we dropped that.

We tried a few more activities after that, but anything that started on a weekend morning was difficult for all of us, and after school activities required me to beg huge favors of moms who didn't work in NYC like me, and I just wasn't up to asking.

Not that my girls felt they were missing out - I was the one who felt that working mother twinge of guilt that I wasn't exposing them to enough extracurricular activities - possibly dooming them to teenage angst and excessive drug use.

Secretly, though, I loved our lazy weekends. We'd wake up whenever we woke up, make pancakes or eat cereal out of the box, read a book, play with the cats, or just sit by the front window and watch the neighbors walk their dogs. I live on a suburban corner, with sun streaming in from three sides, and it's a cozy, relaxing place to just be.

Magical things can happen when you're sitting still. One weekend day a few years back, I walked over to one of my daughters and sat beside her on the couch. She smiled, then looked at me quizzically. "Mom," she said, "why is it that just sitting next to you makes me feel so happy inside?"

Those kinds of moments are difficult to catch if you're running too fast from place to place. So over time we've made it a family tradition to have "lazy Saturdays." It's brought my family closer together, and I think my twins are getting a lot more out of it than it may be apparent on the surface.

Yes, they often use this downtime to play on the computer or their video games, but they also draw and paint and build blanket forts and read comic books and ask questions and talk to us about whatever happens to be on their mind. Free time gives them the space to explore and make choices, and create and figure things out and interact with the world in their own way.

And it gives me the opportunity to be a better mother. I try to always take the time to listen, really listen to what they're saying. And to not give them rushed answers, but to thoughtfully and fully respond.

One of my favorite adults when I was young gave me the greatest gift you can give to a child - the gift of attention. From my earliest memory, she treated me as an individual and spent time trying to understand who I was as a human being.

Coincidentally, the home my children are growing up in today is her home, which my husband and I bought from her when we got married. We were starting a new life, while she, an aging widow, moved to another state to live closer to her son.

Before she passed away, she came back to visit for her 90th birthday, to spend time in her old home and to meet my then-baby girls. She told me she was so glad I was raising my family in the home where she raised her son. And she wished me joy in the coming years.

As always, she looked deeply into my eyes when she spoke, as if she was confronting my very soul. She wanted me to know how much this meant to her, and was willing me to acknowledge the importance of this moment. And then she hugged me and laughed. A big, mirthful laugh that showed how much she was still enjoying life in her ninth decade.

I wish for my children and for myself that same kind of joy that comes with attentiveness and the rare, but oh so precious ability to truly know another human being.

The world moves past us all at such a dizzying pace. And it's exciting and wonderful to get caught up in its whirl. But it's in those empty spaces in between that the important stuff happens. And I don't want to miss a thing.

Lather. Tweet. Repeat.

OK, for those of you who haven't yet tried Twitter, or tried it a few months ago but gave up in a few days when you couldn't figure out what you were supposed to be doing, or wonder whether it's just the latest blip in the world of communication that's already on its way out - this post is for you.

I've been playing around with Twitter for about two months now, and am still forming my opinion about it as a business networking/broadcasting tool. But as a strange new world, I'm starting to have fun - and make some new contacts/friends in the Twitterverse.

There are some basics you need to know about Twitter until someone writes The Idiot's Guide to Twitter. I'm sure there are more, (feel free to add in the comments section) but I think these will be useful for the novice.

Some tips I'd give to any Twitter newcomer to get the most out of the experience from day one:

1. Upload a picture of yourself, not some cute/weird avatar, but a real picture of yourself. And write something in your bio that lets people know who you are as a human being, not just as a businessperson (if you are one). Twitter is one large community, with lots of little niche communities sprouting up everywhere based on interests and backgrounds and where you live. And we want to know who our neighbors are and what they look like before we want to, like, talk to them.


2. Before you send your first tweet, ( I haven't searched, but I bet the most common first tweet is something along the lines of, "Trying to figure Twitter out." Find some people to follow. This was the most difficult part for me at first. Twitter allows you to search for people you know, but it's not so simple to just search on topics like "marketing" to find out who's tweeting on that topic. They're changing the functionality on Twitter now so you can do that, but I still find it easier to just go to http://search.twitter.com/ to find people with like-minded interests. Follow a few people who've been on Twitter for a while and observe what they do. Most people will let you follow them without first giving you permission. Just click on "follow" under their photo and you can go right to their "tweet stream" and read what they've been posting. Read what they link to, view the profiles of the people they follow. You can also find people who live in the same general area as you by using such sites as http://www.nearbytweets.com/.


