horsepigcow

As many of you who read this blog know, I have been training lately. For what? Nothing in particular except for getting into better shape, looking and feeling better, but this training has gotten me back in touch with my body. In more ways than I could imagine.

I was working out with a friend a couple of months ago who had a fancy watch on that was connected to a strap around his chest. When we were side-by-side on the treadmill, the machine picked up his heart rate and read it to me. He explained that he could keep better track of his progress in and out of the gym if he could record his heart rate.

As I paid more attention to my workout regime and progress, I started thinking about how useful this data would be to me and for my birthday I asked friends and family to give me money instead of gifts so I could put it towards one of these fancy watches. This weekend I finally bought a really nice heart rate monitor watch:

And started to record…well…everything. At first it was a rollerblading journey, but then I got curious. Why was my average heart rate at 154 when I didn’t feel very out of breath or tired? I recall my friends’ being at 128 or so and he was sweating pretty good. So I ran it during preparing dinner. Average 91 bpm. Seems a little high, but not ridiculous for a relaxing activity. So I tested my levels and found out that my heart rate rises super quickly. And I don’t get out of breath, either. It just goes from about 85/90 to 125/130 to 150/155 in a matter of a minute just from moving around a bit (taking stairs, doing pushups/situps, etc) and then drops just as fast when I stop. I also found out that I don’t actually start breathing heavy until about 170 or so.

This has prompted me to go get that long overdue checkup next week. Something that I have been putting off for way too long. I have been working out steadily now for about 4 months. Taking care of myself. Eating better. Feeling great. But the heart rate is not normal. And I have noticed that I require more sleep than average over the past few years and the exercise hasn’t made it better.

The point here isn’t that I’m concerned about my health, but that I wouldn’t know there is anything to be concerned about if I didn’t have the data that the Polar heart rate monitor has given me. Which made me start thinking about how little data we have on our own bodies and how little we have to compare it against (if it wasn’t for my fitness-buff friend, I wouldn’t know that 155 is a really high mid-range heart rate). Is there anyone out there that has their health records back to the time they were born? Hell, I don’t even have health records back to when my son was born. *Gulp* I may not even have health records back to the last doctor’s visit I had. Now where was that?

Of course we’ve seen the sci-fi movies like Minority Report where this data in the wrong hands is a dangerous thing…and, well, there are multiple commercial entities trying to gather our health records together, but what about you and I? And where is our mechanism to start gathering this information without worrying about how it’s being paid for? My heart rate monitor is a good start, but what about other biometrics? The cost of testing is coming down. It really is. I have my latest eye testing results. That was $50. I joined 23 and Me a couple of years back. A little steeper at $399, but I’m sure it will come down as more people join. Now where to store it? Analyze it? Is there an SMS alert I can set up if something seems out of place?

Frankly, the thought of having this additional information about my body is kind of exciting. Something I’m willing to pay for. To monitor. If I knew the effects of that poutine I had at 3 am a couple of weeks ago were in real time, I would probably watch what I put in my body. I would walk more. I wouldn’t have that extra drink. I would definitely never bum a cigarette when drinking. But right now it’s invisible and even though I kind of get the effects of my personal abuse, I keep abusing.

I wonder how much more effective self-monitoring would be in disease prevention? Cancer? Obesity? Heart disease? Would we start to become numb to the information or would it actually make us healthier? I think it’s the latter. The more I can look inside of my body, the less I want to abuse it. The new gaming becomes how to achieve the perfect score on health. Better than any badges, getting an all-time high score on the state of my lungs would be something to tweet about.

We are just at the beginning of how important data is going to become in our lives. From our bodies to what we spend to our location to our relationships and beyond. We are just starting to realize how us being aware of, owning and controlling our data is going to be the most powerful part of our future.

Hosting my own website is a pain in the ass. Kind of like owning my own house but without the obvious benefits.

When I owned my own house and my hot water heater died, I had to get it replaced. Broken things added up over time, but I always thought to myself, “That’s okay. It’s an investment in my own property.” So the time and money spent on it felt like an investment in my future.

