Twitter Tweets.

I am in the process of querying agents for my first manuscript.  For this, I use google excessively.  I google authors that I like to find their agents.  I search the agents' names.  I google literary agencies in various locations and I search, and I search and I search.  I read their bios, I read their blogs, I read anything that might help me turn this dream of publication into a reality.

But it got me thinking.  What if one of these agents, reading my query letter, turned around and googled me?  I wasn't too worried, after all, I'm a little intimidated by the longevity of what gets out there on the web.  I try to post thoughtfully, and always try to keep in mind that any words that I put out there on my blog or facebook page could potentially be out there in the cyberworld existence for a long, long time. 

But a quick google search for "Natalie Fowler" sounded like a good idea.  Just to be sure.

Uh oh.

There are a lot of Natalie Fowler's out there in the world. 

One of the first Natalie Fowler links lands on a Twitter Account.  NatalieYoBabyFowler something or other.  

Yikes.

The tagline under the google search reveals that the Yo Baby Natalie Fowler is an "aspiring young quirky writer." 

Huh.  Maybe it's not such a bad thing to aspire to be young.  I barely know what Twitter is.

A click on the link to her Twitter Page, reveals a tagline that states she might very well write you into one of her novels as a character.  

Oh Dear God.

She tweets about taking out the garbage, joking around with her sister, and getting flowers from a secret admirer that included a quote from Harry Potter, and (my personal favorite) getting mistaken as an employee of Hollister (and apparently that's a good thing).  

Now I just feel old.  

But I also feel really, really thankful that there was no such thing as Twitter when I was in high school. 

Maybe I should put a disclaimer at the bottom of my query letters from now on:  I am in no way connected with the "Yo Baby" Natalie Fowler on Twitter.  But then again, there probably aren't that many other Natalie Fowler's from Belgium.  I hope.  

 

Tragedy Strikes.

The tragic school shooting in Connecticut just before Christmas can hardly pass without comment.  

It's funny, just before it happened, my mother-in-law was visiting and we were talking about the song Pumped Up Kicks.  She made a comment to the boys about it being about a school shooting.  When they asked what that was I quickly directed the conversation elsewhere and later explained to her that we never had a reason to have to explain "school shooting" to the kids and I was going to protect that innocence in them for as long as I could.  Living in a bubble can sometimes have its benefits.    

How I wish that bubble hadn't burst.  Just a few short weeks later, with the tragic news from Connecticut everywhere, we had to tell them what happened before they heard about it on their own.  Oh, how my heart breaks just thinking about that horrible day.  

In the aftermath, I was struck by how big of a role Facebook played a part in that tragedy.  Now, looking back, to be able to visually track the grief and shock of a national tragedy like that was fascinating.  In the immediate hours, there was a lot of anger and emotional posts.  And lots of finger pointing.  

But eventually, the discourse changed to grief and support and compassion for those families that lost little lives that day.  As it should.  

It made me wonder, how would 9/11 have been different if we had Facebook back then? I am thankful for Facebook on so many levels, but this gave me another one.  A single, public forum for free speech and discourse.  We all have the ability to state an opinion and listen to others express theirs, and share thoughts back and forth, thus possibly impacting general public opinion.  It's an amazing tool.  

And now, I hope what comes next, beyond the world of Facebook, is problem solving.  Because really, how could something that senseless and tragic be because of just one cause?  But rather, a whole wicked combination of combustible factors that exploded into what became a national tragedy.  Every aspect of it should be looked at and reexamined.  There is a lot of screaming about gun control...but it's so much more than that.  It's about diagnosing and assistance for the mentally ill...it's about a desensitization to gun violence through realistic video games...it's about keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, especially those that have been desensitized to gun violence....it's about safety in schools...it's about the media and how the race to be the first to cover a tragedy in our world of instant access to online information may not always lead to the most appropriate coverage.  All of it, all of it needs to be assessed so the problem solving can begin, and I have faith that it will.  There are twenty smiling little angels to make sure of it this time.

 

Cutting the last tie.

I love American Reality shows.  Not just any crazy wacky concept, but the old-school reality television (has it really been long enough to use the words old-school?) like Survivor and Amazing Race.  Bravo also has excellent reality shows, like Project Runway and Top Chef.  There is something about watching that creative competition that is riveting entertainment for me.

Now, I would never pirate a movie online or even a television sitcom.  But reality television always felt different for me and I never felt bad about following the current issues of Survivor or Top Chef via internet streaming.  Especially given the fact that most U.S. television networks post their own episodes online for a lot of different shows, especially the reality shows.  By the way, anything (like recent episodes) posted on a network television website is blocked to viewers living outside the United States.  

