A World of 140 Characters

November 10, 2010

Yesterday’s Facebook post got me thinking more about oversharing, overtalking, overfriending, etc.  Let’s move on to Twitter.

Like I said, I’ve been tweeting longer than I’ve been on Facebook and I really like, even prefer, Twitter.  No, Twitter Haters, it’s not because I have to share the contents of my lunch with the world. It’s more like a dashboard of all my interests rolled into one, just scrolling in front of me in real time.  Where else can I get CNN Breaking News, followed by a tidbit of NYC history, the latest stroller reviews and today’s alleged celebrity affair/pregnancy/rehab visit — in 5 seconds flat?

It’s like a car crash that you can’t stop watching.  Here’s what I’ve got now.

And let me tell you, you don’t see the full power of Twitter until you watch a piece of national news unfold there.  Remember that whole story about the Balloon Boy?   Well, before we all knew his parents were publicity-seeking crazies, everyone was riveted by a boy trapped in a runaway hot air balloon.  And it was all over Twitter, blow by blow, from every news source.  Ditto the recent Brooklyn tornado.  I saw photos and video on Twitter before it was on the local news.

So, who is worth following?  For me, they tend to fall into these buckets:

  • News Outlets/Journalists
  • Parenting
  • Friends
  • Movies
  • Food
  • Travel
  • Celebrity nonsense
  • Brands I like
  • Work Stuff (PR, financial services)

See, it’s really not a full day until I hear what’s on the minds of Gawker, Starwood Hotels, Conan O’Brien, CNN, Slash, Ed Burns, NJ Transit Alerts, Steve Martin, my co-worker Sarah, SelfishMom, The Pioneer Woman, Bethenny Frankel, Anthony Bourdain and Stiller & Meara, to name a random few of the 226 I’m following right now.

And then, yes, I put my nonsense blurbs out there too.  It’s good that Twitter restricts me to 140 characters since being brief is not my strong suit (as you agree, rolling your eyes).  It’s a nice exercise in self-editing.

Fellow tweeters, who are some of your favorite follows I can add?  Also, anyone who’s on Tumblr, let me know how you like it. 

And yes, I clearly have the attention span of a six month-old.

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Trimming the Facebook Fat

November 9, 2010

I’m sort of a Facebook infant in the grand scheme of things.  I resisted for a long while and didn’t sign up until July of this year.  It was the same week, in fact, that Facebook announced its 500 millionth member.  I have to wonder if that milestone member was actually me — and, more importantly, shouldn’t I have won something for my impeccable timing?  I guess not.  (Mark Zuckerberg, if you get this, have your girl call my girl.)

“Wait.  You just joined Facebook in July?”

Before you call me a total dinosaur, I’ll defend myself and say I was tweeting, Linking In and Four Squaring long before I was Facebooking.  And I lurked on my husband’s Facebook account from time  to time — a sort of Beta entry, if you will.  So I wasn’t running around wondering what the heck “that Facebook” was all about.  I knew. 

It was my then-impending high school reunion that finally brought me over to the dark side.  Given that he had no affiliation whatsoever with my high school, it just would have been plain weird to sign up for the reunion under P’s account, right?  So it was time for me to bust out and get my own account with my own friends and my own ghosts of my own past.

Now, I am a captive audience to this time sucking zone of blue and white web pages.  I enjoy it.  Maybe I’m still in the extended honeymoon phase, but I like catching up with old friends and old acquaintances, seeing their photos, knowing what they are up to. 

**To an extent.**

I’ll never be the gal with hundreds of Facebook friends.  I’m not that popular, which I came to terms with years ago in the offline world, and frankly, I don’t think I like quite that many people beyond common courtesy.  But that’s OK.

You know why?  Because Jimmy Kimmel said so.

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I know the people he’s talking about  — the people whose every move is documented on Facebook.  It’s dizzying.  I’m sure there’s some relevance here to how friendship and communication have evolved over time.  And I have to believe that, at this phase of the game, entire dissertations have been devoted to some generational analysis of blah blah blah [white noise here]…so let’s leave the real insight to the academics and social media gurus who can more elegantly explain it.  Me, I’m just here to support Jimmy Kimmel.

As for the folks with hundreds of Facebook friends, if you have the time, God bless.  I have a very close relative with over 700 Facebook friends.  But I think she may be the exception to Jimmy’s late night rant — she really is friends with many of these folks.  Before you ask me how that’s possible, I’ll just stop you and say please take my word for it.  Better yet, I may ask her to guest blog about the art of maintaining a large, global friend base.  She is a master.  I can barely remember my husband’s birthday. 

As for the rest of us mere mortals who are only liked by and enjoy the company of a limited amount of people, no worries.  A few updates now and then, a photo of your kids, some life changes on Facebook — and we’re good.  I’ll try to keep it to an acceptable minimum as well.  It’s sort of the unspoken deal — well, as far as I’m concerned anyway.

And if I fail to uphold my end of the deal (and sometimes I do), you can add me to your purge list on November 17, just like Jimmy said. 

What about you guys?  Do you have some fat to trim on your FB roster or did you keep it lean?

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Missing Out

November 8, 2010

I won’t get into the whole working vs staying at home debate right now, but I’ll just say that there are obviously things I miss out on during my office tour of duty every week.  Milestones, school happenings and just the silly, fun, mundane stuff. 

Like this.

I don’t know who the strange bear/chef is and why he was roaming the grocery store — though, admittedly, he freaks me out a bit — but my nanny says that the baby was enthralled.   So enthralled, in fact, that said unnamed freaky bear/chef sent them home with a miniature stuffed version of himself, which the baby proceeded to hug all weekend.   The mini stuffed version is far less freaky.

