TTFN

Apparently this blog break is going to last longer than I thought. I had two different sets of posts in my head, but at the moment, they both feel like they need more work, and you'd probably rather not read drivel in the meantime.

Once small story before I go, which was going into a 7Things post at some point. I ran into a woman I've known socially since our children were small, but we don't know each other well--just the kind of thing where we'd see each other at PTA meetings or whatever. Now we run into each other every once in awhile and wave or say a quick hi. This particular time we were in a waiting room together, so we ended up chatting for five or ten minutes, longer than I've talked to her in more than a decade (and actually, maybe ever).

Random picture included because always have a picture!

 

We updated each other on our kids and talked about what we'd been up to, and I could see in her face and in her body language that she was building up what I was saying into something much different than what I meant. I could see her thinking she's got it all together. She's successful at life. She knows what she's doing. I'm a failure, I'm a mess, I can't measure up.  I could watch it happening, but I don't know her nearly well enough to say anything.

No big news or wisdom to impart, because it mainly served to make me think about how often I do that, too. I see someone, and without knowing what's going on in her life or the real details, use her life to prove to myself that I'm a mess, I haven't accomplished anything, I should be doing more/better. 

Probably all of us have been down that rabbit hole every once in awhile.

Let's not do that. Just saying.

TTFN.

(p.s. I took that picture of the owl, can you believe it? Our neighborhood adolescent owls were acting strangely one day last summer when a thunderstorm was approaching.)

7ToF: Sugar, Marriage, and the Mystery of Washi Tape

1. I've tried several food crazes over the years, and none of them has made much of a difference in my health. But here is the one thing that does make me feel better: avoiding sugar. Not carbs in general, because in spite of the fact that all the nutrition gurus say that fruit, white flour, etc. are metabolized by your body in exactly the same way as refined sugar, fruit and white flour don't make me feel sick. But if I eat a big piece of cake or a bunch of cookies, I feel awful.

2. Why is it so hard to avoid sugar? People make their special sugar-y treats and their feelings are hurt if you don't have one. Or the entire office breaks out in an orgy of chocolate for Valentine's, and you're not any fun if you refuse. I would be more than happy to just go to the office party and not have any, but people seriously want you to have some treats. They do not feel neutral about this in the same way that you might feel neutral when you know someone avoids gluten or cheese or animal products.

3. Which is not to say that I'm not tempted. I have a terrible sweet tooth. I could eat a whole plate of cookies, and I've done it before. But I pay for it later, and the older I get and the more my metabolism slows down, the worse it gets. I'm working on this--both my own food choices, and dealing with the choices people want to make for me. I need to come up with some snappy, self-deprecating one-liners to sub in for no, I do not want to eat 2,500 calories of candy before lunch today. It's a strange thing about sugar-y treats that sometimes you have to choose between being kind and your own health.

4. Recommended: If you've been married for a long time, track down the Big Boo Cast podcast and listen to episodes 93 and 94. The Big Boo Cast is run by two women writers that I've been listening to off and on for years. It's always fun-- they just sit and gab, and it's like eavesdropping on the next table at a coffee shop. But their discussion about what it's like to be married for a long time is even better than usual-- it's down-to-earth, hilarious, and wise. I've been married way longer than either of them but I couldn't give you any better advice.

5. I've been looking around for awhile now for a craft project of some sort that I could do in the evenings while we watch TV or listen to an audiobook. I am hopelessly Not Crafty, so there is no simple answer to this--anything that requires a glue gun or a complicated three-page pattern is not going to work. A couple of months ago I read about washi tape somewhere. Washi tape is small rolls of beautifully printed tape that you can use to do various crafty things with. Stock up and check Pinterest for dozens of ideas of what to do! they said.

This isn't even all of it.

6. So I'm thinking: tape. I can do tape. Scissors and tape, that's kindergarten stuff. So I bought a bunch of washi tape--it's everywhere, Target, Michael's, various websites--and it is pretty. Tiny, but there are some really interesting color and design combinations. And then I went and checked out Pinterest for what to do with it.

7. Here's what you can do: Wrap your pencils. Fold it over the edge of a notebook page to color code your pages. Wrap the stems of silk flowers. Whaaaaat? That's it? Do you guys know what to do with it? I have a bunch, all dressed up and nowhere to go. Next time remind me to check Pinterest first.

Blogging

Here’s the thing about blogging. When I started (back in 2003, which when you think about it is a really long time ago, both in terms of years and cultural shifts), blogs were an obscure new idea. Hardly anyone had one, and there were no rules about what you could do. You just wrote posts and put them out there, and maybe people found your blog and maybe they didn’t. Thousands of people started blogs and then quit after half a dozen posts. A few hit the big time, and a few, like me, kept going just because they liked it.

Then six or seven years ago, there was a major shift in the “blogosphere.” Suddenly blogs became a thing, part of your Branding Strategy, and journalists and writers and Internet personalities all started blogging. There started to be rules—spoken and unspoken—about what you should blog about, how often you should post, how long the posts should be. Always include a picture! Keep your paragraphs short! Have a theme!

A lot of very good blogs started during this time period, blogs I still follow. But there didn’t seem to be a place anymore for bloggers like me, who don’t have a brand or an online presence or a following. I just like to write about what I’m thinking about, and I like to put it out there instead of shoving it in a drawer.