Now, I understand that hosting my own blog has similar benefits. I’m hosting my own data and have complete freedom with it and that is very future focused of me. But I understand the importance of data in the future and not everyone does.

This conversation is going on right now over on the Project VRM Mailing list. I’m explaining why the fact that blog maintenance being a pain in the ass outweighs most people’s perceived benefits to hosting one’s own data. That Facebook or Google owning our data doesn’t seem pressing compared to the type of work we’d have to put into the maintenance of it ourselves. Plus, there is that convenient way that they connect so many of us by making it so easy.

I self-host my blog. I get to personalize the theme and have the ability to export my data in an instant. Nobody puts ads on here except for me. You sign up for alerts? I maintain that database. It’s my content, my community and my artwork. All mine. But it’s also a huge time suck. I get bugs, hacked, lose things, have the possibility of having my host explode and lose everything not backed up. When my template breaks with an update, I have to figure out why. I recently lost my Whuffie Factor website altogether (content is still on my server), and it’ll take me a while to track down this issue. My blog was compromised again for, like, the 6th or 7th time in 10 months just this week. I needed to research what was going on and how to fix it, then figure out where things were at, what my passwords were (I always seem to be changing them) and wade through folders looking for files that look out of place (I have no clue, really). Luckily I have stellar friends that helped me out.

It’s frustrating and inconvenient. And even for me, a big believer in owning my own data, I wonder on days like these if it’s worth it. I want to “set and forget”. I’ll deal with the data issue later so I don’t have to deal with the maintenance issues now. So I posted this dilemma to the list and got back a bunch of responses with all sorts of links on how I can make my blog more secure. It’s not that security isn’t important. It’s very important. I get that. But I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want answers. I want convenience.

And I really think that is the basis for “regular people” not fighting against Facebook or any other companies that own a good amount of our data (still growing at an incredible rate even if there are protests in the geek ranks). They make everything really convenient. People don’t want to learn more about security so they can host their own conversations and relationships, but if you provided people with a solution that is 100% user-friendly PLUS you gave people the ability to export/move data/relationships/etc, you would be a clear choice.

People aren’t lazy or stupid, but we ARE busy and will find anything to simplify our lives so we have more times for the things that really matter (i.e. not reading how to make our blogs more secure). It’s not about education, it’s about understanding that. So if you are in the business of changing the world or offering a solution for people that is empowering or a ‘better alternative’, don’t educate people on the benefits of using your service. Instead, offer the very very best user experience in the universe. Help people not think about the stuff that doesn’t matter and do all of the heavy lifting in the background so that they can just reap the benefits of your platform. If you can deliver both freedom AND convenience, you’ll be the clear winner.

Even though during my entire adult dating life I’ve observed this, I recently started two question this phenomenon. The scene is sort of as follows:

Him: “When are you available to go out?”
Me (checks schedule): “I’m free Saturday night.”
Him: “Cool. What would you like to do?”
Me: “I’m open. You pick.”
Him: “Oh, that’s a lot of pressure. Do you want to eat or…?”
Me (getting frustrated): “Sounds good.”
Him: “Okay…what kind of food do you like?”
Me: “I’m open.”
Him: “Do you like Italian?”
Me (biting my tongue): “I’m open. So sure.”
Him: “What time were you thinking?…”

At about this point I want to say, “Forget it. I’m busy,” or, like I’ve done in the past just step in and pick a place, time and take charge. And the frustrating thing is that, over the 19 years of adulthood dating I’ve participated in, this is more the rule than the exception. I can count on one hand where I was asked out, plans were made and I just enjoyed being out. And each of those times I had the time of my life. Not all of them were fancy (sometimes it’s just a walk in the park, a drink on a patio or a dinner), but the fact that I didn’t have to take charge made me feel like a princess.