3. Don't follow everyone who follows you. There's a lot of debate about this in the Twitterverse, but I have enough to keep track of on a daily basis without trying to get a handle on 10,000 followers' tweets. And you probably do, too (not that I'll ever get that kind of a following, but you get the point). I only follow people who have something to say that really interests me, or makes me laugh. And I ignore the people who are way too obvious that they're just trying to sell something, i.e., "My new internet marketing book is coming out next week - read about it in my latest blog post!" I'm a marketer so I'm not against trying to use Twitter to enhance/build your business, but that kind of in your face stuff turns me off. I'm on Twitter mostly to learn more about social media and how it's affecting my former profession and first love - the news business, my current profession in marketing and communications and the world. And to post my daughter's angry letter to the tooth fairy and view cool pictures of rice walls in China.

4. # see that symbol to the leff of the word "see" - it's called a hashtag and tweeters use them a lot so that people can more easily find the topics when doing a search. So for example, if you want to view all the silly jokes people post you can do a search for #hilaritweets and they'll all come up in your search, in time order. People do this a lot when they tweet from conferences or on a more lyrical note, when they write the kind of poetry ideally suited to the 140 character medium, #haiku.

5. I've seen a lot of essays about what to tweet about that will get you more followers, and get retweeted and become the most popular tweeter on the block, but again, I've got a contrarian viewpoint on this. I'd rather have 300 followers who interact with me on a meaningful level and develop a rapport with them, than 20.000 followers who barely recognize my username. Granted, celebrities (both social media, tech, film and TV types) are always going to get lots of followers. And I've got no problem with that. They've earned their pulpits and have something to say that lots of people want to hear. But for the average tweeter, I think about 300-400 followers is probably enough. Same goes for people to follow. I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to unfollow people. Some posted great quotes that I really enjoyed, but then had nothing of interest to say on their own. One posted too many musical notes and hearts in her tweets, and it just bugged me. A conservative Republican I followed to learn more about politics from a different angle got too vitriolic for my taste (but I still follow @karlrove, who I'm finding kind of fascinating).

6. RT = Retweet. When you see that in someone's tweet, that means they liked what someone else wrote in their tweet enough to want to share it with their followers. The proper etiquette for retweeting is to start with RT, followed by the person's username (@newsucnuse) and then copy what they wrote, maybe adding a comment yourself.

7. There are two ways to get in touch with someone you follow on Twitter. Either send them a direct message, or post a message in your stream that starts with @ followed by their username, i.e., @newsucnuse you crack me up. Direct messages are private between you and the person you're following, while the @ messages in your stream can be seen by anyone. I'd hazard that most people on Twitter would prefer you respond to their messages in public, unless they're very personal. That way everyone can be part of your conversation, and maybe even add something to it. That's when Twitter gets really fun.

8. So what should you tweet about? Many articles on Twitter I've read say you should/can tweet about anything you want. And that's technically true. But unlike Facebook, where you're sure to get someone to acknowledge your status updates with a "likes this" or a personal comment, most of the people on Twitter don't know you and don't feel compelled to interact with you unless you have something interesting to bring to the table. Start out by commenting on other's tweets and making connections with people whose tweets you like. And don't be surprised if the first 20 tweets you send out into the world get no response whatsoever. That's what nearly turned me off to Twitter in the beginning. One way to at least know whether people are clicking on your pictures or your links is to send your pictures to http://www.twitpic.com/ (there's a counter that shows how many times someone clicks on your photo). And I've just discovered http://bit.ly/which not only shortens long links (a must for tweeters), but also shows how many people clicked on your link.

9. Should you create multiple twitter accounts for your work persona, your Civil War reenactment enthusiast persona, your I love Karen Carpenters persona? Again, there's a divergence of opinion about this in the twittersphere, but my gut tells me that the answer is "No."
The most interesting people I follow are people who show you all sides of their personality. Like David Gregory tweeting as he passes the White House to see if anyone's free for lunch (pretty sure he was serious), or @careerdiva writer/reporter Eve Tahmincioglou tweeting about career issues, but then taking the NY Times' food guru to task (in verse, no less) for daring to suggest that meat be deleted from lunch. Listen to your mother and just be yourself! There are millions of people on twitter - there have got to be some out there with like-minded interests who will want to hear what you have to say, and comment on it.