The blog branding wave seems to be subsiding, at least in part because doing a major branded blog like that is nearly impossible to do by yourself. (Especially if you don't like to write. Why would someone start a blog if they don't like to write?) Even the ones that started small have folded or become group blogs with multiple writers, “sponsored” posts, advertisements, and associate links to make them financially viable.

I have no complaints about this. I read some of those blogs regularly (and some of them, like Melanie Shankle’s and Anne Bogel’s, are still run by individuals). I’m happy for them that they’re able to make a living doing it. But I’m also happy that the Eye of the Internet seems to have moved on to other things so that there is less pressure to blog in a certain way, and the peons like me can keep doing what we like to do, which is writing what we’re thinking about and posting it.

It is a little difficult sometimes to keep going when you’re writing a blog that hasn’t “caught on,” because there is so much value in our society placed on success as measured by numbers. But I’m used to that, and that isn’t why I ended up not posting this past week.

Nope, I took a blog break this week because I read some opinion pieces about the Emmys, and watched some videos of new artists whose work they felt was unfairly ignored by the Emmy voters. And I realized with very great clarity how hopelessly irrelevant I have become, sitting in my 3-bed, 2-bath house, married to a man who makes enough money that I can choose whether or not to work, unworried about drive-by shootings or whether or not our heat will be turned off because I couldn't pay the bill.

I am that supremely inconsequential thing, an over-educated, financially stable, middle-aged, straight married white woman. Women in my demographic are pretty much the opposite of Influencers (a term I only read about this week). It’s both humbling to realize that my people no longer matter and also enormously freeing because I don’t have to worry about trying to be relevant or influential—it’s not going to happen, and the harder I try, the more I prove that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I don’t know how other people are living out there, and the contentious issues that are facing our society are not ones that directly impact me. I can discuss them as an interested observer, even as a passionately opinionated observer, but it's not about me. I mean, seriously— I can write about my experiences with sexual harassment when I was younger, but frumpy 56-year-olds don't worry about it. (apologies for the way that was worded previously. I was trying to be funny but it missed.)

Sadly, the main way that women in my demographic make their presence known is as consumers. Unsettling, that is. We wield a lot of cash. (Insert here Kathy Bates' parking lot rage scene from Fried Green Tomatoes. I'd link to it but I'm pretty sure you've all seen it. It pops right up on Google if you haven't.)

All of this leaves open the possibility that I could quit blogging. But as you know, I’ve quit plenty of times before and I always start again. Maybe I limit my topics to things that directly affect me and those of you who read here. Maybe I just keep going with better awareness and a more humble attitude, feeling grateful that I live in a place and a time when I can do this just because I find it satisfying, and I like to write. And extra grateful that a few of you take the time to read it.

7ToF: Punxsutawney Phil, weather prophet extraordinaire, will have done his thing by the time you read this

1. I swear January lasted three months. I am so happy it's February. For one thing, February is the month that Dean has his birthday, and since he is five months older than I am, it marks the start of the annual give-Dean-sh!t-about-being-older-than-me-a-thon.

2. So now that it's February, the first month of my experiment with limiting social media and internet time is over.  I like this-- not reading the news until late in the day, limiting social media to weekends and occasional evenings, and not having games on my phone. Getting rid of my games has actually been the hardest part. They say it takes three weeks to form a new habit (or, presumably, break an old one), but after a month, I still really miss my games. For some perverse reason that is making me think I should keep going until I get over it. We'll see how long it takes.

3. Celeste Ng's new book, Little Fires Everywhere, has been in my queue at the library ebook website for months. It was Amazon's #1 fiction book of the year last year. It has blazingly high reviews. I really liked her last book, Everything I Never Told You. I've been looking forward to reading it for months, and when it finally became available, I was ready to clear out my schedule.

4. It starts out well-- a woman is standing in front of her McMansion in a wealthy suburb of Cleveland watching it burn down. Forty pages into it, I was completely hooked. But then it started to feel... predictable. And then the characters started to seem like types instead of individuals. And then it started to seem less like a novel and more like a lecture. About the time I hit 65%, I realized, I hate this book. I skimmed through to the end and gave it two stars on Goodreads. Extremely disappointing.

5. One of several strands of the story is the difficult relationship between a mom and her teenage daughter. We saw Lady Bird last weekend, and it made me realize how good that movie really was. We were impressed with it when we saw it in the theater, but reading Little Fires, which has a sort-of similar situation between two characters who are practically clichés, made me realize how fully realized the complex characters were in Lady Bird. (apologies for the convoluted sentence but hopefully you figured it out.) Good movie. Not always easy to watch.

6. Did you know that it is now acceptable to use "hopefully" in the sense of "it is to be hoped"? For a long time that was one of those English teacher pet peeves--you were only supposed to use "hopefully" when you meant something was filled with hope, like the expression on your dog's face when he looks at you hopefully, expecting a treat. You were not supposed to use it the way I did in the previous paragraph. But the times, they change. I went looking for a source to back that up and discovered that the AP Style Guide changed its opinion on "hopefully" back in 2012, so I'm late. No surprise.

7. Super Bowl Schmuper Bowl. I was hoping that the Vikings would make it-- I don't care about the Vikings, but we have friends who do, and I could root vicariously for them. But two teams from the northeast-- just can't bring myself to care. However, we're having friends over to watch the commercials and the half-time show, plus eat lots of food, so maybe we will have fun anyway.

And that's more than enough from me. I may not be posting next week, so have a good one.