Walk, walk fashion baby

Fashion is not my thing. I’ll pin the occasional haute couture or prêt-à-porter item on Pinterest, but I’d rather be looking at Star Wars humor posts or knitting. When Adam found out I didn’t know Bond’s pea coat was designed in Alabama, he was pretty shocked. Basically, if you leave out the holiday sweaters and herd of tiny dogs, I’m a nerdy 60-year-old trapped in a 23-year-old’s body.

Aside from a turtleneck and some layering shirts, all of my clothing is at least two years old. I hate shopping, Black Friday and malls, so I buy classic items so I don’t have to go there often. The last time my mom took me shopping for my birthday, I got the same shirt in six colors. Don’t worry, I don’t normally wear two in the same week.

Being 6’1”, most shirts show part of my stomach and most skirts make me look like a streetwalker, so when I find something I like, I’ll usually buy it. Recently, the only place that has consistently had clothing that fit has been J. Crew. Their designs usually feature clean lines and modest enough cuts for daily wear, even for me.

In the past two years, I’ve only been able to find one pair of slacks that were decently flattering. They’re even long enough that I can wear heels, but the walk from the parking lot to my office precludes the use of four of the five pairs of work appropriate shoes I own.

Because the department of the company I work for is quite conservative, my work clothes are pretty uniform. Most days you’ll catch me in the black pointy-toed flats, gray wide-legged slacks, messy hair and a vacuum tube necklace. The only regular change is the shirt I pair with this combination. Sad, I know, but I can only do so much in the fifteen minutes before my 30 minute commute.

My closet is full enough that if I wanted to, I could dress well and looked polished every day. It’s been so much easier recently to stay rumpled—to dress appropriately for work but not look entirely professional. If you ask Adam, if I’m rumpled it’s only because of the science.

Title comes from Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance." We've already established I have a penchant for trashy music.

Incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

As you may have heard, I love voting. Walking into my polling place gives me butterflies—what if I choose the wrong guy (or gal) for the job? What if I haven’t done enough research about this person? Yep. Sounds like a first date, except instead of stalking on Facebook and Twitter, you use national news networks, campaign websites and your friends’ political leanings.

I’m not suggesting that you and your friends are into groupthink, but whether or not you like it, your peers’ political views influence your own. My group of friends is diverse in political views and backgrounds, so adventures through social media provide many opinions. During this past election, the media focus has been on the deep divisions in the country. Perhaps the repetition of this idea has lent it truth—up until very recently, the two dominant political parties differed on some issues, but were largely similar.

Because of the timeline, it appears that one of the causes of our political polarization is the way we get our news. With the huge increase in the number of news outlets provided by the Internet, individuals have an increased ability to choose their sources. As humans we tend to choose the sources that mirror and magnify our own views, so the tendency on the Internet is to do just that.  In so doing, we may discount the possibility that other viewpoints might have merit.

Another result of this shift is that science is under attack. With personal bias (I said it! I said the b-word!) playing a role in our choices, opinion has been put on the same level as hard data, years of repeatable experiments and pattern of thought may be discounted by personal opinion. I’m sorry, but believing gravity doesn’t exist won’t save your life if you walk off a cliff. On the flip side, several huge discoveries made recently have turned out to be bupkis after they were introduced by the Nature or Science journals and used in TED|Talks and news articles.

This shift from hard evidence to opinion is deeply unsettling to me, both as a scientist and as a writer. I have been raised to believe that the purpose of reporting is to provide as much relevant information on a topic as possible and to leave the conclusions to the audience. On the Internet, that sometimes involves reading multiple articles about the same topic from different sources which can be hugely time consuming.

Outside of NPR, who has fired correspondents because of personal political activity (their policy here), and PBS, I am straining to think of others I trust to give the full picture. Their paychecks come from listener support, grants and government funding, so money is less of an influence. Granted, you might disagree if you’ve ever been stuck in traffic during a pledge drive, but that’s a different story.

With the newness of new media, it largely remains to be seen if a (mostly) bias-free Internet-based news source possible in this new environment. Now I’m curious—how do you get your news?

Paul Simon's “Call Me Al” tied with the Beatles' “Daytripper” as my favorite song for almost a decade. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with my parents going to the Clinton inauguration. 

