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.

The Last Hurrah of Father's Day ...

A public art work I came across while walking around in D.C. yesterday. It has a sign that says something along the lines of "Father's Day, Gone Fishing."

Social media is such a weird barometer for how transitory and simultaneous the world is. This year on Father's Day, one of my friends just gave birth to her first son, another friend lost his father to cancer. All of this was prominently announced on Facebook, of course.

I honestly tried not to think about my Dad when June 17 rolled around, because I miss him too much. Luckily, yesterday I was nowhere near old photo albums, or even paying that much attention to social media. Instead, I was walking around D.C. with friends looking for a good place to grab brunch, nursing a mild hangover and enjoying how beautiful the day was.

I got sunburned and I was late getting back to where I live out in the mountains of Maryland, but I don’t care, it felt good to be careless, mindless and unaware of time passing.

Does time even matter anymore, when we’re carefully curating every moment of our lives? Don’t we supposedly exist forever, in tweets, posts and Pins? I can’t bear to post one of those faded, scanned images of my Dad and me as a Profile pic, like so many people do when this annual celebration of dads rolls around. I know his presence didn’t last ... only until I was 15 years old. I don’t want to go back to that moment, and what it felt like to lose him, ever again, visually or otherwise. It's not that I begrudge people who need that on Father's Day. It's just that I can't relate to it, and I don't want to.

What I want to do instead is live every moment like it’s the day I decided his death wouldn’t hold me back in any way. And I’ve been doing that a lot lately ... traveling, doing art shows, writing anything and everything I want, running half marathons. Dancing in a club somewhere, where time appropriately stops, as it should, because I get lost in all that good music and the people around me, just existing in life, bright and flashing and full of possibility.

The BEST Valentine EVER That Social Media People Can Give

Engagement. Authenticity. Responsiveness. People who use social media for marketing and communications love these words. They use them with a sense of authority and power and promise.

I’ve used these words before, in various meetings and presentations. I like them. But I also hate them a little bit. Because they basically add up to this ironclad guarantee that social media marketers are supposed to make it work around the clock. They’re supposed to be staring down at their iPhones and their computers every other second, checking on something they tweeted, posted, uploaded, etc., to see if anyone’s commenting on it, liking it, REtweeting it, pinning it. To see if there’s something new they should say, in response to a question or comment or photo. Basically, these communicators, who in their previous lives were people persons ... people people?? ... are now auto-conveying emotion, meaning, humor. They’re becoming human robots with social ADD who are plugged in 24/7 to digital everything. The ones who are taking pictures of the Jumbo Screen at the Pearl Jam concert with their phones while the band is only a few feet away and could practically spit or throw a drumstick at them.*

But you know who hates “engagement,” “authenticity” and “responsiveness” the most? The significant others of the social media “gurus.” Ironically, these words used to describe the personality of someone who was a great spouse or boyfriend or daughter. Someone who paid attention, was spontaneously awesome in the real time of here and now.

Guess what? These words can STILL be used that way, in that context. Here’s how: If you happen to use social media as a large component of your job, do yourself a favor, and give your partner the BEST valentine ever! Grab your boyfriend’s hand rather than punch in another text while you’re out walking down the street to the restaurant where you're having what feels like the first dinner out in weeks with just the two of you. Turn off the damn device when you’re out to dinner. For God’s sake, DO NOT bring your iPhone into the bedroom, at least not into the bed. Put it somewhere where you can still hear the alarm, but you can’t reach it to fire it up first thing when you wake up in the morning. Instead, wrap your arms around whoever’s next to you --- your husband, your girlfriend, your dog --- and appreciate them for a little while instead. Ignore your status updates, your tiny blue birds, your blogs. Just exist for a little while, and remember why you feel so glad to have someone who loves you, and who you're also crazy about. And if you’re single, all this stuff still applies: Ultimately, the best relationship you need to have is with yourself, and you’re not a machine.

Here are a few other great words: “Unplug.” “Recharge.” And let’s not forget “Hootsuite” and “TweetDeck,” or, as I like to call them, “digital interns.” Take the night off and go have some fun, with your friends, with your girlfriend, with yourself. The digital world, changing at the speed of light, can’t exactly wait, but it will be there when you get back.

Flickr heart image above courtesy of qthomasbower. Pic of my husband and me above on right by the ever-talented Amanda Shea. *And yeah, I did go to a Pearl Jam concert once where people were really doing that, people with killer seats.

Big-Picture Communications: Be Nimble, Not Land-Locked

Public transportation: In Istanbul, Turkey, it can mean everything from a taxi to a subway to a ferry that carries passengers from the European side of the city to the Asian one. Yes, it is possible to be in two continents at once ... okay, not quite at once, but within a half hour ... in this vibrant city churning with people, places and cultures.

