Quirkyalone

Here’s a preview of what’s to come has Quirkyalone expands to become a group blog. This piece is written by my fantastic, quirkytogether poet friend Elline Lipkin. It’s cross-posted on girlwpen.com.

Lisa Belkin, ever on top of the nuances and foibles of dating, mating and family making in our time, points in a recent Sunday New York Times magazine piece to a new study that is sure to make (at least some) men squirm and women, as she puts it, “chortle” with delight; although the news is, for anyone who thinks about having kids, actually sobering.

Women often bear excruciating pressures around choosing when to have a child, from all angles, while men are told their biology is limitless, hence their chance at fatherhood is as well. Not so anymore. Throughout the past few years more and more evidence is coming to light linking a father’s age at conception to schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar disorder, as she points out (while the mother’s age at conception shows no such correlation). Two years ago the New York Times also ran a piece entitled “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too”. Now, Belkin highlights an Australian study that shows that children born to “older fathers have, on average, lower scores on tests of intelligence than those born to younger dads.

There are those who will take issue with the research, claim there’s no adjustment for environment, individual father’s IQ, parental involvement and more. But here are the two lines that made me want to sit up and shout “so there!”: “French researchers reported last year that the chance of a couple’s conceiving begins to fall when the man is older than 35 and falls sharply if he is older than 40.” Later in the article Belkin quotes Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who says, “It turns out the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.” Ha! I wanted to shout at the screen as I was reading.

Really, what I wanted was to do was shout this to all the 50something men who, when I was 35 and entering into the online dating world, contacted me, ignoring their agemates, specifically because they felt they were “finally ready” to get around to starting a family. Most were utterly unapologetic that part of what they were seeking was a woman they perceived to be still fertile enough to incubate their suddenly desired offspring. My response that being contacted in part so I could incubate a legacy child for them was insulting often fell on deaf ears.

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Guilty as charged: Like many women, I sometimes read the New York Times Sunday Styles’ section wedding announcements. I’m not so much keeping score (I don’t really care about marriage-as-status), but I am looking for inspiration in the slog for committed romantic love; at the same time, I sometimes avoid this section. There are too many fresh-scrubbed, cookie-cutter smiling wedding pictures from perfect 29-year-old couples whose fathers are investment bankers and who both attended “most competitive” colleges. In any case, every so often, the Vows column features older kindred spirits whose love stories are simply too quirkytogether to not share. Here’s one of them, and why I loved it.

1) They met on a subway, she approached him (he was reading a philosophy book), and she shouted out her email address to keep the possibility of future communication alive as she exited the car (death to all books that say women shouldn’t make the first move!)
2) He hadn’t been in a serious relationship “since the first Gulf War”: love the honesty of just putting that out there
3) The final quote: “I see beyond the nerd in him, he sees beneath the gaudy in me,” the bride said. “For the first time in my life, Jeff makes me feel fully seen, fully accepted, fully loved.”

We all love catchphrases to define who we are. But given that we are all such complex snowflakes, it’s hard to find just the right one. Who really calls herself a “lipstick lesbian”? What urban man unironically embraces “metrosexual”? And yet, it’s fun to have a term for yourself, isn’t it? It can be a reference point to reassure you that you are connected with others across our culture, in this moment in time.

I wondered what terms I could use to describe myself after my friend Jason forwarded me this story “Maybe the slackers had it right after all.”

The piece’s author David Scharfenbergargues that the commitment-shy, dillettantish slackers are better positioned to weather the economic gloom than traditional folks who bought homes and (gasp) had children. Interesting argument, but being a language person, I got stuck on the terminology. Scharfenberg identified “slackers” as people whose social values inform their work, like journalists and social workers. At the core, I think of slackers as people like the characters in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, who move out to the desert, and work as little as possible and give up on making money. Slackers don’t seem to be engaged in the world around them. They seem to be more engulfed in a cloud of pot smoke.

I started to play a game with myself. It’s a parlor game that you can play too. In a moment of delirious, silly afternoon thinking, I wanted a label for myself. It would just have to be a series. Here is what I came up with.

I am a quirkyalone, aspiring vagabond, new rich.

I realized that the words I chose came from books that I’ve had passionate relationships with recently. The books have changed throughout the years.

Quirkyalone: Because although I ache to be in a stable, committed, full-on relationship, I’m still just as unable to fake it and be with someone for the sake of dating or being in a relationship. I’m also committed to the quest of fully enjoying my life whether I’m single or not, and being fully present in my life for myself, my friends, and the eventual partner. Book to credit for this label: my own!