Close to home, close to the heart

I left my local readings out of my nerdy links post because they tend towards a much different side of the things I like. There are so many that I try to follow that it would take close to a week to list them all. Here are the some that I've been thinking about recently or are from people I've connected with through social media. I've divided them into categories: 1. Better with Coffee These blogs pair well with coffee--they are the introspective musings of people I know and people I think I would like to know.

Ink-stained Life Gold Shoe Blog Food Revival

2. Moving and shaking Straight up shots of energy, inspiration or humor.

YouGotRossed Writeous Babe See Jane Write Worst Weblog In The World Vodka Cranberry Clooney

3. Misc good stuff Music. Beer. Science. Food. Love.

Birmingham Box Set (Full disclosure: I write for this blog for fun) Primavera Urban Standard

4. City Love Life in Birmingham.

WBHM Magic City Made Mary Katherine Morris (photog) Kate Tully (photog) Rob Culpepper (photog) Cary Norton (photog)

Whiling away the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey

I don't read enough. Well, that's only half true. If you combine the time I spend reading blogs and my tutoring kids’ homework and text at work and you’ll probably end up with a figure much higher than the average American’s.

The full truth is that I don’t read enough books. Though I’ll occasionally read on a screen, a physical book is just so much...sexier. With a paper book, you have the weight of it in your hands, the smell of new or old binding glue and reminder of what you read to keep on your shelf. Virtual notes in ebooks just don’t evoke the same response that fading notes in the margins do.

That said, I frequent quite a few websites to keep my workdays lively. These are divided up into five main categories: nerdery, current events, music and pop culture and local love. The last one will get its own post.

If I’m having a rough day, I’ll usually visit the Nerdist. Home to a dedicated Neil deGrasse Tyson channel, a recurring celebrity bowling segment and sci fi TV news, it’s one of the easiest sources for fun. It’s also run by comedian Chris Hardwick, one of the geniuses behind this Ben Folds (+ Fraggles!) video and this parody of the meme above. Though I am a relative newcomer to the podcast, I’ve already gotten in trouble at work multiple times for laughing too hard at the Bane impersonations (video not from the Nerdist) and the episode with Bill Nye (language NSFW, proceed with headphones).

Many of my nerdy reads come from Adam via boingboing. The few times I’ve been on there, I’ve spent hours going back through the archives. It’s nerdy, tech-savvy and delicious.

My news sources tend to vary widely, from Al Jazeera to the Huffington Post to Fox News to the BBC to Jon Stewart. I try to source my news from several places to counteract the spin, but have recently tended towards focusing on the BBC and Al Jazeera for domestic political news. Turns out, if you’re not beholden to a fan base that has a personal, emotional interest on certain issues, your coverage tends towards a fact-based approach. More on that tomorrow.

For music and pop culture, I follow @PasteMagazine on Twitter and haunt its music section to discover bands’ touring schedules before they hit the venue websites. When used in tandem with a streaming service, it can also be a great way to discover new music or find artists who are talking about or coming to your town.

For pop culture, I usually go back to the Nerdist or boingboing, but I also regularly check the Muppets Studio YouTube channel. I dare you to try to watch their interpretation of “Stand By Me” and not say “HAI, I’M A BUNNEH” several times during the next day.

Title inspired by the Eleventh Doctor

Staccato signals of constant information

When my family moved to Alabama, my parents gave me a Lisa Frank diary. For a few months, I locked the details of my playground exploits, crushes and friends behind the unicorns playing on the rainbow covers. One day, I left it unlocked and open in the living room. At that point, I hadn’t acclimated. After eight years of life in Virginia, my new yellow (more Naples yellow than cream, ick) bedroom still seemed foreign.

Because what I had written was unhappy but tame—I had only just heard my first curse word—they sat me down to talk about it. I was mortified. As an only child, I wasn’t used to having my stuff moved or touched. I knew how to share, but that was my diary. That was MINE.

Now I don’t keep thoughts for anything other than writing projects on paper. There are a few drafts of angry letters to exes shuffled away somewhere and some notes from the trip I took to Europe, but those are camouflaged in my cluttered apartment.

As a paranoid member of Gen Y, it kind of makes sense. One look at my Facebook timeline and you're privy to an electronic record of the past seven years of my life. Until LiveJournal went through a purge earlier this year, you could’ve found my adolescent pre-Facebook drama there. Thank goodness that’s not readily available.

