I’m really happy to announce that I’ll be collaborating with Mark Clay in the near future to actually put out some live music again. Good chance that we’ll produce some originals, too, as we both are songwriters. But we’ll also be putting our imprint on some music from the 80s.
Today marks my last post for Ask the Matriarch, a column the RevGals started two years ago that made me, as Gallycat, part of a weird A-list of bloggers that cause a room full of women priests to smile knowingly when they hear that name, even though phonetically it’s more commonly associated with a top publishing blog.
In this capacity I’ve been fielding questions from priests and passing them along to a panel of women pastors and priests with a tremendous amount of experience under their belts. And advice, dispensed with love, has flowed from them through me to a point that ever so briefly, I’ve been kind of an advice columnist in my own right.
It’s time for me to turn the reins over, however. I took a brief respite last summer during which time Listing Straight was kind enough to cover for me while I juggled a new house, a job transition, and summer with the kid at home. This year, it’s become harder and harder to keep up with the responsibilities I already had when I bit something else off: I’m starting graduate school in the fall–er, next week.
I’ll be getting my master’s degree in Public Administration, specializing in nonprofit management, and continuing to dedicate myself to helping organizations, including church organizations and faith-oriented progressive causes, understand and leverage web 2.0 technologies like blogging, social networks and new media.
And, in less than three weeks, I’m marrying my darling future husband, Dean, on the occasion of our fourth dating anniversary in a private ceremony in Northern Virginia. (FINALLY.)
Ann Fontaine of What the Tide Brings In and a colleague of mine at the Cafe, and the blogger RevHoney, both themselves matriarchs, are taking over management of the column for the foreseeable future. I will remain available to them as they take it over, and I do hope the column continues to be as much a success and as valuable a resource for you as it has been.
I really want to thank the RevGals for the opportunity, as it lead to other wonderful things for me, including my role at the Episcopal Cafe, my first published spiritual reflection, my present job, and my emergence as a social media strategist who’s “internet-famous” among a really amazing, creative, thoughtful group of people. I’m not as reflective these days, more intent on being a humorist and tapping my DJ roots, but perhaps this will free up just enough time to get back to weekly meditations.
I also want to thank the Matriarchs for their insights. I’ve learned a lot from all of you. And for all the RevGalBlogPals for participating each week, cheering us on, and being an amazing community of diverse viewpoints and experience.
May blessings run over for you all!
There’s a metaphor percolating about with regard to digital immigrants and digital natives that quite honestly chafes me to the core, because I feel like I’m a first-generation native and my child is a second-generation native, but no one seems to give credence to that analogy because, well, the first generation natives are gen-x and no one really cares about us anyway. </obwhine>
Tonight I was brainstorming ideas for a community based around my high school. 20-year reunions really are the devil for those of us ENFP types who kick out grand ideas every five minutes and then scramble to get _any_ detail right, because, well, I’m inspired. Reconnecting with high school friends left and right and realizing I’m a natural at sleuthing out missed connections (everything from missing classmates to 30-year-old earworms) made me also realize that I would like a reunion to help me connect with my friends from the classes of 1986 to 1990, with a few fringers from years beyond even that.
So I started to create a group that, once I decide whether it’s viable or not, opens the floor to members of all those classes, and I was trying to figure out what classes to invite. My dates are kind of arbitrary, to be honest, but I felt like there was a period of time in there that my peers and I experienced something that would allow us to be more proficient with this technology once it became available to us.
I chose the classes of 1985 through 1994. Intuitively, this felt right, but i couldn’t put my fingers on exactly why until I thought about a significant even in my own life that transpired in 1994: I got online.
And I wasn’t sure why 1985 felt right either; certainly it wasn’t that they were the seniors when I was a freshman. But then I realized that they were born in 1966, which by some markers is the beginning of generation X.
Other markers pin the beginning of gen X as 1961, but, as I continued to mull this over, I realized that being born in the five-year stretch before or after this 10-year window put folks on a cusp with overlaps to the previous or succeeding generation, respectively.
And a funny thing about this subgroup of our generation, no matter how you define it: we are the pre-internet segment of generation-x. As I was bantering with one of my 20-year reunion organizers recently, I didn’t become an extrovert until I got on to the Internet. That’s ok, he replied. Computers didn’t become extroverted until they got on the Internet either. It’s funny, but it’s also a good point: we might not have been connected by technology to the greater, wider world as we were growing up, but we had computers, VCRs, cable, and a host of other technology that gave us the language and the culture that would allow us to adapt seamlessly to the new media horizon, some of us faster than others. But not as immigrants.
Nope. We’re your first generation natives–the PRE-INTERNET DIGITAL NATIVES, and we are your translators, no matter which side of us you happen to fall.
Pick up a copy of the September issue of Good Housekeeping. Flip to page 128 and see a familiar face.
The whole article is worth a read–it’s how to avoid and handle burning out as a volunteer. That in itself is worth an Ask the Matriarch column!!!
But it also ties back to a column I wrote for the Episcopal Cafe last year–worth revisiting in light of the fact that Good Housekeeping felt my career evolution worth a spotlight. So any of you who google me based on my appearance in the magazine, have a look at it here:
From Transparency to Enlightenment: On taking the step of putting my volunteer “church” work on my resume.
Usually, among my faithy colleagues, I’m the early adopter for most new toys. Being a DJ in my former life, it’s hard to let the control go, so I’d never given Pandora a look until the Very Rev. Nick Knisely, who’s oh-so-very VERY (heh, had to!) asked me why I hadn’t told him about its musicky goodness. I was caught clueless, and sheepish. See, I use Playlist.com to build embeddable playlists, Blip.fm to microblog my various earworms, iLike.com (via Facebook) to get updates from bands I like, and Last.fm to explore music (and I still use gnod, so there). So, I really didn’t think I needed another music tagging service to keep track of.
Nick+ had mentioned Pandora had iPhone integration so I decided to give it a whirl. Oh, Lord. See, I’m a woman of many genres, and finally I have a way to broadcast all of them on separate channels, tune into whichever I want, and share the results in all their crazy mishmoshedness.
So far I’ve set up Radio Helcat 80s, Radio Helcat Industrial, Radio Helcat Bluegrass and Radio Helcat Modern. And I’m quite sure I’m going to have to set up a Baroque channel, a movie score channel, and .. hmm. Eventually they’re going to have to cut me off.
But they, like every other social music service, totally lack any songs by Modern English other than that one we shall not name. That’s going to be the barometer, for me, of how fabulous a service is, because I will not rest until “Someone’s Calling” gets the love it deserves. (And for that matter, becomes my ring tone.)