Cheryl Katz

New post over at Jew and Julia… here’s an outtake:

What is the point of food if it isn’t satisfying?  I will admit that I’ve been struggling with my weight recently, and spending time feeling deprived.  Just recently, I decided that I am simply no longer going to waste calories eating food that I don’t enjoy.  Life is too short… but I’ve already said that.  I may wind up eating less, but I will wind up more satisfied.

Jew and Julia | SatisFAT-ion: how I learned to stop worrying and love the schmaltz.

My body has quit its most strenuous complaints against general motion, and today I got off my bum and ran an easy 3.1 miles.  Way better average time than in the half, OR in the first 3 miles of the half, go figure, on an equally hilly course.  Guess that’s what a good night’s sleep will do for you.

Clearly, it’s back to the grind.  Having picked up and gone back to running actually has helped to ease tension and relax me, and in the heat following my jog I stretched well.

And now that I’m not substantially increasing mileage for the forseeable future (there might be a marathon ahead, and DEFINITELY another half, but not for a little while) I am shifting priorities for a while back to overall fitness with an eye toward weight loss.  Who knows, maybe running a half marathon 5 pounds lighter will make that much difference in my time and energy level.  Never can tell until I try.

I’m coasting on the “Holy crap I did it!!!” sentiment.  I’m now further chuffed having dragged my sorry butt on a run I didn’t feel particularly inclined to do until it was already under way, and really proud of how good I feel RIGHT NOW.

Taking full advantage of the endorphin boost, I’m counting calories again, I am completely ditching my “chocolate for lunch” attitude of the last few weeks, and I’m gearing up to be cooking a lot – hot kitchen be damned!  I have a very interesting food project on the horizon which you will be hearing about in due time (sooner rather than later, I hope.)

Right now, I’m scanning my to-do list (yes, I have one!) and seeing that I need to get busy.  Daily grind, here I come.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship of a blog to other kinds of media, especially Twitter.

This comes as part of two related trains of thought: what does Twitter really *do*, exactly?  And more importantly, what am I doing with my life?

You may wonder how everything I’ve written thus far are related.  Let’s discuss.

1) What does Twitter really *do*, exactly? I started down this particular path when news from Iran began unfolding primarily over Twitter channels.  Twitter is an online outlet that until recently I hadn’t been using much, and to be honest I haven’t determined my thoughts or feelings about it.  It’s quite handy for blurting things and pictures out onto the internet as they’re happening.  I’m able to absorb bite-size updates from a distinctly different circle of friends than the ones on Facebook or within blogging circles.  And I’ve recently started following entities (websites, news outlets) in addition to the individual Twitter feeds I’d been following for a longer time.

This is what led me to explore the interplay between Twitter and my blog.  To that end, I’ve created a new Twitter ID, @cheryl_katz, which will truthfully probably contain most of the content that had previously been blurted through @cinediva – now with more brand/identity and domain-matching consistency!  And maybe with fewer gory details of my personal life.

To these ends, I’m conducting some informal research to learn what there is already catalogued out there about the use of Twitter in internet marketing, especially but not limited to the blog world.  Here are some links I turned up, for the curious:

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/5-ways-to-use-twitter-for-good.html
http://bethkanter.wikispaces.com/twitter_primer
http://blog.mskpetigo.com/2008/04/tweets-or-blogs-personal-perspective.html
http://blog.ogilvypr.com/2008/08/the-creation-of-twitter-best-practices-round-1/
http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/twitter-guide/
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/01/25/35-twitter-tips-from-35-twitter-users/

I have no comments to share on these, as yet, but they’ve been open in Firefox tabs for a few days and I’ve been noshing casually on them.

