Acting My Age ...

This was taken at the "Art of Video Games" exhibition on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in D.C.

A few weeks ago I was out at a bar with some friends, including a few people in their 20s. We got on the topic of how old I was, and I made them guess. A few of them thought I was in my late 20s, which was certainly flattering.

But lately I’ve been thinking how dumb it is of me to want to be mistaken for someone younger, or to even care if I look younger than I am. It’s not just about vanity or being stuck on some number. When I’ve thought about it at length, I realize it’s been more about wanting to go back to that moment in my life when I never questioned I was inventing the world, one idea at a time. That was definitely when I was fresh out of college, working at a dot com in the '90s in Austin, Texas. And the guys I was hanging out with a few weeks ago ... they remind me of that time. I’m in awe of what they’re creating for social media.  They are wicked-smart, relentlessly creative, exceptionally talented people, not to mention generous and authentic with their knowledge and how they share it with others. I get around them and learn new ways to solve problems in my own social media projects for higher education.

The thing is, though, I haven’t exactly dropped off the face of the earth, with being on the forefront of well-executed ideas myself. I don’t know when I started second guessing that, or why I don’t do a better job of celebrating what I’ve built along the way. My younger friends certainly don’t doubt what I’m doing and have never made me feel like I should be worried about it. I'm still dreaming and inventing all the time.

There are circumstances that make my age what it is: I make it a priority to take good care of my body because I want to be healthy and strong as long as possible. My creativity is alive and kicking, and something that can alternately make me feel like I’ve lived a thousand years and like I’ve just been born, depending on what I’m developing and experiencing. My work in digital communications for higher education certainly feeds my need to examine and respond to all the amazing innovations that are happening right now, and transforming how we relate to people, brands, markets, places, products. That’s timeless, and changing too quickly to make me feel bored or stagnant.

My birthday is coming up later this summer, and usually that induces some major epiphany related to reinvention. This time around, I think I’m going to sit back and assess what’s going on with my career, my health, my life and just feel thankful. It’s been a challenging but incredible year, in terms of what I’ve survived and done and discovered in my 30-something-year-old world. I need to honor that more.

Telling Time

I finally broke down and added Facebook's Timeline to my Facebook Profile last week. I like the billboard branding... or should I say, buzzwordishly, the personal branding possibilities ... of the larger-than-life cover photo. I’m enjoying the bigger, brighter compartmentalized sections that Facebook has created for all of us to review and admire about ourselves and our friends. What I’m struggling with is the tidy little bar on the right, the one beginning with “Now” and ending with when you were “Born.”

Don’t get me wrong, I like that easy swoosh of scrolling down years and remembering things that happened through what people shared on Facebook. That’s conveniently nostalgic and interesting. What I’m struggling with is the assumption that Facebook is where we should store and document every aspect of our lives, even before we were on Facebook--even before Facebook was invented. It indicates we should do some sort of exhaustive digital scrapbooking. It seems to presume that Facebook is not only taking over the Internet, but our personal pasts that happened before its invention and relentless inventory.

After exploring Timeline and all of its bells and whistles, I found myself wanting to remember the other ways we measure our lives by time. So I did what a lot of writers do ... I conducted an informal poll with my friends on Facebook:

Doing some writing and have a question for everyone: How do you measure and keep track of time? Perhaps a better way to put this would be: How do you know time is passing ... how do you measure your life by time? Would love to hear everyone's thoughts. Thanks.

One artist friend said he knew time was passing when he saw trees he had planted, and how much they had grown. He has a tiny studio that’s nestled in a meadow off a winding road in Western Maryland. A dedicated mom of two I know said she told time by “the increase of grey in my hair, the height of my children versus the height of the kitchen counter, and by the increasing discrepancy between the weight on my drivers license and my actual weight.”

“Now (telling time) is in the development of Samuel. Before him, I didn't really notice. Am I not still 28?” wondered one friend of mine who is a proud dad. “For about the last 8 months, I've measured time by the size of my belly,” said another friend, who is expecting her first child.

For the dedicated educators I know, the passage of time was marked by pop cultural references their students could no longer relate to and watching students go on to have kids and pursue graduate degrees. “Time passes? I thought I was living the same term over and over again,” one joked.

