Comfort Zones

Every so often, I have to force myself to do things I wouldn't normally do because I've noticed myself leaning toward the safe and familiar. Since moving to Baton Rouge, I've had to put myself out there more than I used to. The husband and I packed up our house, left our circle of friends, our family, and our financial solvency to go on this trek of his (he decided after 10+ years in the IT industry that he wanted to get his PhD in Political Science). Enter new friends, new (and much smaller) living spaces, and new routines. Comfort zones suddenly get smaller as everything around you is unfamiliar or uncharted.

I've spent the last two  years stepping out of these comfort zones (new friends, new state), but recently I've started a new round (school and projects). This time it hits both literally and figuratively.  Here's my Comfort Zone Smackdown:

Volunteer Work
I've helped out the International Hospitality Foundation at LSU with a new letterhead, and now I've volunteered to help with Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week (BREW). Why is this hard? By volunteering to do something for someone, you're admitting you have a skill they want and can help them. In a weird way, I believe it takes some measure of ego to volunteer. It's similar to being a freelancer; I'm still getting used to being my own advocate.

Running
I've set a goal to run a 5k by next August. To some, this is no big deal; but to someone who's never been a runner, it's a lot of work. I'm not exactly an athlete (understatement), so working up to a 5k will take me a while. I'm using this app based on a series of free podcasts called Couch to 5K. It's the first app I've paid money for ($2.99) and it was worth every penny. I'm going to stay on Week 5 for a few weeks to build up strength and maybe a little speed.

School
I've decided to try going back to school. People have been telling me to do this since I got to Baton Rouge two years ago. Problem is, you have to put yourself out there to do it. It's likely something I've dreamed up in my head, but I feel going back to school at my age puts added expectation on my skills. I feel that not being the "typical" age of a graduate students means I shouldn't be turning in "typical" work. When I was an undergrad, I absolutely despised having non-traditional students in my classes. They worked harder, asked more questions, and always made us "regular" students look bad. I don't want to be that person to my theoretical cohort. The comfort zone smackdown comes when I get over this and just do the $(%*@&#(* work to the best of my ability, right?


This Blog
This is my first blog, primarily because I've never felt like I had anything to contribute to the blog-osphere that wasn't already there. I don't mind sharing the occasional musing on Facebook or Twitter, but a blog, again, takes a bit of ego to start. You're just sure there's an audience out there who wants to read your golden words. In my head, it's the equivalent to "those people" who post their every. flipping. move. on Facebook. I'm fairly certain the world doesn't care when I go to the grocery store, just like I'm fairly sure they don't care about the comfort zones I'm writing about now. But the smackdown comes as I get over the fact that I think I'm being vain in writing this.

In Appreciation

Thank you for the music, REM. 

I’ve loved you since my tennis coach in 7^th grade introduced me to Green.

You were one of the first things my husband and I discovered we had in common; he went to a concert on your Monster tour in Orlando while I was away at college being a poor freshman who couldn’t afford a ticket. When you came to Iowa, I had a friend buy me a T-shirt. The boy and I traded shirts through the mail, and 15 years later, we still have them.

I am thankful I did eventually get to see you twice in concert over the years. My only regret is not getting a T-shirt at the Vote for Change show. Springsteen didn’t hold a candle to you that night. Sorry, Boss.

I wasn’t saddened by yesterday’s news of the band ceasing to be. It made sense; I understood.

The fans will be fine. And I will always have “Catapult” on my playlist. And probably “Electrolite,” too.

Editor's Note: All the "It's the end of the world as we know it" headlines have just got to stop. Really people. It's not clever.

One Big Clusterflix

I'm a loyal user of Netflix, but I gotta tell ya, when the terse email came a few months ago saying they're raising rates and splitting services, I was irked. That could have been done some much better - and the socialmedia-sphere let them know it. Netflix-bashing exploded over Twitter and Facebook, making Netflix drop its customer projections by 1 million. Its stock also tumbled. Ouch.
  