Which leads me to my second purpose:

2)  What am I doing with my life? You might suspect that a snappy Google search isn’t turning up handy results, and if you suspected that, you’d be right.  But this question relates to Twitter in the simple sense of being a marketing element on the internet.  Once upon a time, on- and off-line marketing for a fast-growing startup web-based software company were projects of my daily concern.  I got pregnant, hired and trained a replacement, took a maternity leave, and when I returned to work a year later had entirely different hats, not within my area of “expertise” so to speak, to wear for the sake of the company.

But one day, now, I’m going to want to re-enter the workforce somewhere within my vast and very flexible comfort zone.  In my confident moments, I’m aware that I can (and have done in the past) jump into any role and quickly acquire the necessary skills.  I’ve proven over five years and four job titles within our former company that I am easily adaptable and readily able to hit the ground running.  I am very good especially at establishing a department and hiring the right person to take it to the next level.

I bring this up mostly to illustrate that while I spend a lot of time considering what I “can” do given my skills and experience, the more pertinent question is what a) do I want to do and b) am I “in shape” to do?

a) is a far harder question.  b) is an answer entirely within my control.

So I’ve decided to spend some of my free time pursuing opportunities through volunteer efforts and pro bono work to exercise elements of my eclectic skill set as it interests me to do so.  I’ll be helping out with our synagogue website and published materials in various ways, working for a former colleague on projects of interest to him and professional benefit to myself, and I will focus my efforts to develop my blog both creatively and functionally.  I’m working out some muscles that to be honest are a little rusty and atrophied, but the knowledge is still in there, and I have a reassuring ability to learn stuff for doing things.  To bring it back around to the beginning – I’ll be starting with Twitter.

After a long day out and about yesterday, Sami crashed in the car on the way home. (We’re talking 5 PM – not a convenient or particularly healthy time for a crash, so needless to say a) I didn’t wind up being able to accept the impromptu dinner invitation we received and b) she woke up practically in the middle of the night hungry for dinner.)

At actual dinner time, I was alone and brought near to the brink of starvation by my own drive not only to feed myself but to somehow be creative about it. I wound up throwing a salad together from rinsed spring mix from our CSA box, some strawberries and a few crushed walnuts, and a home made vinaigrette.

Not quite the satisfying dinner I was looking for, but at least it was attractive looking and probably a #2 on a scale of creativity where 0 is boring as hell and 10 is mindblowing delicious creative artiness. Nonetheless, after this bowl of yum, I was still craving substance.

I cooked up some split peas (didn’t have any lentils in the house) then drained them, tossed them in a tablespoon of vinaigrette, added salt and pepper and chopped in some Irish cheese. Again with the not terribly creative, but what it lacked in originality it sure made up for in satisfaction and in flavor.

I have so much to write about, things with actual substance, and they are so large that I can’t get them out here when I want them. Instead I am holding place with some minutiae, though I suspect it’s in the minutiae that people find the unexpected interesting nuggets of writing that bring me back to others’ blogs. C’est la vie. I offered this by way of lame near-apology; I hope that my “off” posts offer some level of sustenance even if they’re not the masterpieces I hope to be writing. If you’re still reading here, thanks for giving me audience. This blog is as much for me as it is for you.

Here is a list of things I haven’t been doing:

Photography
Spinning
Knitting
Reading
Active gardening (have weeded and/or harvested, and plan to put tomatoes down soon)
Changing the world
Valuing my own time, efforts and accomplishments
Blogging (or writing at all)

I’m sure there are plenty of other things I also haven’t been doing, but these are ones I might be reasonably expected to do.  I have, on the other hand, spent a lot of time thinking about all of the areas in which I perceive that I lack, and build boxes of “important stuff” into which I somehow miraculously never fall.

I also killed my blog for the span of about twenty-four hours.  Why?  I have an easy, truthful answer for that, actually.  I like to blog when I’ve done things.  I don’t like to talk so much about the times when I’m floundering and uncertain, and much much less when I’m mentally eating myself alive.  At least not until I feel I’m able to explain it away with a neat conclusion.