Thing is, social media has become the new way to journal and document life. This switch has some serious consequences—the electronic record is almost never entirely erased. It is easily shareable through social media and never entirely dies. On the other hand, paper can be scanned or copied, but it can also be totally destroyed. It doesn’t hurt that burning old documents can purge both your filing cabinet and your mind.

If Facebook had been around when I was younger, I probably would have been diagnosed with ADD and medicated accordingly. Multitasking at the same rate that I do now would have rendered me almost entirely unable to keep attention on one task at a time. Since I started Tweeting, Facebooking and text messaging later in life, I am still able to turn my phone on silent, make a friend change my social media passwords and get down to writing/working physics/being fully present. Once the assignment/hang out is over, though, I go right back to being constantly connected.

That’s the beauty and danger of social media. It’s possible to plug more into your community and to connect deeply with others who share your passion. It’s also easy to get sucked into documenting every detail of your life for everyone in your network to see.

Striking a balance between these two is the key—if you can’t, I’m going to hide your profile. That’s the purpose behind journaling, not social media, and is best left off the web. I heard that the book store you mentioned quite a few times on Tumblr is having a sale on Moleskines…

Title taken from Paul Simon's "The Boy In The Bubble"

Write, bake, love

The most difficult writing assignment I have ever completed was not on Fitzgerald or physics. When finished, it was only just longer than one page and filled less than half of the width of the page. Titled “Mom’s Little Flour Fairy,” it was a poem about my relationship with my mother.

Writing it wasn’t difficult because I have a tough relationship with her—she and I are pretty close. The challenge lay in stripping down the neatly constructed barriers I had positioned to separate my family life, social life and academic life. Though they kept me emotionally safeguarded, they also limited my ability to really grow and develop a voice in personal writing.

Fueled by Earl Gray, cheap cabernet sauvignon and smoked gouda, the poem finally took shape about six hours before the deadline. When it was fully drafted, I took a blanket and my glass of wine out to the porch swing and stared blankly into the shrubbery for a while.

According to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I am just barely an extrovert. In terms of my life, this one question margin means that I make friends easily, but that being in a crowd for too long exhilarates and stresses me out. If a day at work gets hectic and I tutor afterwards, I don’t go out for a drink, I curl up under blankets and knit. I also don’t like getting emotional around anyone—it makes me feel burdensome—but my amazingly caring group of friends has supported me and shown me that asking for support can be a sign of strength, not weakness.

When I got the poem back, my professor had noted that the poem was strong, but that it followed a tendency to distance myself emotionally from my writing.  Since that assignment, I really haven’t written poetry. In fact, I haven’t written anything that had such an emotional resonance since that poem.

I hope that writing here may begin to scratch away at that wall and make me more comfortable with this different type of writing. Even if it doesn’t, it still allows me to set that as an intent for my writing and to start learning how to put it into practice.

Mom’s Little Flour Fairy

As the oven ticked up to 350˚, Mom circled flour on gray granite to catch the raw bread left rising under a red-checked dish cloth. Feet resting on the paint-splattered beige of a stepstool, my hands followed hers, spraying a fine wheat dust over our arms.

My mother tipped the metal bowl, releasing the dough to plop in the white circle. Another reach into the flour jar gloved our hands against sticky crumbs and left a powdery print when she tapped my nose.

Sneezy giggles became the soundtrack to shaping dough into square loaf pans and the legs and shells of lumpy tortoises, left laying on a dented cookie sheet boasting a margarine sheen.

Newly washed fingers wrapped in paisley heat protection wrestled a wire oven shelf until it could cradle the browning turtle as Mom’s little flour fairy tugged her apron to ask to place the pans for baking.

Fingers digging into metal, I transferred my creations to the oven’s rack, only loosing my grip when the 350˚ shelf caught my naked digit under the sheet’s weight.

Seeing reddened skin and salt tears pooling in my eyes, my mother shoved the oven door shut and pulled my fingers over to the cool stream of tap water flowing over our dirty dishes.

Years later, my mother scrawls a fresh card with our bread recipe to replace one with water-smeared ink and a surface coarse from a dozen years of dried batter.

As she turns to check the time, I pluck the card off the counter, folding faded corners into my palm as I groan assent to taking the old copy out with the trash.