I had a boyfriend years ago that I took ballroom dancing lessons with. We were awful. At one point the instructor came up and asked, “What’s going on here? Show me the steps.” We stumbled through them and then my boyfriend blurted out, “It’s because she keeps trying to lead!” The instructor took one look at him and replied, “Of course she does, silly, SOMEBODY has to!” The relationship didn’t last much past that point. To me, that moment was a metaphor for that entire relationship. I’ve spend most of my life taking charge (mostly because as a single mom who had nobody else to rely on, I have to), so I am more than happy to just let someone else take charge when possible. To be in a relationship where I’m leading all of the time is exhausting!

But what came first: men who got complacent or women who started taking charge?

Did the sexual liberation of women lead to men taking a step back and stop trying so hard? Or did men stop trying so hard lead to more women stepping up? I’ve had this conversation with too many others (both men and women) to think it only happens to me. And to be fair, men shouldn’t be the only ones making decisions and leading, either. Both parties should continue working to make the other one happy. Relationships where one person is putting in more work than the other are draining. But if the woman focusing more on how to make a relationship work is a generalization and a stereotype, I’d love to experience the example that disrupts it. Especially now when we are leading more in the workplace. That’s a double-day and the studies show that women are growing more tired and stressed because of this.

But then I ask myself…is it me? Am I doing this? Do I come across as too “take charge”? Do I not give any space for someone to take care of my needs? Am I not vulnerable enough? I have heard myself uttering the following phrase too many times, “I don’t *need* anyone” (and had a good friend tell me I repeat that phrase more often than anything else). All my life I’ve been told that a woman shouldn’t be needy. Any time I’ve uttered the words, “I’m lonely”, I have dozens of people instructing me that I should be perfectly happy with my own company and that nobody will love me until I can love myself. Since I was a little girl I was taught to stand on my own two feet, be myself, not need anyone, be 100% self-sufficient, fill my own needs, get over my need for external validation, never make a decision based on another person, be emotionally secure and never admit I’m lonely. And ironically I’m standing on my own two feet and all of the above, but what I want most in the world is for a strong man to come along and organize a goddamned date and sweep me off of my feet. I want to let go and be vulnerable and just be taken care of by someone else.

My point is this…I know that I shouldn’t be needy, but I don’t want to be 100% independent either. And I think we give people (men AND women) the wrong messages growing up about this stuff. We aren’t rocks. We aren’t islands. We *do* need other people. And there are times we should take and times we should give in order to maintain the balance in human relationships. A woman being vulnerable isn’t a setback to an ancient time, it is reality. It doesn’t mean that we are always vulnerable or more vulnerable than men. Being loved is awesome. And being loved requires a certain level of vulnerability. In order to accept it, you must take a risk with your heart.

So…if someone can give me a clue as to how I can be vulnerable without coming across as needy, would you let me know? And if you run across a man who can make a decision and take charge feel free to introduce me.

After having coffee with a male friend today, I came home and changed some of the information I share with my “friends” on Facebook. I felt incredibly conflicted doing this.

The context of our conversation was the following: I’ve been asked out at a fairly normal, even healthy rate, by men I meet while out and about, but as soon as they ‘friend’ me on Facebook, there seems to be an extreme amount of vanishing going on. According to my male friend, my level of disclosure is too much for most men to stomach (in his words, men want “mystery” or at least to think that there is a challenge to getting a girl’s number and information). Of course, my reaction was that any man that couldn’t handle a few foursquare check-ins and posts about my son and life on FB wouldn’t be man enough to deal with me anyway, so good riddance. However I wondered in the back of my mind if removing my phone number and tightening up the privacy settings just a wee bit wouldn’t hurt anyway.

As I did this it occurred to me that there was a new ‘class’ of women emerging in the world. When I open up FB, most of the posts talking about personal lives, posting whereabouts and having deep discussions about sex and modern love are by the women I have as friends on FB. Many of them single. Most of them list their contact information, including phone number. The number of posts by women seem to be far greater than those by men – and I have more male ‘friends’ than female by far (it’s the circles I run in). And this seems consistent with some of the most recent research about who is participating on social networks (more women). Only a few years back, though, it seemed to be the opposite.