I recently spent a week in Istanbul catching up with an old friend, and I’m still thinking about the incredible 30 minutes we spent traveling over the Bosphorus during our ferry ride to Kadiköy. Everything ... the sky, the water, the crowded, overlapping architecture in the distance ... was glowing with that pinkish blue luminescence that happens during the last few moments before sunset. A young man was throwing handfuls of breadcrumbs over the side of the boat, much to the screaming delight of seagulls skimming the wind and light in whatever direction they pleased. Their persistent grace was awe-inspiring, an air dance that matched the tumbling, broken water falling behind them. And somewhere in this place between continents, moving forward seemed graceful, spontaneous, full of possibility and happenstance.

Now that I’m back in my daily world of deadlines and writing and social media-ing, I keep returning to that day on the Bosphorus because it reminds me of a critical truth about communications. We need to be nimble, and ready to change with the world changing around us, a world that can shift within hours, even seconds. Gone are the days when we have time to pin our hopes on something that's overly complicated and keeps us land-locked and unable to jump ship when needed.

Remember the fervor of Facebook Landing Pages and how much companies invested in them through design and links and other bells and whistles? Well, Facebook Timeline is coming to brand pages. We keep telling ourselves that global community is what drives the economy ... but are our companies, colleges and universities exploring the social media that is relevant to audiences overseas? For example, Qzone and Weibo are huge in China, Facebook, not so much. Will BlackBerries stay afloat, when the iPhone, Android and other mobile devices have taken on-the-go communicators by storm? What does it tell us about our priorities in the year ahead when in 2011, people spent more time on mobile apps than they did Web browsing? Is referring to social media as “social” no longer relevant, as we convince ourselves integrated marketing is key to our success? Maybe it should just be called "media" at this point.

The best creativity is by nature often spontaneous. And creativity drives the ideas that are populating the communications world around us, carrying us forward to the next horizon, the next conversation. The good news is that if you miss one idea, you can probably catch another one in 20 minutes or so. The bad news is if the ship has sailed and you’ve invested too much time, money and metrics into a specific system, you just might be adrift.

Here's a Spotify playlist that makes me think of the ride on the ferry over the Bosphorus.

Gr@itude

I like to slip out and go on a long run on Thanksgiving, to spend some time reflecting on the good things for which I am grateful. Today I was jogging past this little Thai restaurant right around the corner from my Mom’s house in Atlanta. On the sidewalk right outside their front door, there was a plate with several small portions of cilantro, tomatoes, diced onions and other foods. Two candles were anchored and burning on the plate, too, their tiny flames seemingly out of place in the bright, cloudless morning around them.

When I spotted that plate, carefully placed on the concrete and off to the side of pedestrian traffic, I thought about those fairy tales I read when I was a kid that always seemed to include families who left food on the edge of a forest for the spirits who lived there, to keep them happy. My mind also wandered to the idea of memorials, and whether someone was honoring a person who died and leaving a light behind for them so they were always remembered and their soul nourished. Maybe a restaurant employee was simply showing the world a small token of gratitude, with food, simplicity and warmth.

I hope that every day, not just today, we light a candle or two and enjoy a moment of gratitude for that place within all of us that’s persistently strong and full of hope, a place that’s been with us from the beginning. Maybe we’ve had several beginnings and started over a couple of times, or are just now coming to terms with truths that are changing how we understand ourselves and the world we live in.

In less complicated and universal terms, here are a few things that come to my mind, as I give thanks for what I have, what I know and what I hope for:

• I’m thankful, not just today, but every day, for the good friends my husband and I have in our lives. When I talk about the people I care about, I always stumble over the distinction of friends and family, because our friends have been our family for a long time, particularly as we’ve moved farther and farther away from our hometowns over the years.

• Feeling thankful for old-fashioned things that don’t require electricity, like knick-knacky junk and abandoned clothing in thrift stores that lend old-school irony to my home décor and the way I dress, handwritten thank-you notes, sour-smelling library books with crackly, plastic covers, and my hours-long culinary adventures in the kitchen, like caramelized onions and slow-cooked soups that make savoring a moment deliciously necessary. These tactile objects anchor me and open all my senses to what’s happening right in front of me; they're tried-and-true timeless experiences that keep me real and wide awake.

• Equally thankful, though, for all things digital, because these places online where we chatter, post and share make creativity instantaneous and awesome. I love wandering through a city, snapping  a picture of something arresting and beautiful and uploading it immediately, so that thought, that idea, is safely stored away in my inventory of imagination. Making a video of my giggling niece and nephew that they can watch over and over again, once I’m on a plane and far away from them and we all need to remember how much fun we had during my last visit. And reading and learning from people everywhere, letting their ideas inform my own, so we’re all growing together.