Nerd Alert: Ouch, I just hurt myself in the legacy.

Spouse started today with another winner.

“I had one of those moments when I was thinking: ‘If I were preserved in amber right now, I would be gravely misunderstood by scientists in a million years.’”

We all have moments when we really hope the spy cameras are looking elsewhere. If you’re a parent or host to animals in your home (though we all know that if you have cats you are merely a tenant in their home), you have these often due to the fact that you are intimately, unavoidably and frequently involved with their bodily functions.

But it made me think (and I do hate to think) about how that is totally right. Context is king. And the concept of cultural relativism – which we studied in anthropology 101 – is applicable all over our daily life.

• When someone overhears only part of your conversation.
• When you tell a story without enough background.
• When you assume someone else is starting from the same experience as yourself.
• When you write an e-mail that’s just a little bit too glib.

Would someone from Mars understand what’s going on from a snapshot of this scene? I’m going to start calling it The Amber Standard.

And then I had a long talk with a dear friend over the Intertubes using Skype. And she is kind of a High Profile Authority on Social Media in a lot of ways and we got to talking about how frustrating it would be if you had something big (and perhaps unpleasant) going on in your life and you just can’t tweet about it because then you’ll have all of your followers all up in your business trying to be helpful, or now knowing too much about you and feeling very free to comment on it.

And when did we have to tweet about things to validate our lives, anyway? What is up with that?

Some people, though, chose to let it all hang out – scars, scabs, snot and all. I’m not going to get into whether that’s brave, bold or needy (me? I think it’s a combo). But they also get some great encouragement from their audience, who get to watch, criticize and goad from the security of the other side of the screen.

But this was supposed to be a funny light post about cleaning poo and hoping that the aliens don’t come for me when I’ve got a pissed off cat under my arm and am holding her ass under the tap in the bathtub. Poor thing – she just never learns that spiders don’t agree with her.