Heart it races

After 30 minutes of conversation, most people learn that I love writing, science, food, beer and music. Give me a little bit more time, and I’ll spill—I listen to a lot of trashy pop music. With an hour to kill in my car every weekday, most of the time is dedicated to filling my NPR fix, but some of it gets eaten by the local Top 40 stations.

In my defense, I work with high schoolers part time. I have recommended new pop songs (most notably Girl Talk, which is great for workouts!) for cheerleaders’ routines and breakups. For others, talking music involves Mutemath, Young the Giant, Jason Isbell and Imagine Dragons. It balances out, right?

Pop music also gave me a way to connect with my peers in high school and college. After many years saturated with Bach, Beethoven and the best bands you’ve never heard of, pop music was my way in. It was easy. Before I knew it, it was the soundtrack for my workouts and drive time.

The lyrics and rhythm of Top 40 music also lend themselves to memes and Star Wars parodies. They also inspired my favorite blog, Snacks and Shit, which I discovered during my John Wesley and the People Called Methodists class a few years back. Suffice it to say that reading through the posts during a lecture on the persecution of Methodists is not the best idea I’ve ever had. Enjoy with discretion.

When it comes down to it, the music is a break. In those moments, I get to shut down the part of my brain that moves at 290 m/s from the other bits that actually function rationally. Though I love NPR, I yell myself hoarse pretty regularly on national political matters. Pop music lets me escape to a world where it’s “complicated,” but after three minutes, something new cycles through.

These little breaks give me the mental space I need to do (all of) my jobs. It allows me to crawl out of my head and connect with people I wouldn’t before. It may be a deeply guilty pleasure, but it’s mine. All mine.

Title from an Architecture in Helsinki song.

Love in the time of Facebook

Without exercise and a creative outlet, even the tiniest annoyances inspire a nuclear-level reaction in my brain. I start clenching my teeth, my core temperature spikes and my posture goes to crap as I start taking pot shots at the people around me. After almost a year dating Adam, I’ve had to start consciously moderating my behavior.

Adam and I met in person at a mutual friend’s birthday party. Our initial courtship began with a Facebook message thread about cephalopods, special effects, books, music and food. That was how I gave him my number. Since then, our relationship has continued through messages and posts on Facebook, by text messages, phone calls and in person.

These days, my crazy moments happen when I neglect my emotional health. When the thankful posts on Facebook and Twitter started, I realized that I had not been at all mindful of how my emotional state affected Adam. Thus began my exercise—every day I tell him at least one reason I love him. Redirecting my focus often makes me smile and helps keep my emotions more level.

Coupled with an increased focus on regular exercise, deliberately practicing love has helped me to treat him as a friend as well as a partner. After seeing my progress in this area, I want to try this exercise with other areas of my life. I hope that continuing this practice will allow me to focus more on what I love about my city and my friends and even to share it with others.

On becoming socially active

Shortly before I began interning at Birmingham magazine, I made my Twitter account public. Much to my parents’ chagrin, I began meeting up with some of the people I met through social media. In the months that followed, the city and its opportunities opened up. I learned how to ask for opportunities, and haltingly began using social media as a connector. The targeted fearlessness that I learned has resulted in freelancing gigs and some really incredible interviews with artists, musicians and chefs I admire.

As a member of Gen Y, the Internet is comfortable and easy to navigate. I can point you towards grammar jokes or find you the latest in Fitzgerald scholarship. My Google fu is strong. I have a penchant for nerdy web comics, and love sharing funny things with friends.

It comes as no surprise, then that social media (especially Twitter) has fundamentally shaped my interactions with others. Despite warnings against the superficiality of social media, its use has resulted in friendships and enduring inside jokes. Most recently, I had coffee and beer “meetings” with people I connected with through Twitter thanks to WBHM’s Issues and Ales. Those two stories will get their own post later—Javacia and Alex are both people you should know.

Social media can be an amazingly effective way to connect with people. Few other forms of media are as efficient at conveying so much information, and if used safely and correctly, can result in such stimulating and satisfying conversations.

This blog will be my documentation of my adventures in social media, both personally and professionally. My hope is that it might even convince others to try connecting with new people through social media. After all, you’ll never know who you’d meet unless you try it.