Where does the personal end and professional begin?

Even Con Edison ads on the subway entreaty the reader to "join us on Facebook!"

Social networking is omnipresent and unavoidable.

First I used Friendster to keep in touch with college friends. Then I used Myspace to find old high school friends. Then I used Flickr to share photos with family, friends, and people I met in my travels. Then I joined Facebook to keep in touch with aforementioned travel buddies, being that its popularity globally was much bigger than locally-- outside of college populations.

Now we've seen the largest migration ever encountered: the entire world, it seems, joining first Facebook and now Twitter, which have become more than social networking. They are a means for branding, marketing, publicity, public relations....

It was strange enough when my former students "friended" me and, no longer being a teacher, I accepted their requests.

Then last summer, in conjunction with my position at a publishing company, I used my personal Facebook profile to appeal to groups of users who were fans of a particular author, as a means to market and publicize a book.

I was uncomfortable with the invasion of my professional life into my personal, and decided to never use my profile again in such a manner.

But the fact remains, the personal and the professional spheres are more and more seeping into each other, not always seamlessly. Media outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg to the New York Times face some very strict policies limiting, or at least guiding, their use of social networking site. Staffers are urged to keep their profiles professional, censor comments from friends and post promotional links.

(As a side note, one can understand concerns from higher-ups over what professionals in the public sphere put out there. Just have a look at the multiple politicians showing their true colors on Facebook. The jury is out, however, on whether such racist stupidity will actually impact their professional career at all.)

But back to why this is concerning me in particular right now.

So, by now there are a few things published out there now with my name in the byline. The ball's rolling; I need to keep momentum. The writers I speak to encourage me to write everyday, no matter what. Hence the increase in posts here as of late. If I am not writing as a freelancer for someone, I should at least be creating material I can use for writing samples.

Meanwhile, as I peruse popular blogs in fashion, in food studies, in wine, there everyone is, advertising themselves-- follow them on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, check out their photos on Flickr.

Web 2.0 offers some fantastic opportunities for self-promotion. I am not always pleased with the results (Julia Allison really bothers me), but if it's done right, without violating any principles or self-respect, seizing the opportunity to brand oneself certainly presents a thoroughly modern avenue to success or, at least, exposure, which, with talent, could lead to success.

Needless to say, branding alone does not a successful writer make. In fact, I think it makes an obnoxious and annoying one. Just because you can manage multiple social networking accounts and have lots of friends and hits on your blog does not mean you are a force to be reckoned with in the literary world. But the exposure from increased blog hits will help. And in order to increase blog hits, two things are helpful: a recognizable and established identity and a means for self-promotion. Hence, linkage of worlds: the professional (if I begin to look at this blog as such) and the personal-- my social networking profiles.

Sorry for all the circular logic. Bloggers are bloggers, not journalists. I think back to my first "blog"-- an e-zine, really, that I circulated throughout the AOL community back when the internet was a baby for us commoners. I called it Brainspew. I find that to be representative to blogging in general.

But back to my point, which I do have.

I am considering jumping off the deep end. Actively seeking increased traffic for this blog-- taking it from something I share with friends and family to something I share with a larger, anonymous-to-me community. Taking it more seriously and using it to build skills as a reporter, establishing my name. My brand.

But how? Should I go full-on anonymous? Or do I go all out? If I go anonymous, I'll probably create a second blog and try to conceal identity-revealing details. Readers who follow me here (few though they are, given my frequent lapses), will know who I am at my new blog, so it's not like I'd stay fully anonymous. And I'd still probably post links to new blog entries on my Facebook profile. But my anonymity would pretty much be controlled by me--I'd reach out to those I wanted to reach.

On the other hand, if I do go public, how public do I go? Do I post a link on my blog to my Twitter? To my Facebook profile? I understand the value of the former-- I can tweet when I've updated and what-not, but I never really understood people who make FB profiles public. Seems a bit stalker-ish.

All this exposure warranted by Web 2.0 really fascinates me. Everyday people become celebrities a la Perez Hilton (whose model is one I most certainly will not follow). It's funny to think of people I don't even know reading my ramblings (note to self: I am not Jack Kerouac. Keep away from the red wine while writing.) Will people really care about who I am, be curious about my personal life, or will they just want to read what I write? Do I even want to broadcast my personal life? I'm sure there's a middle ground, I'm just not sure if the identity I've established with this blog is already a little too personal to bring fully public.

These are the things I think about, with my name out there attached to a few articles, with designs for this blog that would increase my visibility and provide me some more fodder for writing samples. It's like I'm navigating the same waters as the staffers for the Times, the Journal and Bloomberg, but without some higher-up sending me a memo on guidelines, I have to create my own.

