Reaching out to others

Since I'm in "take it easy mode" we limited ourselves to one brief outing today. We went for lunch and then headed over to the Carter's baby clothes outlet to exchange an outfit for our growing little weed. Having never ventured in that store before, we were surprised to find it packed wall to wall with garish SALE and CLEARANCE and HOLIDAY DISCOUNT signs as well enough upper middle class mothers with strollers to surely violate some fire code. Since we were sans stroller and lugging the boy around in his bucket, Rich offered to take him over to the video game aisle at Best Buy next door while I stood in a crazy long line to exchange our item.

I stood there amongst the ironically humorous bibs and coordinated bootie/cap/jumper outfits, eavesdropping on all the other suburban mothers. I was awash in a sea of white women in yoga pants with dyed blond hair discussing how many outfits grandma should get and if they should sign up for the store's coupon mailer (realizing that I had only recently been a white woman with dyed blond hair).

As I pondered what sort of subculture I had gotten myself into by procreating, I felt a tug at my purse strap. It was more like a tapping of someone trying to get my attention over and over. I turned around and there was a tall lean black teenager, maybe 15, running his hand up and down my purse strap. Having first deduced him to be the World's Worst Thief, I realized he was not looking at me or even my purse but only at the strap as he ran his finger nails up and down the course nylon material. I noticed his other hand hooked in the arm of his mother as she reached out to inspect some garment for her young daughter.

I'm still surprised that I processed this all as fast as I did but somewhere in my head I thought, "he's not lost, his mother is with him, he's most likely autistic and he's not hurting me. I'll just leave him be." I smiled at him, shrugged and turned back around to wait my turn. I also caught the look of another lady next to me and she clearly looked appalled at both his behavior and my reaction. After about 30 seconds he abandoned my purse strap and started tapping the plastic hangers on the display next to his mother. His mom never knew we interacted.

As I checked out and left, I wondered how many times his hands have strayed in a crowded store like that and how many times his mother has apologized for him. I wondered if she was tired of managing both him and her precocious two-year-old daughter. And I wondered how things might have played out in line if he'd reached out for purse of the lady next to me instead of mine.

A month or so ago, I added Carly Fleischmann to my Twitter friends after watching a TV special about her. She occasionally solicits questions about autism and responds to them in Twitter or her web site. It's very interesting to read what people ask and her explanations. She's a clever kid. Remembering Carly as I processed my brief interaction with the boy in the store, I'm even more glad I didn't pull away from him or scowl. I'd hate for strangers to fuss at me over things I couldn't help. And in his defense, my purse straps are pretty neato.

Treating bedrest like my new job

With the exception of a brief lunch appointment, the baby and I have spent all of today in bed in our underwear. It was exactly what we needed to do today. I realized last night that I have been doing too much. I wouldn't realize that I was doing too much while I was doing it, only coming to terms with it in tears on the bathroom floor each evening around midnight as I realized my whole body hurt and I hadn't gone to bed yet. This is a new thing for me where my intellectual well being is not on the same page as my emotional or physical one. I'm fidgety if I don't do things or feel like a slacker but then at the end of the day I'm wiped out in more ways than one.

So today the boy and I enjoyed a little R&R. Unfortunately, I think Ian is starting on another growth spurt as he hasn't napped all day except for the hour of my lunch appointment and his poor little arms and legs keep churning and twitching. But unlike the last time, I took that as an opportunity for us to just hang out in the bed and chat. I held him with both arms (without one also holding the iPhone) and we counted fingers and toes in the afternoon sunlight of the bedroom.

Amazingly, my lady parts fare much better when I'm not stuffing myself into pants and trekking all over creation during the day. I've only had one dose of Motrin today and it was more out of habit than anything. Now if I can just get the rest of me to stop freaking out with the zits and the infected insulin pump infusion sites. I think my whole body is just telling me to chill out.

So things are looking up all told. Rich is entertaining Ian for a bit while I get settled in bed. If Ian manages to fall asleep, Rich can bring him up here, otherwise I'll just see him when he's ready to eat again.

And once we make it past all this postpartum aftermath, I'm buying myself all new underwear.

