Posts Tagged "Shameless Self-Promotion"

Why Twitter is better than Crack

Posted by Josie on Sep 4, 2009 in Uncategorized | 24 comments

Two things have saved me from the brink of insanity these last six months. OK, three things if you count my husband giving me five minutes to have a wee in peace without a small monster trying to ‘post’ his plastic Wonderpets Hamster between my clenched legs.

1. Blogging (self-explanatory – it rocks)
and…
2. Twitter

For some reason I’ve found the last six months especially hard. I mean, I found the first eight pretty horrendous too at times, but the last six? Man alive.

Maybe it’s because most of my friends went back to work and seemed to be coping so much better than me, being brilliant mummys AND having careers. Maybe it’s because Kai developed the ability to move. And move. And move some more. At high speed. Towards everything likely to kill him. Maybe it’s because in combination with the moving about he additionally developed the art of the apocalyptic temper tantrum  which he proceeded to unleash every half an hour, or every time I dared to look away from him or try and disattach him from my leg (whichever came soonest). Or maybe it’s simply because the months of no sleep and forgetting to eat and running on adrenaline alone finally caught up with me.

In any case, whatever it was, it’s been tough.

It was during a particularly bad couple of weeks that I discovered Twitter. Mostly (as I think it begins for most people) as a way of spying on Stephen Fry and Jonathon Ross and the like. After a couple of weeks I started to get a bit bored. I had a grand total of 15 followers and was fed up of stupid Stephen blanking me, despite my persistent and frankly hilarious tweets to him, and following Ashton and Demi’s very sub-standard and yawn inducing conversations. And there I think it would have ended.

That is, had it not been for a life changing discovery.

There were people on Twitter. I mean REAL people. And if you happened across them and sent them a tweet, then chances are they’d tweet you back. You could have CONVERSATIONS!

Now as you know, I like talking. But at the same time I’m not so good at the ‘face to face’ type talking. Suddenly on Twitter I could become the wise-quipping, super confident, articulate superstar that dwells deep under the cover of my socially problematic exterior. It was wonderful.

I loved the randomness of my encounters and my experiences. One day I chanced upon an emerging tweeting trend on the subject of the TV show LOST and ended up spear-heading attempts to uncover the mystery behind a fan-made artificial reality game (ARG) running online and through Twitter itself, writing a blog chronicling the exciting events. In the 4 weeks it ran, my blog got nearly 30,000 hits. Yes I know, it was geek stuff and was short lived. But it got me totally hooked on blogging as a writing medium and equally importantly it fuelled my Twitter obsession, opening up hundreds of new random encounters and conversations.

Blogging led to British Mummy Bloggers and the vast network of blogging mums and dads both here and all over the world, ALL of which seem to be on twitter and tweeting about their equally mundane and extraordinary lives. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Yes I am hooked. No I am not ashamed of the fact. It beats a drug addiction or alcoholism which I think are probably less appealing ways of surviving motherhood.

And it really has been remarkably therapeutic. When I’m at home, especially on those days where I just can’t face going out, or it’s raining (again) or I’m tired, I tend to have the laptop running as I go about my daily business, pausing ever so often when I get a chance to respond to the ‘buzz’ of my Tweetdeck or the ‘ping’ of an email. And taking ten minutes to check my messages and have a quick chat can sometimes be the one thing that gets me through an otherwise lonely, stressful day. It revives me, gives me the boost I need to get me through that day’s particular meltdown, or the energy to go to up to re-settle Kai for the umpteenth time that evening, or the sense of humour to laugh at the fact that I just burnt the tea and the front room looks like a bomb went off in Toys R Us (during closing time though – don’t worry. No icky bits of harassed parents. Just Toys N Wee). It’s a time-out for me. And a much needed one.