Well, today I got an email -- from the CEO himself! He apologized and explained why they did what they did. That was supposed to make everything better, right? Oh you're splitting the company, renaming the most-established half, and creating two separate websites for each service that won't talk to each other. Fabulous. Now that it's explained, I'm totally on board. If you missed it, that was sarcasm.

Today, Twitter again comes alive with response. Mashable tweeted this article about Qwikster, the new name of the DVD-mailing portion that will be the "formerly known as Netflix" part. Problem is, the current @Qwikster Twitter handle is owned by a highly-effected muppet who has gotten quite a few new followers lately, and likely has no idea why.

Other funny people chimed in, like this:

 

I made this screenshot!

So, a price hike that could have been less traumatizing for its users again lives in infamy in the Twitter-verse. Consumers know prices are going to go up -- we don't like it, but if we love your product enough, we deal with it. Netflix simply could have explained the split, and branded it as having more options (hooray options!). Today's email from the CEO admitted the streaming audience is pretty darn different than its DVD-delivery subscribers; they should have addressed each separately and been a little more transparent on out outset. Now we're just left with a bad taste in our digitally streaming or DVD-receiving mouths.

I won't cancel our Netflix subscription, but I certainly won't pay two separate companies. I'll choose one and they'll get less money from me than they did a few months ago.  Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Qwikster.

2 Apps, 1 Very Happy User

On my phone live many apps. But only two of these make me smile and start in on thisreallylongexplanationofwhyyoumustgetthemtoo. One speaks to the ABC of me (yay communication all the time!), and the other to the OCD (I must have order!).

Fring

See, I'm a very important person. I need to be available to people should they need to plan something, or ask a very important question. My husband, friends and I all have divided loyalties when it comes to which instant messenger we use. And no matter how much I love these people, I am not about to have 14 different clients on my phone or computer. Enter Fring. It's just a simple little app that lets you sign into all of your IM accounts at once. GChat people sit in the same buddy list as AIM and Yahoo! folks. It's a glorious world, and buddies are none the wiser. While typing this blog, my husband and I had a very important conversation, see:

Because I have Fring on my phone, I wouldn't have missed this conversation had I been somewhere more exciting than my living room. Thank God for technology.


StitchMinder
The best free app ever for knitters/yarn people. Is your phone set to automatically go into sleep mode after X minutes? Not when you're using StitchMinder! What? You don't knit? Ok, I'll start from the beginning. In knitting projects, often you'll have a chart to follow, repeating the design in the chart over and over until you want to throw something (this blog post describes how the knitting rage begins for me quite well. Read it later.). Or sometimes you are given a really long list of row-by-row instructions. Sometimes that list has 14 billion rows on it, and if you can't remember if you just finished row 13,789,342 or row 13,789,343 the pattern gets all mucked up and you become violent. Just look at this instruction sheet I started before I knew about StitchMinder. It would make anyone twitch.

What StitchMinder does is allow you to tap the screen as you finish rows, and it remembers even if you shut off the app. When you return to the app, there are your numbers, sitting there like angels, awaiting your next session of knitting. You don't have to make hash marks on paper, or use the silly dot system like I did above.

When my IM buddies are all in one placing using one app, my knitting projects are nice and neat, and my patterns are hash-mark free, it's a beautiful world. Things line up, everything has its place and the knitting rage monster doesn't have to come out and fix things.

SocialMedia Me

I have circles; we all have circles. If you were to narrow down to 5 the things that make me who I am online, you'd get an odd mix. This odd mix, in fact:

The Daytona Beach News-Journal
The newspaper where I spent about 9 years. Most of my Facebook connections are friends and former colleagues I met here. Many have since become like family and most have left the paper, but we're all still connected to it (no matter how much we hate to admit it).

Drake University, and my home town
I have smaller circles -- all roughly the same size -- from my new friends at LSU, my old friends from college at Drake University, and high-school and home-town friends from growing up in DeLand, Florida. This is the second-biggest area where I use Facebook -- as a personal and social tool. I use it to keep in touch with friends (mostly) and some family. 

