Generation X is stuck between the metaphorical rock and a hard place.  

As the first latchkey/daycare generation, we long for the authentic, intimate community that typically our families of origin didn’t provide.  However, we also have no real model for how to create community.  

So we’re try-ers.  We experiment a lot with things that we believe will fill that void of deep connection in our lives.  We keep looking.  

In the marketplace, there’s a working theory that Gen X’s search for community is largely responsible for the explosion of coffeeshops in the last decade or so.  There’s a reason people still associate us with coffeehouses. Do a quick Google search on Starbucks and “Third Places” and you’ll see what I mean.  We’re all still looking for our own Central Perk, as if a group of quirky, funny friends with great apartments will then magically appear if we find it.

In the online realm, this has resulted in heavy Gen X participation in social networks like Myspace and Facebook, and why we ruled the message boards, blogs and Yahoo Groups that came before them.  Having failed to find community via blood relation or caffeine-induced camaraderie, we hope that seeking out those with similar interests and ideologies will work.  And the social web’s marvelous propensity to sort folks by interest and ideology can make it seem like an eBay for friends.

There is some encouraging news available on our generation’s continuing quest for community.  Generation X typically waits longer to get married, but our divorce rate is dramatically lower than either Boomers or Millenials.  We also spend more time with our kids than our parents’ generation did.  

Slowly but surely, it seems like we’re figuring out how to make community work from the point where it originally failed us–the nuclear family–and hopefully we can work our way outward from there.

img courtesy michelini

Raise your hand if you know someone who is completely obsessed with scrapbooking.  Oddly enough, as much as I love the idea of preserving and sharing family stories, I’m not really all that into scrapbooking.  This may be due to residual guilt over the fact that I still haven’t finished my eldest child’s baby book (and he’s in the sixth grade this year).  

At any rate, with families living farther apart, widespread broadband access, and cooler, simpler tools for uploading, organizing and sharing family media like pictures, stories and videos, the idea of an interactive family album is becoming more appealing.  Not to mention that an online album is relatively green-friendly.  There’s no paper, no plastic, and it only uses electricity when someone is looking at it. 

So I’m going to be doing a series here on creating interactive, digital family albums.  This week, I’m going to look at Capzles.com.  

The idea behind Capzles.com is to create digital “time capsules” (hence the name) that contain all the various text, images, video and other assorted content for a particular event or piece of your life, organized in timeline form, on a single page.  

From a user standpoint, Capzles is fairly simple, with point and click tools to upload, organize, and prettify your Capzles and the content they contain.  Some of those tools have a bit of a lag-time problem which could prove frustrating for novice users (the service is still in beta).

Since privacy is always a concern when sharing images and video of your family, you’ll be happy to know that you can set individual privacy settings for each Capzle you create.  Your options are Public (everyone can see it), Friends or Private.  

Speaking of Friends, Capzles is yet another site that will beg you to try and drag your existing social network onto their platform.  Make of that what you will.  

On the whole, I liked working with Capzles and would recommend it to someone who is looking to do something that could roughly be described as “rich media scrapbooking.”  One small complaint: I’d love to add video to my Capzles.  Since I generally take video of this sort with my mobile device, the fact that .3gp format (most cell phones’ native video format) isn’t compatible for direct upload makes it a bit of a nuisance that would deter less techy users.  It would be nice if I could directly send content from my phone to the media folder for my account at Capzles, but it’s hardly a deal-breaker.  

With the proliferation of Web 2.0 services like this in the last couple of years, I haven’t really been able to keep up with what is available in similar service like I would prefer.  If you’ve tried or know about one, chime in on the comments, and I’ll do my best to check it out and review it here in the series.

img courtesy Scyza on sxc

It’s a little ironic that I wrote last Friday about surviving the whirlwind…

And then Sunday, we ended up with no power after the remains of Hurricane Ike spun through the area.  

LG&E reported about 300,000 without power due to the event in Louisville, and when I called Duke Energy (the Indiana provider) they said that about 100,000-200,000 of their customers were down.  

So about a half a million people were bereft of electricity this week in my local area.  

We got ours back late Tuesday evening (I had fortunately already queued up Monday’s post on Friday.  Thank you, Wordpress!)  

I had a lot of plans for this last week.  I can assure you, none of them involved grilling all the rapidly-thawing meat from my freezer on our tiny charcoal grill.  Or cooking soup in a crock pot next to my desk all day Tuesday for dinner. (The office still had electrical power, and I think the smell was starting to drive my coworkers slowly insane by about 3:00 PM.)  I briefly considered picking up a copy of Manifold Destiny to figure out how to accomplish dinner during my evening commute for Wednesday.  

I had to improvise.  I had to slow down.  I had to let go of my own plans and work with the situation at hand.  I spent a lot of time reading children’s books to my kids.  

It was a little bit glorious.  

Enjoy your weekend.  May your plans work out exactly as you’ve foreseen.

Or else, may you be enriched by whatever happens that wasn’t in the plan.