Books proved to be another source for keeping track of how years were passing by. “Rediscovering my notes from a book I've read some time ago and reading it again and discovering other things in it,” responded a professor friend. “Coffee spoons (literally),” said a poet I know, wryly citing T.S. Eliot and revealing her one-pot-a-day caffeine addiction. “People I have spooned with,” added my artist friend.

No matter how we spend time, measure it, mythologize it and reexamine it through digital documentation, the most unexplainably beautiful, memorable moments are perhaps best experienced when we’re living in the present, and reaching out and holding onto them with both hands. Stopping to notice and acknowledge them and realize they are not permanent.

Time has been transformed, and we have changed; it has advanced and set us in motion; it has unveiled its face, inspiring us with bewilderment and exhilaration. - Khalil Gibran

NEW FEATURE: Starting today, I'm going to create a Spotify playlist for each new blog post. Here's the one for Telling Time.

Video killed the radio star ... Did Spotify kill the mixed tape?

There’s a cracked leather box of cassettes I just can’t seem to part with, a random artifact that’s traveled with me to several states over the years.

A chronicled soundtrack of failed relationships or boyfriends who just drifted away before I could make sense of what we were supposed to be, all smudged black or blue ink valentined in between those steady lines on those folded white paper edges. Side A or Side B. Maxell, JVC. Homemade and heartmade.

Listening to these old grey and black plastic pastimes can take me back to high school, when this guy stopped me mid-sentence with a kiss in the middle of a crowded party on a balmy summer evening, a kiss the didn’t stop until we had eased ourselves away from everyone and found our own ledge on the front door step, behind the hedges, where we proceeded to make out with abandon. And other boyfriend stuff; driving around in cars, getting ready to go out to shows of bands we loved, writing really bad poetry in battered composition notebooks after we were over, always listening to that careful mishmash of just the right sentiments and genres, blended together. Indie rock, with some intelligent hip-hop mixed in, some Beastie Boys for smart-ass irony, some shoegazer rock. This music, in this order. An art, a science, an obsession we all shared, over the years, my fellow Gen Xers and I and the hipster youngsters who followed us and had cool older siblings who tutored them on the art of the mixed tape.

Those cassettes gave way to CDs, which eventually were eclipsed by Napster and iTunes, with some streaming Internet radio stations for variety and discovery of new bands along the way. It got less and less tangible, and more mix-and-match instant gratification, buffet syle. Gone was that afternoon you spent carefully studying your music collection like an archaeologist, unearthing the perfect songs for what you wanted to say, an act that lingered with the CD, but eventually went the way of the dinosaurs as the world dissolved into all things digital. That commitment of couples sealing their fate with their own soundtrack, crafted just so, was gone and no longer needed. Or so it seemed.

Like the rest of the music geeks, I was over-the-moon excited about Spotify, when I first heard about it. I netted an invite from a friend soon after it was available in the States. And it was daunting at first. Any song, any album I could think of, suddenly available, to build and take apart in an endless series of mixes, whenever and wherever I had Internet access? Where were the Napster-like lawsuits? How was this possible? At first I was giddy, snatching songs left and right, patching them together in a crazy quilt of audio bliss that was too chaotic and greedy to be artful. Then one night, I went to the drawer where those old mixed tapes were, pulled them out, and proceeded to capture my ex-boyfriend mixes as much as I could. It felt close to right.

In September, just a few months after Spotify came to the U.S., I was riding on MARTA, my first trip back home to Atlanta in what felt like forever. Two teenagers took the seat in front of me, their heads close together. The girl took out an iPod, her thumb skimming round the song lists in such a familiar way it was practically a reflex. She found what she was looking for and then took her headphones out and put one extension in her boyfriend’s ear. They leaned into each other, smiling, occasionally whispering, joined at the hip as much as the earbud. And it occurred to me that that heartfelt, electric moment of existing in song, together, was still very much alive and kicking. Not lost to all things digital, but suddenly mobile, happening in the moment in a way that mixed tapes could never be. Transitory, but still touching and very real.

Now I take my sweet time with Spotify and my playlists are a little more carefully woven together. I understand how those Millennials are milling around at shows, sharing songs, seducing each other through music, same as I did years ago. And I fall in love with music all over again and course through my time and theirs, feeling their energy and youth and savoring my own, rescripted in a whole new way.