Cheryl Katz

the title would be called I Am So Not Cut Out for This and it would be filed in that section with all the truth-is-weirder/funnier/more entertaining-than-fiction female-interest novels get filed, the ones where protagonists agonize over gaining or losing 5 lbs, getting a date for the weekend, and how they’re going to become self-assured and fabulous.

But my magnum opus would be about the three weeks I’m currently in, where Sami is on school break and I am spending all day, every day keeping her entertained, running out all her energy, geting her to the potty like clockwork, and wrangling/bribing/negotiating her into a nap(-like situation) every day.

Suddenly, weekends *actually* have absolutely no meaning, as opposed to back when school was in session, when the days didn’t all blend endlessly one into another.

Suddenly, I’m awash with an entirely different set of reflections than the usual.  Now I’m thinking about how it seems like most mothers, presented with an “opportunity” to spend three whole weeks with their child, might be surrounded by happy feelings.  While at any given moment I absolutely love Sami, at any given moment I am also feeling one of a handful of feelings that are definitely not love.  How about frustration, boredom, anger, exhaustion… just to name a few.

I guess it’s normal to feel this way when days really do start bleeding into each other at the edges.  I fall into bed a lump of worn out caregiver, read for a little while until I fall into a restless, dreamless sleep, and start it all over way too early when Sami jumps on me in the morning and whisper-yelling, “ARE YOU AWAKE?”

They don’t make baby gates tall enough to stop her from climbing out, and even if they did, she’d just stand at the gate and yell, “Moooooommmmmmeeeeeeeeeeee,” over and over until I came to let her out.

While I’m not on the playground getting Sami good and tired, the intricate process of determining what she wants to eat and making it, dealing with pile after endless pile of laundry and washing the infinite supply of dishes we somehow burn through… then I have a few practical committments I’ve made with my time, and then the nagging question of what do I want to do next and how am I going to do it always hovering over my head.  (Hmm, why would I be worn out?)

I think I have all the critical elements of a pretty good first-person-self-effacing truth-is-humor novel/memoir right here.

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.