But last year, some sort of computer/internet legislation went into effect that caused a significant disruption in my daily life here.  With this new legislation, there was a "crackdown" on sites that illegally posted studio television/movie content online.  As there should be, that's illegal.  But it carried over into everything.  My reality tv shows completely disappeared.  And now, links for everything like clips of interviews on a news channel, are completely blocked to users outside the U.S.  

That last little window, to my American pop culture has been slammed shut, that last bridge closed off.

After it happened, I went through about a week of withdrawal.  Mid-season Top Chef, and a new Project Runway was about to begin, but it wasn't as bad as it would have been during a sweeps week of Survivor.  I tried watching the french version of Survivor (Koh-Lanta).  But really.  I'm sure there is more appeal in watching your own countrymen battle it out in a social game like that, but for me it was just a big display of all of the french stereotypes.  And seriously, if you are from Paris, just stay in Paris.   There is no need to go battle it out on a deserted island.  In any event, my reality television addiction trickled quietly away and now I don't miss really miss it at all.  

But then, we switched our cable package.  Finding ways to cut expenses, John bundled our cable together with our phone and internet and now we have a new provider.  And this new provider had a genius idea.  Order some of the dutch cable channels.  This is because most dutch television isn't dubbed over, but rather left in english with dutch subtitles.  We have the History channel!  And National Geographic!  

And now, he will be the first to tell you about my new favorite television shows.  Storage Wars and Pawn Stars.  I wonder if Bravo has a dutch counterpart....

   

Elections from Abroad.

This was the second presidential election where we voted via absentee ballot.  The first election, four years ago, I remember being struck by how much everyone wanted to talk to us about it.  Americans don't just walk up to someone they barely know on the street and ask them who they are going to vote for and why.  It's not that we don't talk politics, it's usually just a more personal conversation amongst friends or family, not something you'd walk up and ask a stranger about.

Also, I remember that the biggest topic of conversation was whether or not it would be Hillary or Obama, no one even mentioned a republican candidate or cared.  Then after the primaries were decided, it was all about "when Obama was president" not if.  It was interesting to look at my own country's elections from an outsider's perspective.

Since then, I have talked to other expats who have lived here a lot longer than we have.  One mother told me about what it was like to have her American children at a local school when Bush was president and the Americans were in Iraq.  One word sums it up, "difficult."  Her children were chastised for being Americans and they had to try hard to fit in fast, even going so far as to renounce their own nationality amongst friends to fit in.  I can't imagine what that would be like, and I'm glad that we arrived at a time when our country was not so hated, it was hard enough as it was.

For this election, I was mostly aware how blissfully ignorant we were about the candidates.  And I say this in this way because I did not see a single election ad for a single candidate during the entire campaign.  The only commentary that filtered in was through Facebook friends and various rants or raves about this debate or that.  And that's easy enough to skim past and skip over in my Facebook feed, so I didn't pay any attention to that.

As a side note, I think it's kind of funny when people on Facebook get upset about what others are posting.  Just don't read it.  We can't control what other people are posting, but we can control what we choose to read.  And there are certain Facebook friends that when I see their name, I proceed with caution. Ahem, you know who you are.  But they are entitled to express their opinion and I am entitled to skip past it if I want.

But I digress.  Where was I?  Oh yes.  Blissfully ignorant with election coverage.  It was so bad, in fact, that I sat down to fill out my ballot before John was leaving for a trip to the States with the idea that he could mail it for me.  But when I tried to "quick fill it in," I couldn't.  I had absolutely no idea who to vote for or why and it occurred to me that this was a rare gift.  A rare gift to search out the topics that were important to me and research prospective candidates positions about them.  I used a website (www.ontheissues.org) -- a website dedicated to collecting nonpartisan information about various candidates for almost every possible candidate.

I dedicated the next day to this task and it took me almost all day in front of the computer, reading and researching.  I went right down to the state offices, and it got a little interesting when it got to the positions for "water council board" something or other.  I tried, but couldn't find a darn thing out about any of it other than a random faxed application if even that.  Seriously, if there is no public information out there about a candidate, don't make us vote for it.  (I left those blank.)

I won't say who I voted for, but I will say that the result surprised me.  And what I took away from watching our election, was how lucky we are to have such a thoughtfully planned system of government.  Our founding fathers gave us a system that did not allow any single governing body too much power.  That's ingenious (if only these various arms of the government could actually get along and work together, we'd be in business).  But after watching my adopted country struggle for more than a year without a government in place, or watching some of the crazy violence unfold in countries with political unrest, like Egypt, I feel lucky once again to be an American.      

Our european friends here still want to talk about the election, and the most common question is "are you happy with the result?" To which I answer some variation of "our country has a lot of challenges right now with everything from the economy to immigration to international relations, and no matter who is in office, they have a lot of work to do."  And I would say the same thing no matter which candidate was elected.