A friend of mine used to always be able to make me life by means of imitating Jacques Cousteau and saying things like “Day 13 in the bubble… Phillipe and I are beginning to question the wisdom of 2 men underwater in such close living quarters…” and continuing on in whatever vein his imagination took him.
Nearly 20 years later, I still find myself slipping into a bad French accent and quipping about “bubble-life” when it seems as if I’ve been under water metaphorically for too long and I’m starting to wonder if there’s a more interesting life going on outside my self-imposed confinement.
This week has been interesting for someone who usually spends the better part of her time on and off of social networks. As I’ve been putting this site together, I’ve had to disconnect enough to focus on my geekier skills. Creating graphics & a logo from scratch required turning on my design mind (terribly rusty and still amateur at best) and switching back & forth between my usual laptop and the old one which has all of my graphics software installed on it.
Wrestling with CSS has never been my strong suit — I still think it’s the C++ of web code: object-oriented code being a great idea that is mostly a horrid mess when it comes to implementation. But I have slowly but surely gotten back into it. Let’s not even get into how lacking my PHP skills are. Fortunately a good foundation in coding will go far even if you aren’t really fluent in a language. For those of you non-geeks? I speak Latin – which helps when traveling in Spain or Italy, but isn’t quite sufficient to have an in-depth conversation.
But all of this geekery really isn’t conducive to being active on social sites.
Or at least, not for me. I know there are geeks out there who could do this all day and still maintain a healthy online presence – but I’m apparently not one of them. Mostly because I find the time it takes to shift mental gears back-and-forth is a bit too much for my liking. Truth be told? I’m a batch-processor, not a multi-tasker.
So here I am at the end of day number whatever-this-is (let’s just call it Friday) and I’m finding myself wondering what important things went on outside my self-imposed bubble.
Annnnd then suddenly realizing that I’m supposed to be leaving in 30 minutes to go attend a live & in-person Tweetup* downtown.
Fortunately for me? This bubble doesn’t require me to rise slowly to the surface like Captain Cousteau’s Denise did — all I have to do is close the laptop and go put on something suitable to finally go meet Mari Smith (@marismith) face-to-face and to see other dear friends like Patti Serrano (@igrandmatv), Kit Seeborg (@zsazsa), Dave Webb (@davewebb) & Ashley Kingsley (@ashleykingsley) for the first time in awhile.
There’s a time for bubble and there’s a time for bubbly conversation. I’m off to the latter.
Edit to add: Murphy’s Law sometimes defines my life. After 3 roadblocks – each more insurmountable than the last – popped up to keep me from getting to the event, I was forced to concede and stayed in for the night. I did get to spend a few minutes watching the livestream thanks to Patti Serrano – but that’s as close as I got. On the bright side, I did spend a pleasant night at home with my wonderful husband.