Anyway, I missed it.  It wasn’t a huge, life-changing moment  — but it was awfully sweet.

(Does this bear roam your grocery store?  Just curious.)

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Next Stop: Eataly

November 5, 2010

I am totally fascinated by the Manhattan opening of Eataly — a 50,000 square foot massiveness of Italian food, shops, wine and treats. 

Yes — 50,000 square feet.  But Mario Batali never does anything small, and he is one of Eataly’s backers. 

I haven’t been there yet, but I know this much.  In addition to seven restaurants, a full upscale Italian market, a cooking school, wine bar, vegetable butcher, two wood-fired pizza ovens and a fresh pasta counter, Eataly (awful name, no?) also has the following lures (this is the stuff that really caught my eye):

  • A Lavazza coffee stand
  • Paninoteca (bread bread bread bread)
  • Pasticceria (pastries!)
  • Rosticceria (roasted meats)
  • Gelateria (need I say more)
  • And, finally — wait for it:  Il Laboratoria De La Mozzarella.  *Cue angels singing*

It’s just so much…Italy, I guess.  I can’t decide if this is pure genius or a bit of Vegas.  Or perhaps EPCOT.  

Check out this news clip that covered the big opening day.

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If the excitement of the woman being interviewed in the blue halter dress is any indication, I guess I should really make the pilgrimage.  Or maybe she just hit the new wine bar a bit hard.  Or had one too many espressos. 

The whole thing seems odd for Manhattan, or maybe for the fading Manhattan that didn’t embrace strip malls, big chains or anything too contrived.  (The recent travesty of turning the Limelight into a mall comes to mind, which was a bigger sin than its original conversion from a church to a den of 80s and 90s hedonism.  But let’s cover that another day, if I can somehow dust off those fuzzy memories.)

In the meantime, I hope to get to Eataly soon and check it out for myself.  But if any of you guys get there before me, please give me the scoop — along with a gelato, an espresso and a ball of fresh mozzarella. 

 Grazie mille.

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Filed Under: Food & Drink, Places Near and Far 6 Comments

First Halloween in Suburbia

November 3, 2010

Well, it was my first one as an adult, anyway, and here’s what I learned:  Halloween is no joke in the suburbs.  It’s sort of hard core.  From the house and yard decorations to the amount of candy one needs to distribute, we were not entirely prepared.

Who knew that people decorated their homes in our town as if there was a blue ribbon to be handed out, or as though Martha Stewart was coming through with a camera crew?  Not us — we thought our three little yard scarecrows and an uncarved pumpkin were cute.

Who knew that nine large bags of candy was amateurish?  Not us.  Sorry, neighborhood children, we suck. 

But those shortcomings aside, we had a great day.  Nobody pitched a fit over wearing a costume, which was a good start.

Not even the dog, though he did mumble something about abject humiliation, animal cruelty and finding a new home.  But we resolved our differences.

This was the first year our son really understood the whole trick-or-treat gig and the candy payoff.  By the third house, he was a seasoned pro.

And the baby caught on quickly.  She’s in the “Let me run and find danger” phase, so she was on the move — as much as her giant lamb suit would allow.

We finally slowed her down for a milk break.

And with our loot, we went home to comb through our treats.  And by “our treats,” of course I mean some very strategic skimming on my part.  (How come nobody gives out Mounds anymore?  Those are my favorite.  Not a single one in the bag.)

And then there was the sad realization that our nine bags of candy would only last about another hour in prime time.  Next year, we’ll be ready.

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The Blasphemy of Hating Baseball

November 2, 2010

I hate baseball.  Thank God it’s over.  

I know, it’s terribly un-American of me.  You can go ahead and call me all kinds of names, shake your heads in disbelief, wonder what kind of upbringing I had, if I have a genetic mutation, etc.  Sorry, I’ve tried.  I just can’t get on board. 

Maybe it’s just me, but is it not endless?  I mean both the games themselves and then the sheer number of them.  A “season” of sports to me means a couple of months, tops — not, say, seven.  When you have taken up more than half of the year, I call your “season” a fraud.

Admittedly, I know little about baseball in a factual sense, so I did some quick digging just to check my sanity.

  • A regular NFL season is 16 games.  A regular MLB season is 162 games.  Ten times more.  I think we can agree that, at least in sheer numbers, this is not comparable.
  • The entire MLB combined plays 2,430 games in a regular season. Now we’re onto something.  It is, in fact, endless.

I am sure I’ve unknowingly made an apples-to-oranges comparison here between the MLB and the NFL for a variety of reasons that sports fans will quickly point out.  I’m just saying, on the surface, this begins to explain my visceral reaction against America’s Favorite Pastime. 

If you love baseball, I envy you.  It must be fabulous to have access to something you want to see over 2,000 times per year.  How cool is that.  If only Lost had adopted this schedule (though my head may have physically imploded — there would be more Dharma backstory and possibly a second rescue effort, but I digress)…

Anyway, I kind of have no business writing about sports.  It’s not my thing, overall.  But, to add some shred of credibility, I like football.  I like that it has a distinct seasonality to it — that when the end of summer rolls around, we’re ready for it.  And when the awfulness of January wraps up, we’re figuring out where to watch the Super Bowl.  And that’s it.  Those 16 weeks of regular season play make it a distinct timeline.  And it’s a treat, right?  Sundays and Mondays.  An event.  So when it’s over, you’ve got some wistfulness. 

Baseball, you have it all the time.  Five nights a week.  Seven months.  Where’s the specialness in that?  Well, unless you’re a fan — then it’s probably fantastic.

As for the rest of us, thanks, San Francisco, for finishing it off in five games. 

Now we have, what, three weeks, until spring training starts?

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