Depending on how you found me and the nature of our relationship, you may know me as coffeecupkat, Kat French, Katina French, Katina Beckham French, or (and this is pretty much strictly if we’re related by blood) Tina.  So what gives?

About a year or so ago, I started the ball rolling toward legally reinstituting my maiden name as a second middle name.  This would have left me with the rather lengthy moniker “Katina Lynn Beckham French.”  I had my reasons.  

Partly, it was an experiment in personal branding.  ”Katina Beckham French” sounds a little more impressive than “Kat French,” which, as a client pointed out to my chagrin lately, sounds vaguely like an “adult entertainer.”  I can’t really get angry with the client, since it’s hardly the first time I’ve heard that–evidently I’m among the few who don’t need a goofy website to provide me with a “porn star name.”  

When I was a kid, I got pretty tired of having to spell both my first and maiden names.  Thanks to a certain British soccer star, underwear model and metrosexual, “Beckham” is not the oddity it once was.  My family shortened my first name to “Tina” most of the time, but the truth is, I never liked it.  It didn’t seem to fit my personality, and by the time I was in the 4th grade, we had about 5 “Tinas” so I started going by “Katina”– or “KT” to my friends. 

I got married the weekend before I was due to start college, and since all my financial aid was under my maiden name, I went by “Katina Beckham French” for a while.  After two years, my husband joined the military and we moved away from our hometown for six years.  I started going by “Kat” and dropped my maiden name.  It was easier to spell and remember for most people.  

I’ve been on something of a healing journey for the past seven or eight years.  A big part of that healing has involved, for lack of a better term, reintegrating all my various parts.  Over the years, I’ve tried to derive my sense of identity from a lot of different sources–pretty much all of them the wrong ones.  My family, my marriage, my career, my own creativity, have all had a turn at defining who I am.  

So a year ago, I decided to spend some time owning and being at peace with the various names I’ve carried over the years.  More than a few people assumed that resuming use of my maiden name had to do with the state of my marriage–it truly didn’t.  It had more to do with loving and accepting both the family I grew up in, and the awkward kid/teenager who was sick of spelling her awkwardly long and unfamiliar name.  

After a while, I realized that I was putting an unnecessary burden on others by insisting they use my full, unabbreviated name.  I may like it better now, but “the big name” is still kind of a mouthful.  I realized there were other, more important things I really needed to be doing to restore my relationships with family and other people from my past.  

So now, most of the time, in most cases, I go by “Kat French”–it’s still shorter, and easier to remember and spell.  I’m in a part of my life where I’d like to lower the hurdles for getting to know me wherever I can.  

Except, of course, the people who want to get to know me based on the assumption that I’m an adult entertainer.

img courtesy wirkiantoh

Whenever I’m having a particularly neurotic moment at work, I always jokingly say that I’m a writer, and it’s a requirement that I be at least a little screwed up.  If I ever got all my issues worked out, the other writers would probably throw me out of the club.  

I was reading Rebecca Denison’s guest post at Sojourn Music’s blog (I’m a member at Sojourn) on the role of lament in corporate liturgy.  Her song, “Crippled Soul,”  sprang from a time of particular sorrow.  It’s truly a lovely piece, and one that has spoken to me on several occasions.  

My glib joke about getting thrown out of the unofficial writers’ guild if I ever get all my stuff together covers over a very real fear.  What if I get all “whole and healed”–and then I have nothing more to write about?  Or possibly more accurately, what if my gift for words is some kind of cosmic trade-off for being broken and messed up?  If I ditch one, will the scales adjust, resulting in the quality of my writing tanking like the Titanic? 

I somehow think this is not an entirely uncommon fear.  

Everyone has heard stories of artists, writers, and musicians who could only ply their craft when either in the throes of deep personal tragedy or under the influence of mood-altering substances (which, I suppose, can generally lead to deep personal tragedy).  As former comic collectors, my husband and I really enjoy NBC’s Heroes.  The character of Isaac Mendez is a perfect example of this stereotype: “the tortured artist.”

But is the “tortured” part really necessary?  

Lately, I don’t think so.  

I think that good writing springs from a lot of things.  Intense, painful experiences and emotions can be one place to find inspiration–and there is a certain redemptive quality in doing so.  But joy, excitement and funny experiences can be an equally good inspiration.  Regardless of inspiration, writing is a craft that requires discipline, patience, and humor.  Those three things can be hard to muster up if you’re constantly mired in personal angst.  

• If you’re a writer, think about some heavy experiences that would make good raw material for your work.  If you’re looking for some writing exercises, try drafting some one-page scenes or vignettes that are based on those moments.
• Do you need to fully “go back there” to convey the experience with clarity and authenticity?  Is there some benefit to a certain level of emotional distance while writing about it?  Is the scene or vignette clearer when you position yourself as an observer?  
• For times when you do lose yourself in the darker material of your writing, what are some good techniques for pulling yourself out of that space when you’re done writing?  What immediately and reliably lifts your mood?  Going for a walk?  Dancing?  A certain piece of music?  

img courtesy warleyross