Twitter versus Facebook: oversharing with old classmates in 140 characters or less

This entry has nothing to do with my crotch. You're welcome. Today Ian and I took a little field trip to Rich's parents in Richmond (about 1.5 hours away depending on traffic). My crotch issues had improved to the point that I felt up to that much time in the car and was hopeful I wouldn't need any medical assistance through the afternoon. So we threw the diaper bag in the car and took off.

Since we spent most of the day away from the Internet, I had a bit of catching up to do once we got back home. I've been living out of my iPhone most days and only use the computer if I need to type something long enough to benefit from using both hands. I can get to my work email, personal email, Twitter, Facebook, the web via Safari, Flickr, text messages and Ping (which we use because the cell service is so crappy in our house Ping at least means we'll get the message via in house wireless if not through AT&T). I realized I have a bit of a routine for what I check and when.

I check my work email first because that pushes to the phone and usually tells me I have eleventy billion unread emails, 99% of which are SPAM. Then I check my personal account to find out if anyone has commented on my blog or sent me some interesting news (or if my father has another mysterious computer issue that needs troubleshooting).

After email, I head to social networking applications. What surprises me is I tend to check Facebook now before I check Twitter. At one point I said I didn't see the point of Facebook, but now I am getting a more enjoyable experience out of it.

I have tried to use Twitter and Facebook unilaterally and not have "separate yet equal" friends in each community. If I twitter about my crotch, all those folks I went to high school with are going to get a status update about it on Facebook (as well as all those library colleages ... oh well, they're used to it by now). But what's fascinating to me is I get little to no feedback from Twitter versus tons of feedback on Facebook. And for me feedback is a big part of what makes it social and fun. I'm trying to figure out why they behave so differently both for me and others.

Format One of the things I love about Facebook is that I can comment on someone's status and mutual friends don't have to read that comment unless they have also commented on the status or if they care to click on the status and read all comments. I don't feel like I'm cluttering up others' feeds with my "wow, that sucks" messages but I can still commiserate with the updating party. Twitter sticks everything in one big stream and I haven't found an elegant way to get it to show me a conversation. I got a response from someone on Twitter a day after my comment to her and I literally had to go look up the original message because her reply made no sense to me without the original status and other comments. Context is easily lost on Twitter versus Facebook because the comments get separated from the original update.

Like Holy crap I love the "like" feature in Facebook. Many times people say stuff that is clever and it makes me laugh out loud or take note of them but I don't have anything profound to add to their statement. I'll favorite them on Twitter so I can remember to tell Rich about them, but I am not sure how best to respond to that party. Sending an @ reply of "HA!" seems like clutter and direct messaging "HA!" seems ... weird. So I don't say anything. But on Facebook, I can just click that handy little "like" icon and I validate their status update without anyone else seeing much more than "8 people like this".

More than words Twitter really isn't designed to handle more than just text. And the text it does support has turned into it's own dialect because of space constraints. I RTed (retweeted) a post by someone that had hash tags and abbreviations and the end result was sheer gibberish to the casual reader. If I want to post a picture to Twitter, I have to pick another service like TwitPic or Yfrog or TweetPhoto etc. Now that Brizzly is gaining popularity, that makes it easier for photos and videos to show up embedded in the stream, but you have to be on the actual Brizzly site to get those benefits and not out in the field on your iPhone like I have been these days. Facebook gives me lots of options to view videos and see pictures within the stream along with just the simple text.

For Your Eyes Only This is something probably everyone else loves about Facebook, but I find frustrating. I like that I can just send someone to my Twitter page and they can read everything I've said recently. I sent the link to our birth class classmates about a week before delivery so they could "follow along from home" without having to sign up for anything. But even though I've made my Facebook profile pretty darn open, I couldn't figure out how to make my Facebook status list show to anyone without them first having a Facebook account and signing in. My mother wanted to see all our labor and delivery updates and everyone else's comments but she has no desire to be on Facebook (I know ... sometimes I wonder how I came from her womb) so it was a roadblock for her.

Am I the only person struggling with trying to choose which medium is my favorite or what updates go where? I have friends who only use one or the other, but in many cases folks use both and I could see how seeing all my updates twice might be tiring. But I'm getting very different experiences from Facebook and Twitter, both in writing and reading, and am not willing to give up either.

Don't even get me started on Google Wave and how that could just replace all these with one magical unicorn-driven chariot. I'm still not ready for that yet.