Blech.

Silence has been brought to you by the letter I as in illness. Since late last Thursday I've been ruing the day/the person/the food that has gotten me sick (not sure which). All projects slated for the holiday weekend have not happened (save doing the laundry) as I have been practically comatose. Props to the dog for staying by my side, still slightly disappointed I couldn't teach him to run to the store for me. Sigh.

All those thoughts I had in my twenties about what I missed out on not ever living on my own without roommates of any sort... total b.s. Seriously. Having no one around to ask to run to get you something as simple as ice chips from the next room, let alone something from the store sucks. Call me dependent, whatever. There was nothing pleasant about my trip to the co-op for me or the cashier who looked at me like I might give her the bubonic plague as I attempted to secure broth and more applesauce.

Slowly regaining footing just in time for DH's pending return. Finally.

Apparently I Live in a Bubble

A recent conversation with a very, very close person in my life (from and living in Midwest for full disclosure) left me a little bruised. Definitively I was told that because I live "inside the beltway" I no longer understand what it means to be living in the Midwest or how people in the Midwest "are."

So all those times when I flinch during the campaign cycle when politicians say "he's a Washington Insider" which is code for an evil, disenfranchised, out-of-touch individual are now being applied to me. My zip code makes me a member of the "ruling class." Seriously, I'm not making this up.

Really? Wow, last time I checked I was still trying to figure out how to save up enough to buy house, cut my grocery and gas budget, cook better meals at home, and scrape together enough for a vacation if there's anything left over. How is that exactly out of touch with the rest of the country?

Furthermore, I was informed that people make a choice. You either do well or do good, but you can't do both.

Metaphorically staggering backwards, I recover enough to sputter, I'm sorry what part of working for a college and my spouse being an AID contractor scream doing well in your terms? Are we far more fortunate than many people really struggling to make the bills on a daily basis, absolutely. But have I sold out and started doing PR for people who club baby seals, melt the ice caps and want to build condos in Antarctica? Um, no.

I respectfully disagree on so many levels.

When the discussion devolves into you don't understand me because you live in Washington, I fear there's no conversation left to have... sigh.

Status Update

After reading this article in the Washington Post I started to pay more attention to the life events and proclamations made back and forth between friends on Facebook. Individuals merely commenting on their daily state of being becomes in aggregate an accounting of a friend's pregnancy or continued search for employment.

Valentine's Day of course brought a spike in the professions of love and affection and I began to wonder about how a perceived instant audience of FB is altering our behavior to share personal details. Do we more readily share or express our ups and downs because the personal, yet impersonal nature of Facebook? Does the cattle call news need just make it easier to share big life news? Allowing us to include more people in our joy and sorrows, and therefore by extension actually bringing us closer together?

I'm thrilled when I see a friend announce they are expecting that I might otherwise never have heard about. And there's always a few go to friends for pithy comments and clever commentary on their life experiences. I've carved out time in my schedule to regularly check FB. Does this enhance my overall well being? Make me more connected to my fellow man? To a certain degree, yes. I am not one to advocate for the extraction of technology from our lives as a means of communication.

However, I certainly believe the line between public and private lives is more readily blurring. One of the more honest comments I've read in recent months about work life balance is that you can't separate the two. The balance is in the blending of them. By creating strict hierarchies of separation and punishing yourself when you fail to adhere, no one wins and more unnecessary is created. Balance yes, but full separation is highly unlikely. So how does this same logic potentially apply to blurring our public and private personas?
 
For my own consideration because I work in communications, interacting with new media channels in a closed a protected manner is largely against the very idea of exploring a mediums potential. If I tweeted and blogged to myself, I wouldn't gain greater understanding of information flow and user behavior. Yet, the risk is higher. I'm creating a permanent digital paper trail of my writing, my ideas, myself as an individual.

But fundamentally I return to the larger question of relationships and personal information sharing. Are we extracting a greater benefit out of now sharing more information about our feelings, our life changes? Are we creating a new set of expectations about relationship success and failure? Do you show your relationship status or not? Do you post personal pictures or not?

Inevitably age introduces a level of comfort or seamless integration of technology into how one expresses their thoughts and feelings about big events and relationships. So, isolating emerging users and fluent users (basically everyone under 27 or so) and focusing on the late 20s to 40s crowd, have we enhanced our lives or the quality of our relationships by documenting it on FB?

I would put forth a qualified yes. And yet, I find myself limiting my information on the site more and more. Deleting and removing images that seem extraneously archived there. And I wonder how the next ruminations of the machine will alter our behavior in 24, 36 months and beyond.

Resolute Desk

Amid the binge sorting and cleaning of the other week DH finally agreed that he needed a better at-home workspace. Our little grandma's bill paying desk was great, but his knees didn't fit under it. Since we're trying to make no serious furniture purchases this year, the only logical place to look was IKEA. Less than $70 later, he is now blissful over his new "work surface" in the corner of our loft space.

This has now left me with two piles upstairs to still deal with: the remains of sorting down to "OMG we have to keep that paperwork/stuff we can't live without" and now a little desk that has become an island piled high with desk stuff and Christmas decor carnage.

I've realized that we should have waited on getting the new desk because DH's interest in sorting and filing has been completely lost to his obsession with how productive he can now be at home. Sigh. Well, at least I know what I'll be doing while he's traveling. Oh that and the honey-do list he pulled out for me this morning.

Over nine years of marriage and never once has he given me a list... is this progress? Greater equality? Well, you can't fight the list.