Only 3 years ago, it seemed that women were more closed in their use of social web tools:

Women were keeping their Twitter accounts private, their Facebook accounts only open to close friends and they certainly weren’t joining the social networks that broadcast location at a major rate. I’m not sure what the percentage is, but it does appear that women are dropping the “women need to be private for safety” line in exchange for the “women need to be public for success” line. At least in my circles.

Recently, this article came out proclaiming that, well, we as women don’t really “need” men anymore as we are earning more money, more educated and have the majority of the buying power now. Hell, we don’t really even need them to make babies thanks to modern science. My favorite line in the entire article is:

Guys, one senior remarked … “are the new ball and chain.”

Still, as I remarked to my friend (who thought I repeated the line “I don’t *need* a man” too many times to be a neutral statement), I would like to have a healthy, long term relationship with a man, so I’m trying to get to the bottom of the vanishing problem (and vanishing before I can even have an IRL date). As he put it, “You probably don’t want to be dating normal men anyway.”

Bingo. “The normals” is a term I’ve heard come up more and more lately. At one point it was used to describe non-early-adopter types that you want to attract to your startup. At some point, it became people who don’t ‘get’ our crazy social web lifestyle. The lifestyle where we are recording every moment, happening, thought and occasion in some sort of digital form and quite often broadcasting it to everyone. It is quite addictive, really, especially when it is so full of every day rewards: increasing your friend base (geographically as well as numerically), getting you hired to teach others to do this stuff, small bits of fame here and there and interesting moments every day. Broadcasting and connecting with other broadcasters becomes a way for life to get super interesting quickly. It isn’t trivial, either. The knowledge I accumulate through my random conversations daily has made me dangerous at a cocktail party. Who needs to read the paper anymore when we pass around articles before they are published and dissect them as a collective?

“The Normals” who are part of those conversations are left in our opinionated dust. In our crazy social web world, we gain one another’s respect by our deep analysis of social issues. In the ‘normal’ world, we are seen as complete airbags. But there is nothing wrong with our neverending quest for knowledge or desire to share every bit of that knowledge accumulated (being the awesome knowledge brokers we are), it’s just, well, a little abnormal…for ‘normal’ people.

And it’s worse for women. A man who knows lots of stuff, shares it and gets excited by this knowledge is seen by most as industrious, ambitious and smart. Not all women, but many women see this man as attractive and someone with great earning potential. A woman who exhibits a keen desire to share knowledge (for instance, to talk about data, the future of economics and the changing socio-cultural climate) on the other hand is really ONLY seen as attractive by men who are excited by those conversations. For male “Normals”, this woman is emasculating at best.

It’s a stereotype stuck in another era, really. As the presence of women as the leaders in the workforce grows, it will be more an more crucial for women to be knowledgeable and ready to share and strut that knowledge. And not only will it be necessary for our professional lives, but, hell, it will become apparent that knowledge is freakin awesome, so we will want to pursue more of it. At some point, “The Normals” will occupy the minority, too, because survival will be directly tied to our knowledge and ability to share it…but that’s a whole other post.

I knew there was a reason that I’ve found nerds sexier than jocks and rockstars as I’ve grown older (and wiser). They seem to understand that holding her own in a debate on the future of nuclear energy or whether China is the next superpower is the sexiest thing a woman can do and that a woman who blogs, posts her geo-location and scours the web for interesting articles to post on her FB profile is just being smart about her data. The mystery that turns nerds on is in figuring out how to read between the lines of her Twitter stream, how to decode the latest Blip.fm playlist to find out how she really feels about you and looking at her Flickr favorites to understand how she wants to see the world around her. Love is knowing that she shares what is happening with thousands of people, but her innermost fears with only you.

So I maintain that a man who asks for my number but cannot handle my level of disclosure is not the man for this modern woman. And I’m afraid it’s his dating pool, not mine, that is getting smaller.