Now I know most of you reading this use Twitter already (hell I’m probably multi-tasking and talking to you right now!). But just in case  you’ve never tried it, or have and didn’t ‘get it’ (yes that’s you Ms Kendall) then here are some top tips:

1. I’ve learnt that you need to put yourself out there a bit. And be prepared to respond and chat about pretty much anything. In the past 24 hours alone I’ve tweeted about breastfeeding, self-build house cleaning robots, growing a giant handlebar moustache, monkeys, and taking over the world via the medium of catchy bass beats (dunnah dunnah clap). Oh and I chatted to the devil! That was fun…

 ~

2. Celebs are a fun novelty. But if they are the only people you follow it’s going to get very boring, very fast. You need real life people. Compete strangers who tweet regularly work best.

 ~

3. Follow a few interesting people, then see who they’re following and follow them. Then talk to everyone. If you sit there on your todd, tweeting the odd fact about your lunch and expect hoards of people to spontaneously start following you, then the Twitter magic isn’t going to happen for you. If people are boring you can always unfollow them again. 

 ~

4. Don’t just tweet about your lunch. Unless it’s about toast. Cause for some reason that got me about 20 new followers last week.

 ~

5. Prepare to get some interesting followers. And by ‘interesting’ I mean naked and probably sucking something disgusting in their profile picture. Don’t be scared – that’s what the ‘block’ button’s for. They’ll probably try to tempt you with their “Sexy New Vid! Click Here!” (don’t), or their promise of hundreds of new followers for just $1, or instant teeth whitening products. Block block block. Or, alternatively, try tweeting them and see what happens! You’ll soon start to love them in a kind of “I’d miss you if you weren’t here” kinda way. If only because their numbers in your Followers count will make you feel more popular.

 ~

6. Read Scary Mommy’s fab posts on Twitter Etiquette and The Best Twitter Applications. Both essential reading material for any aspiring tweeter.

 ~

7. Follow MEEEE!! You really should.

And since it’s ‘Follow Friday’ and just to get your started – here’s my top pick of people to follow on Twitter. Some are bloggers, some just make me laugh, some are generally just fabulous. And some are all three. Follow them all and collect the set. And if I miss you off it don’t take it personally - just would be here all night if I listed everyone!

@icklebabe_com @Soph4Soph @snafflesmummy @ilovemonty @LauraAWNTYM @Joner 

@MyShitty20s  @WestonsuperMum @ScaryMommy @swhittle @mamakatslosinit @dooce

@AmberStrocel @MummyBloggers @neenerspb @ruthiemossy  @aedison @TheMabster

@hotcrossmum @PotatoFilm @myautisticson @naptimewriting @SouthWoodsMom @flimgeeks 

@TheNDM  @notsuchayummum @RealBillBailey  @Shoegalsedgwick @immoralangel_uk

and, last but not least, my hubby @legobloke  who doesn’t tweet much but posts great pictures of Kai!

Oh… and of course!

@stephenfry

*DISCLAIMER* Despite the title of this post I do not advocate Crack or drug use in any way shape or form. Just say no people. Unless it’s to Milky Way Stars. Then you’re fine.

—————————–

Right! Now it’s your turn (cause that worked so well last time). The topic is… Twitter! Love it? Loathe it? Tell me why…

Why I'm finding blogging a little like highschool

Posted by Josie on Aug 6, 2009 in Uncategorized | 14 comments

I wasn’t particularly popular at school (it’s ok ex-school mate readers, you can nod in agreement).

I was also clever, but not THAT clever. Average clever. (More nods).

But I wanted to be both. Desperately.

I existed on the periphery of the more elitist social groups. Kind of cool by association but obviously not cool, especially when trying to be cool (emphatic nods – ok you can stop now, I get the point). Occasionally one of the more charismatic members would notice I was there and grant me the privilege of their company for a while. Probably mostly out of pity.

I’m finding blogging a bit like this.

There are the popular blogs. They are shiny and polished. Their followers are dedicated, leaving scores of adoring comments. And there are the clever blogs. With their witty and flawless sentence construction; their outstanding use of metaphor and impressive vocabulary. They entertain us with the flare of (insert clever metaphor #1 here). Some are, quite annoyingly, both popular AND clever.

My blog is neither.

But I find myself wishing it was.