My life isn’t really like that.  That’s why it’s been getting harder and harder for me to blog.  I do struggle to accept my abilities and get over my weaknesses.  And when I get into a funk, I do withdraw a bit from doing the things I generally like and feel fulfilled doing (see list above) which removes me further from a) blogging and b) feeling worthwhile.

Here’s something I have been doing a lot of: being a mom.  I spent a whole week and a half at home, full time, with Sami.  I felt at the same time monstrously satisfied and completely inadequate to the task.  By the end of the week I’d realized that the times I felt frustrated, overwhelmed and inadequate were not a wholesale reflection on my actual parenting abilities, but on the age and general tenacity of my child.  That I was able to turn it over and get to that point is, in a word, unusual.

I shouldn’t be excessively hard on myself (not that this stops me.)  I forget sometimes how deeply I still feel the loss of Alex.  I’ll be Jewish in a month and counting, and while most days I feel prepared, inside this is a lot of change and there are still many un-addressed questions; and worse, questions I have answered in my mind whose answers are unsettling when I think about them too hard and too long.  Passover was hard.  Ben’s been traveling a lot.  Life, it seems, gets harder all the time when you’re an adult and you have to face it.

I feel sometimes that I went directly from being a child to being a parent, bypassing some integral non-parent adult phase.  But there I go being all negative on myself.

The only cure for my self-criticism for things I’m not doing… is to start doing them again.  I got back to “normal” weeks ago, post-Alex, but I need to get back to real normal.  Whatever that is.

So I’ll post on, except when I don’t.  (How’s that for a noncommittal, completely attainable promise?)

Baby steps, my friends.

And I’m somehow still staying kosher for passover. In fact, somehow I’m still functioning more or less as a human adult!

I have a lot on my mind but with the wee one home from school this week, I have no time for writing it all out. I want to promise posts to come, but can’t really commit to that, especially since I’m now extra cautious about sharing my most personal beliefs.

Stay tuned for some kind of noise. Chag sameach!

Birthday Balloons!

Originally uploaded by cinediva

But it’s been a little busy.

Somebody had a birthday….

We went to a wedding in Yosemite.  It was actually a big wedding month for our family!

Oh, and I upgraded my blog and brought it down for who knows how long.  I let it slide a few days before bothering to do anything to fix it; I’m not the avid technophile I once was.  (I still haven’t figured out what happened to all my categories, but that’s small potatoes.  At least my blog is up now.)

It’s been a nice break.  October is shaping up to be every bit as busy as September was, only with less travel.  I hope to be better in touch going forward. 

I didn’t see this at the time it was shown, I actually only got to view it after we’d finished with McCain’s speech (had to pause it to put the wee one to bed.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDx80bnFrVs

I found the imagery beyond upsetting. Appalling. Not in and of itself, but because it was being shamelessly exploited to make people feel afraid, to garner support for Republican defense policies.

I was there on 9/11. Not the only person I know who was there, and certainly one of a million people in the tip of lower manhattan that day. Footage of the destruction, the dead and the dying, touch a tender spot that I tend to armor pretty well. I don’t like it when those feelings and those memories are triggered; I especially dislike it when its purpose is to convince me to hate an enemy or vote a certain way.

Keith Olbermann’s reaction was dead on. Republicans regularly decry the kind of graphic footage that was used, and yet found it appropriate to stuff their propaganda full of it.

I really am appalled.

That bit toward the end about having been an arrogant jerk and how he came to love America more than himself was actually good. Too bad he ended every sentence with a creepy, forced smile; it made almost everything he said seem insincere.

He actually seemed most natural, human and approachable in the moments after the protester was hauled off. His off the cuff comment made him seem for a brief moment connected to what was going on around him.

The rest nearly put me to sleep. It really is a shame that he wasted the whole speech making policy sound like the most boring topic on earth. Even if I disagree, I still enjoy a good speech better than one that sounds half asleep.

If they can’t keep protesters out of their own convention, how are they going to protect us from terrorists?

Yes, this builds confidence.