being a lady

You know how a lady reserves the right to change her mind? Yeah, I'm calling that one.

I've realised to be true what a couple of my nearest and dearest probably realised some time ago: I ain't no mommy blogger. At least not a South African one. At least not a South African one who will anytime soon produce the kind of material which'll entice any of the (limited number) of mommy-blogger type advertisers out (t)here.
At least not a South African one who will fit the mold or care to work particularly hard at doing so.

It's complicated. But that is what it is.

The good news: I've liberated myself of some truly tedious twitter follows and blog subscriptions - I'm not playing that 'networking' game no more.

The silly part: I now have two blogs for the same kind of content.

The other silly part: this blog's followers keep growing, despite my not generating any actual blog posts.

Further to that silly part: my followers on the other blog are holding steady, despite my generating lots of blog posts for it and despite very healthy traffic over there (lots of which is from here).

So I've got followers here who go there to spy on me, followers there who know nothing about here, loyal readers there who don't actually 'follow' me anywhere, youspinmerightroundbabyrightroundlikearecordbabyrightroundrightround ...

And all of this because I want to be a writer. A moniker I've had many opportunities to test out of late, what with the girls starting new schools and my meeting new people as a result. People who ask me what I do, and dry-mouthed I answer 'I write' which leads to a whole bunch of inevitable questions which I don't really know how to answer.
'Oh you know ... um ... here and there ... working on some stuff ... look! squirrels!'

What I've written lately:
not many blog posts, here or there
copious lists
the bones of a short film screenplay
the bones of 3 articles for submissions to various publications, none of which are near submission ready
half a letter to my granny
detailed instructions for my nanny
far, far, far too many facebook status updates

I'm not really sure what to do about all of this ...

Hello Oh For the Love of Blog! Happy 2012!

okay twitter, I get you now #blacktuesday

Wow.

Today I experienced that thing about Twitter which so many people rave about. I watched, in real time, as history was made - following the hash tag, my home page bumping up every few seconds with another 20 tweets, another 30 tweets, another 60 tweets as the announcement was made.

#BlackTuesday out-trended Thanksgiving for a moment today. Apparently that's huge.

I wish the historical event I was following was a more positive one. I wish I'd been outside Parliament to experience it with my peers, not reading about it once removed - albeit only a few seconds removed.

But Twitter totally came through for me on this one, and I get it now. Fucking marvelous technology.

Not just the real-time connection with the event, but being able to garner all the varied comments - from SA's top newspaper editors to comedians, political commentators, assholes - the voices of reason, of hysteria - to instantly have ones own reaction tempered, inflamed, counter-balanced, validated, refuted. Great stuff.

And instantly those (South Africans) whom I follow fell into two stark categories: those who were talking #blacktuesday and those who weren't. How could anyone really have been tweeting about anything else today?

Twitter, I take it all back. You totally came through for me today.

Even if my government shamefully and horrifyingly didn't.

the twitter shitter

I've resisted a twitter account for years but with my new blog-venture I decided to create one. There's no denying twitter's usefulness for promoting and networking when you're blogging like (hopefully a whole lot of people) are reading.

For the first couple of weeks I kept my account really quiet, following only a blog buddy who was about to give birth, a couple of South Africans I'm interested in and my SIL. Then I went public with the blog and happily sought out all those people I'd been keen to follow on twitter for years, plus hosts of random parent bloggers, mothers and fathers - people I thought it would be useful to network with for the blog.

It's been a couple of months now and ... I can't say that I'm loving it.

I keep reading odes to twitter, articles about it's awesomeness, first hand accounts of how people's lives have changed, improved, benefited from tweeting.
But I still don't get it.

I know the basic tenet is that if you're not enjoying twitter then you're following the wrong people, and I definitely was doing that for a while there. I fell into that morbid fascination, like the early days of facebook, where I couldn't help myself reading every inane tweet, marveling at the utter crap people feel its relevant to share.
Just take a dump in cyberspace why don't you? No really here, I'll hold the loo roll.

And it left me with that same shitty feeling as wasting hours facebook stalking random wedding photos. Brain cluttered, slightly nauseated, majorly disappointed in my fellow humankind but mainly in myself for having even gone there.

I don't get the sharing random brain farts with 5000 mostly-strangers. I don't get the marvel at squeezing your thoughts and words into 140 characters (how is this a great talent unless you're in advertising or write for People magazine?). I don't get the people clearly tweeting throughout a social occasion or worse, outing with their kids.

I do get the advantages of business networking, sharing ideas and sounding out others on various topics. I do get the thrill of breaking news disseminating so quickly and effectively.
I have to admit to loving the hash-tag-of-descriptiveness #greatestthingsinceslicedbread.

But other than that? I'm tweetering on the brink of meh.