Aspiring Vagabond: Next year, I look forward to a future period of extended travel, of being open to the possibilities of experience various cultures and languages in their native element. I want to open myself up to the mystery, unpredictability, and learning that comes from long-term travel and living abroad. I say aspiring because I’m also sort of a homebody. Book to credit: Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-term World Travel.

New Rich: Even though I have been deeply skeptical of Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week as a gimmick (I’ve never seen a more hard-working self-promoter promoting the idea of working less), when I finally read the book, I found it quite useful as a primer for taking miniretirements: an approach where we don’t delay our lives until we retire. Live for the now. Dip in and out of work. The new “richness” derives from pleasure and enjoyment of stepping out of the workaday world and into unforeseen experiences. Ferriss is an entrepreneur too and his new rich vision (fantasy or not) is full of tips on how to create “passive income” streams. There’s none of that slacker disengagement with the real world’s exigencies. This particularly appeals to me as a creative person because I know that I have periods of inspiration and periods when I need to chill and let ideas bake.

So there you have it! That’s me! Take a look at your own bookshelves and come up with a unique combination of labels for yourself. Play with your friends! Post them in the comments.

Note: This piece was also published on the Huffington Post. I find myself evolving into a technology social critic, perhaps a new evolution in career as an uncredentialed urban anthropologist. So watch for more stuff like this in this blog space, as well as more directly quirkyalone-related stuff, especially as the group blog finally launches within about a month.

On my first day at South by Southwest, an annual geek conference dedicated to celebrating the brightest minds in emerging technology, I already felt like a speck of Internet dust because I only have 157 Twitter followers.

I took drastic measures and pulled out my iPhone for an old-fashioned phone call. My confidante was my former business partner Adam. I knew he would immediately understand. In that moment, I officially hated the Internets.

Just a day before, I was giddy about attending South by Southwest (SxSW) for the first time. Billed as the center of digital creativity, and not to be confused with the film or music festival that immediately follows it, “South by” attracts entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers, advertisers, and venture capitalists. By day, thousands of us roamed the Austin Convention Center to go to panels like “Mad Men on Twitter” (now even Peggy Olsen has a Twitter account), “Love in the Cloud: Online-Only Marriages,” and “What Do I Do With Myself, Now that the Economy Has Collapsed?” At night, shoulder-to-shoulder parties raged.

As much as I wanted to have the random, stimulating conversations in the hallway that everyone says defines the event, something felt very wrong. In fact, my first tweet was: “I feel contrarian urge coming on in first day of #sxsw never seen more distracted sea of people.”

SxSW felt like a flashback to high school, but all the kids are former debate and math team nerds. Summoning all their repressed teenage angst, my fellow conference participants seemed to be taking a new shot at the yearbook superlatives. I quickly realized I was living in the vortex of a geek popularity contest.

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Suddenly I’m going to SXSWinteractive this weekend in Austin! I love spontaneity. I have no planned agenda and won’t be speaking on any panels, just soaking up all the creative and entrepreneurial energy. (A nice contrast to the dour headlines, I hope.) If you’re a blogger, entrepreneur, artist, or otherwise creatively inspired person who will be there and want to meet up, email me at ino @ quirkyalone.net or if you must you can send me a DM on Twitter. Ha! (See below post.)

Note: This piece also appeared on the Huffington Post.

Two weeks ago, on a Friday night around midnight, I was loitering on the sidewalk outside a San Francisco bar with two friends, about to head home but not quite ready to call it a night. A guy standing nearby on the sidewalk told us that that our red, green, and blue jackets, respectively, made us look like the lightbeams that create a color spectrum on television sets and computers. It’s hard to imagine a geekier pick-up line than “You look like RGB!” But that’s what passes for flirtation in 2009 San Francisco in the (waning?) era of web 2.0. He wanted to take a picture of us and upload it to Flickr.

As a writer who also works a product manager in social media, I know the web 2.0 type.

I quickly realized that this web 2.0 boy was part of the Twitter cult, or, as they call themselves, the Twitterati.

The Twitterati are in full effect in San Francisco, Brooklyn, Austin, Portland, and Seattle, where members live their lives as performance art. They exist, therefore they tweet.

Whenever they watch a sunset, eat something delicious, or feel disappointed by a product, they tap out a message on their phones or laptops. Some of them tweet a few times a day, some as many as ten. Or they twitpic, uploading photos. They also seem to believe Twitter is going to revolutionize our lives.

I was looking for a bit more excitement to cap off my evening, and now I had found it. My friends went home and web 2.0 and I hung out on the sidewalk for another hour. First we talked about where we live and what we do, but then, about Twitter! His unself-conscious fervor fascinated me. I played anthropologist, listening to him gush about how Twitter was ushering in a new era of connection that we so desperately needed after the Bush era of fear and division.

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