Four Things I Learned at BlogU

I shared my humiliation and horror from my BlogU weekend with you, but I really did learn more than how to embarrass myself (I didn’t need a conference for that) and what happens when a squirrel lands on the roof of your car (squirrel blood on the windshield, which, when we noticed it, was almost as traumatic as Skippy’s death in the first place). BlogU is packed with useful information, and encourages introspection and self-examination. They present you with all the directions you could go: it’s up to you. Here, in no particular order, are just a few of the things I learned at BlogU.

You don’t have to do all the things

I took a couple of sessions that were enjoyable and informative, but that I walked out of thinking, “Yeah, that’s not happening.” It was useful to learn about SEO, but the impetus of it is to make Google think you’re an expert on your subject. If I were still food blogging, or if I were a beauty or fashion blogger who needed authority behind my information or advice, the SEO session would have been gold. As it is, I consider myself a humor blogger. What’s Google going to think—that I’m an authority on being a sarcastic wise ass? (On a related note: I AM.) So while I was interested to learn about SEO, it’s not anything that I’m likely to spend an exceptional amount of time implementing. And that’s OK.

BlogU is as depressing as it is inspiring

I know that doesn’t sound like a positive take away, but hear me out. There’s so much information to absorb, so many ways to improve, so many people with similar goals, it just seems overwhelming. But as I was thinking about how much there is to do, it occurred to me that breaking down a massive amount of work into manageable actions is what I do all day long. I can apply my professional skills to my personal goals as they relate to my blog and a writing career.

Beyond that, I can apply my professional skills in my writing career. As in, I can write about what I do and how I do it. Plenty of people are unsure how to create a plan, what the process of planning involves, and how to go about it. I’ve gotten countless marriage  proposals from other women over the years because they want me to “run” their lives. Instead of doing that, I can teach them how to do it for themselves, how to create repeatable processes, along with the documentation, scheduling tools, and risk mitigation strategies that a plan entails.

To be fair, this has been percolating for awhile. In fact, it started when I was reading Jen Lancaster’s most recent book I Regret Nothing. She had some very depressing (and unfortunately accurate) thoughts on the state of the publishing industry and its future. She talked about starting her own business, in addition to writing. After years of women saying, “Will you marry me?” and trying to help my children create processes to keep our lives from imploding into a swirling supernova of chaos and despair, I realize that I have a marketable talent, an area of expertise. I haven’t thought through the whole thing yet, but I know what I’m not: I’m not a professional organizer, nor am I a life coach. I’m not going to tell you to buy a bunch of plastic totes and stick pictures of the shit you put in them on the front, neither am I going to help you figure out what you want to be when you grow up. What I can do is help you get from point A to point B with a clear plan that takes into consideration possible detours and roadblocks, and when appropriate, I can help you make that process efficiently repeatable. More on this later—I’m still putting together a plan for it.

Write “you”

This was reinforced in a couple of sessions. In one case it was was explicitly stated, in another it was implied. But either way the point is you have to write your material in your voice. You can’t go read Jen Lancaster or Tina Fey or any of ten thousand other funny people and try to imitate their style, or write on their subjects. I understand Jenny Lawson said something similar at BlogHer last year, which was to write your own story; everyone  has a story, and it’s what makes them unique.

I confess in the past I’ve been guilty of being untrue in this way. I try to think like Jen Lancaster and figure out what overarching project I could embark on and write about. Or like David Sedaris and try to decide what two or three stories I could intertwine to instill an undercurrent of meaning into my essays. This is all wrong. I can’t do those things because I’m not them, and if I tried to imitate them my output would be as pale as copies made when the toner is low in the printer, with uneven streaks and wan imagery. I have to sit down and write what’s in my brain from my experiences, using my voice.  I’ve stopped thinking I want to be the “next” anybody, because what I need to be is the first me. I know the day will come (fingers crossed!) when I’ll have to draw comparisons for the purpose of illustration, but for now I’m focusing on what sets me apart from the million other voices screaming on the internet.

Don’t change your clothes three times a day at a conference

It will confuse people and they’ll forget who you are because you were wearing a skirt two hours ago and now you’re in jeans. Also it will mean your suitcase is super full and there’s a chance you’ll risk breaking the zipper when you shove everything back into it to go home. Not that anything like that happened to me. I’m just observing. (On a related note: why is it that the stuff always fits into it fine on the way to your destination, but when you go to pack for the trip home, everything seems to have swelled and now it doesn’t all fit? Even if you didn’t buy anything new. Every damned time.)

3 Things to Consider Before Going with the Grilled Cheese

Like Lady Gaga, my coworker got engaged on Valentine’s Day. I am now forced by circumstances to listen to her plan her wedding. My coworker, I mean. Not Lady Gaga. While this has the potential to become very, very boring, right now it’s sort of interesting to listen to her debate the merits of this florist versus that caterer. 

She has a couple of sisters, and they’re dying to know what kind of bridesmaid dresses she’s going to pick. I’m sure Lady Gaga’s potential bridesmaids are also curious, and probably rightly so. Pretty sure they’re going to end up dressed like grilled cheese sandwiches, wearing traffic cones on their heads. All designed by McQueen. I guess that’s the chance you take when you sign up to be in Lady Gaga’s wedding.

