A n n a r c h y

My friend and colleague Shelley and I are taking our two girls to a company “junket” we’ll both be attending next month in southern California. (We’re calling the two of them the MarketingProfs “Web 3.0″ team.)

The girls are 9 and 11 and live, respectively, in Texas and Massachusetts. Kinsey (the 9-year-old) and Caroline (age 11) have never met in person. But last week, in anticipation of their trip, they started chatting with each other on Skype, the internet phone and chat software.

Their instant messaging quickly evolved into free Skype-to-Skype calls. This past week, they’ve spent some time jointly playing games at various kiddie sites (like Webkinz, Disney and Club Penguin) and chatting all the while—about the game, but also sharing their favorite subjects at school, talking about their pets, what their moms are making for dinner, and so on. In other words, they’ve been becoming friends. [Read more →]

Around Christmas, I met TomTom. We’ve been inseparable ever since.

TomTom, if you don’t know, is a portable GPS navigation system. It mounts on the car dashboard, and its voice commands guide you to your destination. For someone like me—I get lost finding my way back to the table after a visit to the restaurant bathroom—it’s a godsend.

Since we met, I’ve realized that he’s all that I’d ever want. And, as with any good relationship, he’s full of small surprises I didn’t even realize I’d want, but now find I can’t live without.

What’s more, he’s opened up new horizons for me, encouraging me to venture into places I would have considered off limits before he was my companion.

What’s all that if not the essence of a good relationship? Can you see why I love him? In fact, let me count the ways… [Read more →]

In her book released last fall, Deceptively Delicious, Jessica Seinfeld slips chickpeas into her chocolate chip cookies and purees butternut squash into her mac and cheese. The general premise is that kid food is fried and white. But if you can slip in something on the sly—say, cauliflower into mashed potatoes, or sweet potato into pancakes—then you can trick your kids into eating the stuff you want them to, minus the tantrums and tears.

Jessica, who is married to the comic Jerry Seinfeld, has been in the news of late because Missy Chase Lapine, who authored a similar book, called The Sneaky Chef, insists that Deceptively Delicious is nothing but a riff on her ideas. The Seinfelds contest that.

But whatever. The problem isn’t whether Jessica was the first mother to hide flaxseed in chicken nuggets and then write about it. The problem is, as Wall Street Journal’s Raymond Sokolov wrote a few weeks ago, “These women treat vegetables the way Victorian mothers treated sex, with silence.” [Read more →]

A few weeks ago, I had some time to kill at Boston’s Logan Airport before a flight to Denver, and eventually to Santa Barbara. It was a quiet Tuesday in the terminal, and nothing there (a sundries shop, a TBCY staffed by a yawning clerk) seemed to hold much in the way of a half-hour’s entertainment. But as I cased the concourse, the guy who operated the shoeshine stand called out to me, “Hey, Pretty Lady!” he said. “Look at those boots! You need shoe shine!”

If you’ve been in a major municipal airport, in a larger, older US city like Boston, New York, Chicago or D.C., you know what I’m talking about: those ancient wooden platforms with two or three seats in a row and a series of brass foot rests beneath, lined up like gold teeth in an old man’s jaw. The chairs themselves are usually old and carved, too: In a different context, they’d look like the sort of perch a courtroom judge would rule from.

Today, the structures seem quaintly out of place, their old oak forms solid and unchanging even as the terminals around them unanimously get a fresh update with modern glass and tile surfaces. Most of the stands were likely set in place when the terminals were first built in the 1920s, when commercial air travel started to become viable, anchoring them in an era when most travelers wore the kinds of shoes that regularly needed a good, stiff shining.

Only I wasn’t necessarily thinking about that as the shoeshine man called out to me. Instead, I looked down at my boots, which were – he was right – quite scuffed. I thought how that emphasized their mannishness, with their flat soles and battered, rounded toes, and I decided to march my scuffed boots over to him for some shoeshine magic. [Read more →]

The fabulous Toby Bloomberg solicited this from me more than a year ago for a site she was publishing, Blogger Stories. I asked her to let me reprint a modified version here to answer a question I’ve been getting a lot lately, “So how’d you get into blogging, anywho?”

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When I was a kid growing up in the ’70s, and my parents’ friends would ask me the inevitable question, “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I would look them square in the eye and say definitively, “I want to be a blogger.”

Well, that’s not entirely true. I did go through a period, when I was about 8 or 9, of wanting to be a vet, until my mother pointed out the inherent limitations of a veterinarian who accepted appointments only with cute, healthy dogs under a year old. That, and I was rather shy—so I never actually looked an adult square in the eye. Truth be told, I never spoke to them, either.

But other than that brief diversion—I had always wanted to be a blogger. In fact, I invented blogging. It’s just that it took 30 years for the technology to catch up. So while I waited, I spent hours every day writing. But unlike my friends who kept diaries stashed under their beds, I needed an audience. I needed interaction, feedback, community. [Read more →]

I got an email from my friend Sharon this morning. She had recently signed up for a Facebook account and had just been “friended” by someone she didn’t know very well. Actually, she didn’t know him at all. She asked something like, “So who is he? Is he a creep? What does he want?” Then, she added, “And since when is ‘friend’ a verb?”

For those of us who work in the digital space and have readily embraced online social media tools like Facebook, it’s easy to brush off Sharon’s condition as Neophyte Nerves. But, in truth, the essence of her concerns about privacy and access to her personal life has been clouding my wizened brow, too. And by “privacy” I’m not talking about access to my data—where I’ve been on the internet, or what I’ve bought, or what I’m emailing about.

I’m concerned with something more fundamental and frailer than that: a sense of having my emotional privacy eroded, and a sense that the level of intimacy I have with my Facebook folks—and they have with me—is not in my control. Facebook has changed the rules. [Read more →]