Once again I find myself back in the high school mind-set, that awkward teenager with braces on my teeth and milk-bottle bottom lenses in my glasses. Wondering just what it is that makes these shining beacons of blogginess naturally so much better than me? What makes people flock to them like (insert clever metaphor #2 here)?

But then I remember I’m not in high school anymore. I grew up (well, kind of). The braces are gone. The specs are gone. Ok I’m still awkward and gangly but that’s endearing, or so my husband tells me.

So I’ve decided. I’m not going to try to be popular or clever. Because if the same rules apply as when I was a teenager that will only inevitably mean I end up saying something weird and inappropriate and laughing too loud and everyone will look at me funny.

And I’m going to try not to care.

TOO much.

So I hope you like un-popular and un-clever. Because that’s all you’re going find here. But hopefully I’ll be endearingly awkward and socially inept and you’ll love me in that ‘I’d miss you if you weren’t here to bask in my light’ kinda way.  And if you want to invite me to your party, or share some of your chips over lunch and tell me a secret you haven’t told anyone else? Well that would be good too…

…and by the way I think your shoes are the coolest thing I have ever seen and that boy you like has TOTALLY been looking at you all through Maths.

———–

NOTES:

Possible clever metaphors

#1    a) a thousand glittering iphones.
b) a jewel beetle’s bum.
c) David Cameron

#2    a) a fat kid to cake.
b) Kai to dangerous electrical equipment.
c) Boy racers in pimped-out Renault Clios to a McDonald’s drive-through

Oh I give up.

Pieces of Me

Posted by Josie on Aug 1, 2009 in Uncategorized | 3 comments

I have to say that I am REALLY enjoying this blogging thing. I’m eagerly anticipating the moments when I can steal a little time away to write. It’s becoming a kind of refuge this blog. A way of de-stressing and unwinding, of laughing at myself and helping me not to take things too seriously. And I realised today that I have been keeping it faithfully for over two months.

I guess that doesn’t seem like much to some, but to me this is quite an achievement.

You see I’ve always been someone that took interest in a great number of things, picking and choosing between them all depending on my mood, but I have never been very good at maintaining focus on just one thing. I leap from one subject or hobby to another like some kind of giant human thought-association research project. The slightest thing can set me off. One book could set me off an frantic journey of discover taking in Arthurian Legend, onto tree lore, spiralling my way through Ecology and Environmental Campaigning, onto Green living and knitting, finishing up with remembering to separate my paper and my plastics.

It’s quite exhausting.

As such I find myself perpetually juggling a dozen or more different projects, all half pursued and half finished, left on one side as something new and more exciting steals my attention and my enthusiasm.  Over the years I’ve picked up no end of different skills and bits and pieces of knowledge.

In the interest of getting to know me better, here’s a few:

I draw, paint (and once won a competition), make cards (when I’m too broke to buy them), am a reasonable calligrapher, (producing stationary for two weddings), can knit jumpers with pirate motifs, embroider and undo knots that most people would find impossible, produced two (unfinished) patchwork quilts. I’ve had a go at amateur film making, featuring myself as both a hooker and a bearded doctor, and had a stab at photography. I’ve sang in public (not something I plan to repeat). I became quite adept at yoga, learning to contort myself into any number of positions, turned my bathroom into a laboratory whilst making my own beauty products and home remedies and cured my mum’s menopausal mood swings (well… almost). I’ve played three different musical instruments. I’ve read about philosophy and religion, argued extensively about both, making my mind up then changing it all again. I’ve ran for my local council and got a lot more votes than I was expecting. I’ve written letters and been on tv waving a placard. I’ve traced my family tree back to 1750. I’ve read ten billion books on every subject known to man.

And that’s before I’ve even mentioned my jobs. Let me see… I’ve sold shoes and waitressed (badly), I’ve organised filing cabinets and typed invoices at a double glazing firm. I’ve taken disabled children swimming and been a teaching assistant. I’ve taken care of elderly patients, wiping bums and changing giant nappies. I’ve bathed several old and wrinkly men. I’ve ran a school library and literacy projects and children’s book clubs. I’ve even sat with someone as they died.