10. Twitter is not for everyone. Just like not everyone should be a parent, not everyone should be a tweeter. Give it 30 days. If you're starting to "get it" at the end of the 30 days, and are starting to have fun, keep going. If not, it may just not be your thing. I'm sticking with it because I'm learning new things from really interesting people. And I love to write, albeit usually in much longer form. But it's a great exercise to write succinctly. It forces you to get to the point. I remember early on in my career that an editor told me it was much more difficult to write a short piece than a long one. Right before he ripped my copy to shreds. But I learned from him, and then from my editors at UPI, where there was a deadline every minute, and Don was glaring at me from across the terminal wondering when I was going to have that bulletin ready for him to send to the national desk. Average length of a bulletin (the first lead for a big national story that went out to all of our subscribers electronically, kind of like the Internet) - about 140 characters.

10 lessons from my 10 weeks on Facebook

I've been actively engaged on Facebook for about 10 weeks now - long enough to get the hang
and long enough to learn something new about myself, about social media, and about the ever-growing need for people to connect.

So, onto the list - 10 lessons I've learned from my 10 weeks on Facebook.

Lesson #1 - I was not as invisible in high school or college as I had previously assumed. In fact, some people who I barely remember actually recall me with great clarity. And post pictures of me from the 1970s and 80s that I've never even seen.

Lesson #2 - Sometimes when I get a new friend request, it takes all my powers of concentration to pinpoint where I know them from. Was it the town that I moved away from when I was 14? Was she a colleague at the Children's Television Workshop where I toiled as a secretary in my first real job out of college - or was he the boyfriend of the reporter I worked with at that weekly paper in Brooklyn in the 90s? All that compartmentalization I've done over the years is useless in the face of a melting pot technology like FB. I feel like the person in the Verizon commercial being followed around by the entire network - only it's my own time-space continuum of people from every era of my life.

Lesson #3 - Some people will friend you, but then pretty much want to be left alone. And sometimes I feel much the same. One of the unsung joys of FB for me is being able to be part of someone's life without ever having to really talk to them - and I mean that in a healthy, non-stalking kind of way. I can't possibly hang out with all 100+ of my FB friends - even if they did live nearby. But I can note, with surprise and delight, that my cousin took a spiritual meditation trip to India and enjoy all the pictures that he and his friends posted near the Taj Mahal. The FB connection means I'm able to be part of his life in a way I never have been in the past - so that when we do see each other at the next family function, it won't feel like it's been years since we''ve connected.

Lesson #4 - It has allowed me to fill in the blanks in my life - holes I hadn't even known existed. I can view, for instance, the grade school pictures of awkward pre-teen boys and girls who grew into the cheerleaders and the jocks and the popular kids that I first met when I moved to town, and feel empathy for them. And I can ask the friend I left behind when I moved to that new town the burning question I've always wanted to ask - "Did you date my first boyfriend after I left?" And discover that (as I suspected) indeed she did, bringing some cathartic closure to an emotionally wrought period in my life.

Lesson #5 - Friends are fickle creatures. It's hard to pinpoint which comments, posts, or notes will strike a nerve and elicit a response (and from whom). An elaborate photo shoot of my daughters' 300+ stuffed animal collection that took hours to organize barely registered. But a handwritten note one of my 8-year-olds wrote to the tooth fairy when she neglected to acknowledge a tooth under her pillow went viral.

Lesson #6 - It is a small world after all. Turns out not one, but two of my friends know two of my other friends for reasons having nothing to do with me. The mother I met in the waiting room of Columbia Presbyterian as both of our babies underwent open heart surgery in 2000 is apparently best friends with the friend of a college buddy.

Lesson #7 - Not all of my friends appreciate (or even recognize) my sense of humor. When I changed my relationship status to "it's complicated" on a lark, just to get my husband's reaction, I was deluged with concerned emails from friends and family worrying about the state of my marriage - forcing me into a public declaration of marital bliss (and a private exhortation to myself to never overestimate the ability of my humor to translate to the written word).

Lesson #8 - I'm breaking no new ground by saying this, but yes - social networking is addicting. I check my email and FB first thing when I wake up in the morning, and last thing before I lay down at night. It's gotten so bad that when my daughter pads out into the living room early on a weekday and sees me at the computer, she says - "You're on Facebook, right?" And I must sheepishly nod my head, before ignoring her completely to check my status updates.