LSU
Since I married into the LSU Political Science grad student association, this group and I all use Facebook to keep up with each other, plus we use the Groups function to coordinate outings/happy hours/events.


Knitting
My social graph has an element I'm sure most in my class won't have -- a little community called Ravelry. It's not a site that gets a lot of mention in the social media scene, I'm sure. But if you knit, or have anything to do with yarn, you know about it. You logon multiple times a day. Your stash of yarn is categorized and photographed here, you've compiled a much-too-long list of projects of which you may someday complete a fraction, and you've stalked other people's projects to see how certain patterns *really* turn out. It's a closed system, but its users are rabid and incredibly loyal. They don't care that you can't post directly to Facebook from here or Tweet their recent yarn find. Anyone who cares will already be on Ravelry, clicking that little heart-shaped button by your latest creation. Despite that, I still tweet more about knitting and freelancing (more on that below), than I do life in general.
 
Being a freelancer
This is where Twitter comes more into play. I tweet about freelance projects. I also use Twitter to follow people and organizations that relate to my freelancing personality. @ChicagoManual, @MightyRedPen, @MerriamWebster, @APStylebook, @APA_Style, @AmerMedicalAssn are all folks I make a special effort to pay attention to when they appear in my newsfeed.

So what: I need more time to really process what all this means, but for now I'm fairly happy with the way I portray myself out in cyberland. I tend to want to separate certain personalities -- keep the freelancing away from Facebook, and keep Facebook away from anyone who really doesn't know me personally. Will this have to change to brand myself well in the digital-verse? Probably. In the mean time, I'll be contemplating how to give myself a digital make-over while still keeping some of my identities compartmentalized.

Coming later this week: A better blog post than this one.

5 Things I Think I Already Knew

So, there's this thing called a social graph. And, unless you're living under a rock (in which case you're likely not reading this), you have one. Your social graph shows how you are connected to all the rest of us in this virtual, social world. Whether you like it or not. In old school terms, it's the Six Degrees of Separation Game -- involve Kevin Bacon if you must.

So, to get a glimpse of my social graph, I turn to Facebook (who else?). There's this nifty little app called TouchGraph that magically pulls in your info and maps out how each of your friends is connected to you and everyone you know. Here's mine (I'm the big red blob in the middle with a rectangle in the center):

What this shows:

1. I have the majority of my connection from my former workplace, the newspaper.
2. I have a lot of friends, too, through my husband's former workplace, the aeronautical university.
3. High school friends make up the fewest dots.
4. College friends take up fewer circles on the graph, but I know I have more of them than high school friends on Facebook. I'm unsure of the color-coding/grouping on this.
5. The university in my hometown holds a fair number of connections for me, even though I never attended.

What I learned:

• The top-ranked "friend" was my husband (whew!). We look normal to the world. Hooray.
• The person who shares the most connections with me is not my husband, but the woman who sat next to me at work for nearly 9 years. This said a lot to me; it showed just how much what I did influenced who I knew, who I became, and who I associated with.

What I already knew:

• Of course (whew!) my husband would be my number one connection -- I see him every day.
• I know a lot of (former) newspaper people. I consider many as family. Why wouldn't the place where I spent the majority of my time and professional energy generate the most connections? It was a media outlet for goodness' sake, why wouldn't my coworkers also be members of the social media, too? Print people aren't all lame.
• While high school and college generated life-long friendships, I'm not nearly connected to most of them as I am the people who shared more of my adult life. It's true -- school is a time of social growth, but truly only a few stand the test of time (cold, hard fact. Sorry, classmates.). Those standouts rank as the big blue blobs on the social graph.

While it was interesting to see the lines move from friend to friend as I hovered over their name, ToughGraph's at-first creepy look at my life didn't really tell  me too much I didn't already know. What my bigger question (and later blog post) will ask is, how do I go about creating and managing this online identity/social graph/whateveryouwanttocallit that covers my professional, personal, and creative identities?