Since the Ottoman royal harems were filled with women from the Mediterranean and the Baltic -- Italian families even casting their daughters on the Adriatic to be picked up by the sultan's sailors -- my Turkish husband jokes he finally brought me back to Istanbul where I belong. I don’t know, anything's possible. The Turks were also laying seige to Eastern Europe and my Lithuanian family name, echoing a town and river on today’s Belarus border, sounds a lot like the imperial Turkish bloodline of Osman.

For New World types like me the mysteries of our extended lineage often crop up as synchronicity. Wanderlust. Quirks of taste, like ghost urges from genes and culture long ago severed.

Why does this Northern California girl raised on turkey burgers crave the beet soup borscht? When I feel kinship with my Ukrainian, Estonian, Jewish, Italian and Greek friends, what do their wide brows or brown eyes, their stoicism or talkative personality, remind me of? Do they mirror the mix that is me?

You could call me a fourth generation immigrant. My parents and their parents and their parents before them each left their homes in search of safety and opportunity. Moving to Europe in 2003, I completed what we know of my family’s loop. When I slather Aegean olive oil on a spicy bed of wild arugula, I’m enjoying a harvest like a distant Italian ancestor must have -- yet one my closer relatives did not, as my grandmother served Spam in Chicago and my mother laid tofu taco salad on the table in Berkeley.

What ethnic or regional mystery reverberates in you? +++ I remember meeting a blueblood American at a Thanksgiving dinner in Bedford Hills NY and within a minute he had already inquired where my people were from and we’d established that I had only a general idea. As a Californian, a person from a state of reinvention, I remember thinking it was an odd thing to get hung up about. For him, it was a way to know who he was dealing with.

I was just talking with a friend on Twitter about these ethnic stirrings…for many of us it seems nationalism (especially for melting pot nations like America) has been a way to calm those feelings by lumping us together with others who happen to share passports or places of birth — but ultimately it’s superficial to who we are.

Connected via TED's online directory with a sales and marketing director working in high tech and new media, in advance of both of us attending TED Global in Oxford. The guy explained he seeks to apply technology solutions in innovative ways to solve social issues, and he's currently looking for a new position.

Sounds good. I went to his Twitter feed to get closer and learn more but it's protected. He needs to approve me before I can see all the goodness he's sharing.

I asked him, "What's your reasoning for that, especially given you're in the market for new opportunities?"

He told me: "I have been inundated with dozens of requests of people to follow me. It is flattering to have a following, but when I look at the requests are from people I have no connection to. And, when I look at their profiles, they are following hundreds of thousands of others. Can anyone really follow 100,000 people on Twitter? I think there is a 'twitter stalker' phenomenon which likely leads to 'twitter spam'."

I have been using Twitter for a year (and am #3 Twitterer in Istanbul at moment, mainly because the Turks are not yet active on the service). I don't agree that twitter followers lead to spam. Anyone can send you spam using your twitter handle. If people follow you who have no good reason to do so, either they will drop off or never be heard from.

Many people don't use Twitter in optimal ways.

If you plan to be serious about it I'd suggest a bit of research into Twitter best practices. And follow @mashable @chrisbrogan @ambercadabra @sirhendrix and many others in the SM brand and biz coaching spaces.

One thing I'd say about this person's twitter handle (I'm not one to talk with an unpronounceable, easily misspelled name of "thandelike" but still, here I go) is that his handle itself sounds like spam. People are wary of marketers on Twitter so learning how best to be a marketer on Twitter may be in order.

The main idea of Twitter is to bring value to your network, and to grow that network organically through conversation with others. Share links (not only to your own work) and engage with the material others share. Don't make it hard for people to access what you share. Don't make it hard for us to grasp that you are a real person behind that spammy handle.