Quite a list isn’t it?

But don’t get me wrong, this is not supposed to be a brag. Because although I am a bit of a jack of all trades, I am a master at none. At best I could be called ‘competent’ in most of the things I undertake but I’ve never been really good at anything. Maybe because I’ve never stuck with one thing long enough.

On first consideration, motherhood seems to be much the same. As always, I’d get points for enthusiasm but no-one is ever going to consider me an expert in the subject.

And yet now I come to think of it, it actually IS different this time.

This time I’m being FORCED to stick with something. As a stay-at-home mum I can’t give up changing nappies, or getting up at 6am every morning, or making toast highly delicious and varied and nutritious food stuffs. Well, I guess I could. But Kai wouldn’t be very impressed, and he has a great ability of pointing out my shortcomings in a very loud not-to-be-ignored kind of way.

This is one job I can’t quit.

And do you know what? I think it’s doing me the world of good. I think I have learnt more about patience and discipline in the last 12 months than in the whole previous 26 years combined and throughout all my other weird and wonderful occupations. I’m actually COMMITTED to something. And even stranger, I’m not bored or losing interest. I’m actually enjoying it. And looking forward to doing it a whole lot more.

Most surprisingly of all it’s making me want to change. It’s making me want to be more disciplined in other areas of my life. There’s the blog of course for starters. I’m trying to keep the house tidier and am making more of an effort with the cooking (and even better, so far I haven’t killed ANYONE! Result!).  Determined to know a bit more than ‘a bit’ about something I’ve enrolled on a part-time self-study degree course that I start in a month. The cynic in me tells me I’ll probably change my mind after a year and do something else, that the blog posts will dry up in another month and the house revert back to it’s old slovenliness, but actually I don’t think that’s true.

Because do you know what? I think I’ve changed.

I think I’m almost… *gulp*… becoming a grown up.

…

Now where’s that book on Quantum Physics I started?

Why I am not a supermom

Posted by Josie on Jul 21, 2009 in Uncategorized | 6 comments

First of all I have to ask. Which one of you has cursed my house? Because, as is fast becoming an almost weekly occurance in our family, we have been struck down by the illness fairy once again. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘me’. A throat infection, a low-grade fever and the weak-and-wobblies have meant Kai has once again had to be subjected to the bare minimum of parenting and opened the doors to my usual guilt-ridden worries that I am not doing ENOUGH.

Why is it a few days of feeling under the weather causes me to doubt every single one of my parenting choices, life choices and pretty much every other aspect of my self in one fell swoop? All I have been able to do this last couple of days is curl up in a ball on the sofa and moan faintly while Kai looked on bemused and tried to feed me various bits of half-eaten rice cake that he had squirrelled away in his toy box.

The killing blow (and ultimate salvation) came in the form of The Mom Blog. Not mine but other moms’. You see I’m fairly new to the world of blogging and although I didn’t think for a second my contributions to the bloggosphere were in any way different or special, I hadn’t quite realised just what a teeny tiny insignificant speck I was in the vast universe of the Mommy Bloggers until I started looking. There’s frickin millions of them. Which isn’t in itself a bad thing, until I started reading and found that the vast majority of the ones I came across were very obviously the work of neat, ordered self-congratulatory, self-important, taking-everything-far-too-seriously SUPERMOMS.

And reading them I was suddenly left feeling very small, very immature, very incompetent and completely unqualified to be a mother (or a blogger).

Because I am NOT, in any way, shape, or form a supermom. Not even close.

For starters I do not bake. I am in fact a dreadful cook. I have never made home-made soup or pasta sauce. My son often eats frozen fishfingers and ravioli from a can. My crowning culinary achievement lately was to mash pre-bought roast potatoes with a fork and grill them with sprinkled spring onion and cheese (was yum though). My cupboards contain tinned mince and dry spaghetti.  I don’t know what a ‘caper’ is. I don’t frequent deli’s, or buy organic unless it’s on sale (because I’m broke). I often eat chocolate for breakfast. Or biscuits.