Where will my personal life end and my professional life begin?

What say you?

Our Morning Routine

One of Dixie's obsessions is my hair elastic. If I have my hair in a pony tail, when I am sitting on the couch, she will jump onto the back of it and try to claw the elastic out of my hair.

We have also developed a morning routine around the elastic.

Every morning, the second she hears the shower stop, she starts scratching on the door. I open it and she, knowing that when I take the elastic out of my hair to shower, I place it in the soap dish, lithely leaps onto the sink.



Within seconds she has knocked the elastic off the soap dish and into the sink.



Normally, she'll snatch it up between her teeth, jump down, and take off running and jumping to the bed, where she'll drop it in front of sleepy Karel, hoping to initiate a game of fetch.

However, as I am sick of losing hair elastics to kitty fetch, I have learned to place the real elastic I use in my hair with an impostor: the elastic I've given her as her permanent toy.

Thing is she KNOWS when I use the impostor. And she views it as entirely inferior.

Once she knocks into the sink, she sniffs it, sits back up and stares at me.


I'll go into the kitchen, put some water on to boil from coffee, and walk back, and she'll still be there, giving the evil kitty eye, this time from the other side of the sink so as to best magnify the effectiveness of the kitty curse.

And who said cats weren't smart? Mine is-- frighteningly so at times. Good thing she's cute-- even when she's trying to control my mind.

The agony and the ecstasy

Being a near-30, well-educated waitress, bartender and, let's not forget, freaking intern, I have my good days and my bad days.

Last Monday was a Bad Day. I was mentally formulating a blog post at work. Being distanced from the emotions now-- in fact, being contentedly on my roof deck, drinking a negra modelo, listening to Bob Marley, and admiring the growth spurt of my sunflowers-- it is difficult to re-imagine precisely what was going through my head. From what I can recall, it went something like this:

"The woman at table 3 just grabbed me by my lapel. Literally grabbed me, and asked me, menacingly, 'Did you not hear what I said to you on the way to the bathroom? Don't you know how many times I've been in here?'

She was upset because she had told me she wanted to pay the bill, but her son had asked first, so I decided to be Switzerland and placed the bill gently in the middle of the table at the end of the meal.

Shaking her off of me, I tried to recoup in the kitchen. I grabbed a chunk of bread out of the supply reserved for the paying customers, stole off to a corner, nibbled away and stared absent-mindedly at... a toilet. The filthy freaking kitchen toilet. The crapper was the capper: I am a rat. Vermin.

Disgusted, I tossed the nibbled-at bread into the trash and walked back out onto the floor, scratching my arm. And scratching more. This has been happening since the onset of spring, my arms itching at work, non-stop, hives rising up. I am allergic to this job. I am having a corporeal reaction to the malnutrition of my brain, calling out for help..."

The version running through my head last Monday was more angry, less comedic, but equally melodramatic.

And then there are nights like last night, when I remember, almost-30-year-old waitress and intern aside, I'm pretty damn fabulous. Well, at least a lot of the things I've done are fabulous.

The moment of realization came when I mentioned, off-handedly, to a couple of my bar regulars, whom I've known for a year now, how my former students have gotten in touch with me through Facebook.

"What? You were a teacher?!"

A high school teacher, yeah.

Delighted gasps of incredulity.

Moments like this, I remember: I'm not just a near-30 waitress/bartender/intern. I have this whole other life-- other lives, really. For the most part, Teaching, surviving, traveling, up-and-moving to New York because I simply wanted to. And it's all the more fun to have the ability to turn people's perceptions of me completely upside-down. There's something to be said about living an unexpected life-- the good days AND the bad days.

I recently learned that pregnant female polar bears, when unable to consume the amount of calories necessary to sustain and support a cub, are able to reintegrate a fetus back into their body.

I wish humans had evolved to possess this process.

Maybe then tragedies like this could have been avoided.

A New York Moment: First in a series?

Guess who's back?

So, I've been meaning to write this series highlighting crazy moments I happen upon in NYC, particularly in the subway, but didn't get around to it until now. Keep pestering until I provide more-- trust me, I could hibernate for the next year and still have tons of material to use.

A short one tonight, as it's late.

Two things spotted on the subway on my commute home tonight, on two separate platforms:

1.) Man vomiting profusely as all strolled past nonchalantly.

2.) Large rat accompanying me up the stairs to the street at my stop. Lucky for him he didn't follow me home-- Dixie would have taken care of him for sure. She's a bad-ass.

Dixie!

Finally... This took a while!