Lesson #9 - I learn things on FB that I wouldn't find out anywhere else. I can't remember any of them right now so they're not life-changing epiphanies, but I have come to rely on certain friends to filter the news for me and post items that end up enriching my life (or at least give me a laugh).

Lesson #10 - For some people, Facebook isn't enough. After reconnecting with everyone in the past 30 years that they've ever met, searching through their contacts' photos, and reading a few weeks of their updates about watching the latest episode of ER, they crave something more immediate, more meaningful, more relevant.

Enter Twitter. I've only got about two weeks worth of experience in this new communications medium, but here's my early laymen's take. Twitter is a third world wire service on steroids, without filters or editors, and besotted with news about itself. Its millions of reporters struggle to make their stories heard above the din, and in the process earn themselves a loyal following. Amateur ham radio operators also chime in from time to time about their pet lizards, and nuggets of brilliance occasionally emerge from the ooze, but it's mostly unpolished and unverifiable and often uninteresting.

Still, it's got an immediacy and naturalness and urgent wry humor that's seductive and makes me want to learn more.

Expect a full report in 8 weeks.

Stop the social media whirl, I want to get off

I'm not an early adopter of anything, never have been.

Didn't own my first pair of button-front Levi's til I was in college. Was certain rap music was a fad that would quickly die out with Devo. Regarded sushi as completely unappetizing until, well, until I got up the nerve in the late-90s to actually try it. And then only ate California rolls for two years.

You get the picture.

Yet somehow I've gotten sucked into at least wanting to join the dizzying din of Twitter and Facebook and whatever else some young MIT drop-outs are cooking up in their garages.

Problem is - I'm not very good at it. My Facebook status updates elicit yawns (unheard, but deeply felt my friends), my tweets seem to disappear into the void (if a twitterer tweets and no one retweets or responds, does it really exist?) and texting only works for me because no one expects me to be witty or charming - just specific. "On 6:02 to Hewlett. c u soon" may not be Haiku, but it gets the job done.

The thing about FB and Twitter is that we all yearn to be relevant and funny and retweeted, and followed on fridays. But I imagine many out there feel like I do when no one follows me on Friday - like the kid picked last for the team in gym, or the 12-year-old girl running aimlessly back and forth across the lawn during the kissing party because no one wants to catch and kiss her.

In a way, Twitter reminds me of the wire service, UPI, where I worked in the 1990s, before email and the Web. We had an email-type service between bureaus and it was great fun to instantly communicate with bureaus in London and D.C.

And whenever news broke, we all saw it instantly stream across our terminals in Twitter-like bulletin format if it was a really big, A-wire (national) story like the Oklahoma City bombing.

I remember how cool I felt knowing the news before anyone else did - before the all-news radio stations, before TV, and at least a day before the newspapers.

While much of the chatter on Twitter is about Twitter itself and social media in general, a lot of it is also about being the first to share a link to a story that no one else has read about yet. Or posting a picture that no one else has seen. And becoming the cool kid with 100 more followers because of it.

At UPI, we were all the cool kids (especially the guy who constantly listened to the police scanner), and I felt smug in the knowledge as I headed home that I knew exactly what was going to be on the local news that night - many times because I'd written it.

But then I got into trade magazines when UPI stopped paying my expense checks and contemplated a 5th bankruptcy, and then into marketing when I got sick of trade magazines and poverty.

And so now, here I am, the head of marketing for a professional services firm, the mother of twins who enjoy texting their cousin on my phone and exhort me to stop spending so much time on Facebook, and a near-total Twitter failure.

Maybe I haven't given it enough time. Maybe I just haven't found my true niche of former reporters turned trade magazine editors turned mothers of twins who would instantly bond with me and find my separated at birth jon stewart photo juxtaxposed with a Russian art portrait hilarious.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'm not cut out to tweet. Maybe essay writing is my milieu, and I don't need to be like Meet the Press' David Gregory, fishing for a lunch date from Team Obama as he walks near the White House. (Although the Page Six devotee in me gets a strange thrill from being able to eavesdrop in real time on celebrities' most boring or inane thoughts.)

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it took Tom Robbins 288 pages to write Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (the first book I ever read that I wished I had written.)

"Sissy Henkshaw Gitch" is 20 characters right there, and she hasn't even stuck out her enormous hitchhiking thumb. So I won't feel so bad if my tweets fall flat, or if I end up withdrawing from the Twitterverse altogether.