I do not own a shining stainless-steel bedecked kitchen in which I wear an apron or from which waft the delightful smells of cookie dough or roast dinners. My kitchen is in fact this:

Two square metres of cramped appliances and this morning’s washing up all of which smells of catfood and damp and may or may not have previously undiscovered forms of life making a cosy home behind the fridge.

I do not pray with my child, or at my child, or about my child (preferring to talk to said child himself, and my husband, and other REAL people when I have a problem). I do not attend a bible study group, or go to church, unless you count the very excellent church-run playgroup I attend but even then I have a tendency to mysteriously disappear when they start with the inevitable baby Jesus songs.

I do not have a ‘good’ child. He does not sleep on demand or without assistance. He is, I fear, a very long way from ‘sleeping through the night’. He is often lively, noisy, demanding and extremely separation-sensitive. If you are male and not in his immediate family you WILL make him scream just by looking at him. He probably watches too much tv. When tired, frustrated or over excited he bites and scratches. He is not particularly fond of vegetables.

My (mostly second hand) clothes don’t fit well and are not particular fashionable. I don’t have a personal style or have a skincare regime. I prefer to buy groceries than pay for expensive hair styles so my hair leaves rather a lot to be desired. If you were being kind you would call it ‘tousselled’.  I don’t own a single pair of heels (given my tendency to fall down even when wearing flats) but do own several pairs of well-loved trainers. I have yet to figure out how to make it through the day without getting covered in food, sick, poo or wee. I could count on one hand the number of times I have worn make-up in the last year.

I am not the social epi-centre of a trendy group of friends. I tend to be the one sitting in the corner looking tired, dishevelled, and coming across a little weird. I either talk too much or not at all. I laugh too loud, have a tendency to mix my words up and the awful habit of not finishing my sentences. In the last twelve months I have had two evenings out without the baby. Neither of which involved drinking cocktails or dancing. Both of which involved knitting and drinking tea at my best friend’s house 100 metres away.

I am not a measured oasis of calm. I do not bend in the wind. I have a tendency to be selfish and resentful. I frequently neglect my husband in favour of a little extra stolen ‘me’ time. I often fall apart, have meltdowns, cry, scream and then hurriedly put myself back together again before anyone notices.

I swear too much.

So no. Definitely not a supermom.

So bombarded as I was with tales of bible camp, and bake sales, and endless photos of shining, clean, perfect babies (who I’m positive slept like angels, the little sh*ts) and their shining, clean, perfect moms, I was left feeling pretty much like crap.

And there I probably would have stayed. Feeling like crap. Except thankfully I didn’t. Because I kept looking and I kept reading. And hidden in amongst the endless drivel I found my salvation.

Other not-supermoms. Yep. Thank the sweet Lord.

Other moms that swear and struggle and take the piss out of themselves and their lives and laugh at everything (that kind of slightly hysterical laughter that sounds a little like sobbing). Who have equally grubby, wild children and equally grubby, unkempt houses. Who choose blogging over housework and say that if you’re child is playing happily it’s perfectly acceptable to steal a little extra writing time.

I love these moms. Suddenly, being given free reign to eavesdrop on their lives and their mistakes and their mini-meltdowns, I felt sane again. It was ok to not be perfect. In fact, it was pretty cool. For all their shortcomings these moms were obviously intelligent, accomplished, successful, witty, and despite all their self-deprecation, completely and utterly awesome mommies.

I was happy to be in their camp. Well, happy to in the anonymous periphery of their camp. If I can ever manage to be even half as good a writer, comedian, social commentator or creative free-spirit as most of these women I will consider myself to have done very well indeed.

Screw you supermoms.

So here it is, for your enjoyment: my honour blogroll of the moment. Thank you ladies for restoring my sanity and giving me some much needed reassurance this week. For telling me it’s ok to find motherhood impossibly hard and ok not to take it all too seriously.

Not Drowning, Mothering

Naptime Writing

Bad Mommy Moments

I love you. Please keep writing.