I’ve been in a couple of weddings, and had my own, so when it comes to bridesmaid dresses, I have Thoughts. This is an area where you should tread carefully: you are picking out what someone else will wear, and unless your bridesmaids are Rockettes, it will be something that has to look good on a range of body shapes and sizes. 

This is notoriously hard to do, and you risk epically pissing off at least one person. There will always be someone who looks horrible in what you choose, and you have to decide if you can live with what they could to do you dress-wise if they ask you to be their bridesmaid one day. It isn't necessarily the worst idea to make sure anyone who looks awful in your dress is already married.

I have some friendly advice to share from my own experiences and conversations with friends through the years.

Don’t try to get something “everyone can wear again!”

This is easily the most persistent myth about bridesmaid dresses—that what your girls wear will be sufficiently un-bridesmaid-like that everyone will be able to wear it to a fancy party down the road. I’m pretty sure Eve said that about the fig leaves she picked out (she might also be the only woman who was ever right).

I promise, no matter what, there is no way anyone will ever think this dress is anything other than exactly what it was. I had a friend who even went to the department store and bought dresses off the rack from the fancy department for her attendants. It made no difference. Once a dress is worn in a wedding, it’s like it picks up an odor that emanates from it for the rest of time: anyone who gets near it immediately knows what it was originally. Don’t ask me why, but it’s true. The last thing anyone wants to hear at their company holiday party is, “Cute dress—did you wear it in a wedding?”

Skip the excessively twee accessories

I had a friend who got married on rainy day, and had to provide umbrellas for the wedding party. She found someplace that would rent umbrellas, and got cute ones that matched her flowers. This is fine. If you need to provide something functional, and you can do it in a fun way, great.

I’m talking about dressing everyone up like Little Bo Peep and giving them shepherd’s crooks, or worse, actual sheep to herd, with darling floral garlands around their fluffy necks—and in case you read this and thought, “Ooohhhh…heyyyy…” let me just say right now, NO. Your guests will not thank you if they step in sheep poop in their good shoes, and the sheep will eat the garlands off each other’s necks.

If a bridesmaid dress reminds anyone of anything worn at the Wilkes’ barbeque, the box social dance in Oklahoma!, or something from the Royal Ascot scene in My Fair Lady, skip it.

Filter based on price

Traditionally bridesmaids pay for their own attire. Try to remember this when you’re shopping. No one wants to pay $800 for something they’ll never wear again. If it were me, $200 is about as much as I’d be willing to pay. If you just cannot let go of the $500 dresses, it’s nice to offer to pay the difference. Yes, they get to keep the dresses, but really, they will never wear them again. Unless like one of my friends they’re invited to a, “Come in your old bridesmaid dress” party.

If you can relinquish control (not one of my strengths, but everyone is different) and give everyone a color or a pattern and tell them to find a dress, it can work. One friend told us to wear black dresses—she didn’t care what they looked like, or what style, as long as they were all black. The result was three women wearing dresses they already owned, that flattered them, but matched after a fashion.

It’s challenging to exert your will over others—in a situation in which you are completely within your rights to exert your will—without turning into Kim Jong-Il, demanding everyone have the same haircut or whatever. But remember that as much of an honor as you’re conveying on them, asking them to be in your wedding, they’re honoring you by agreeing to do so. And if I’ve managed to convince you of nothing else, remember: they will never wear it again. I swear.

Assholes and Drama Queens

My daughter is made of pretty tough stuff. Not surprising, since she has three older brothers. Mostly she prefers to hang out with boys, and I don’t discourage her. I’m dreading what will happen when she gets a little older, because I had a nightmare friendship in high school and I’m terrified the same thing will happen to her. On the one hand, I can honestly say it was the worst relationship experience I’ve ever had with anyone of either gender, but on the other hand, I think I needed to have it because it taught me so much that I think I needed to learn. I wish I could have learned it all in an easier way, but I don’t think that’s possible. And while I want my daughter to learn the same lesson (“Tell the drama queens and assholes to fuck off out of your life the instant you recognize that they’re drama queens and assholes”), I don’t want her to have to live through an Ellie.

Ellie transferred to my school when we were in 10^th grade. At our first meeting she seemed fun, nice, if a little shy and quiet. I was never the most popular kid in school, and I was happy to find a new best friend (not to reveal a spoiler here, but the previous best friend that I dropped? We made up and are friends to this day. Ellie? No idea. Don’t care).

So here’s Ellie, and I have no idea what she’s like, other than that she seems fun. She and a girl named Morgan and I become a clique of three. Three is a bad number for kids, even worse for teenage girls. The first glimpse I had into what Ellie was really like was on an Assembly Day early in the school year. We had an all-school assembly every Tuesday and Thursday. On the day in question, we all agreed to meet at Ellie’s locker or something, and walk down together.

I went to the assigned meeting place and looked for them, but I didn’t see them. After a minute, I decided to just walk down and find her at the actual assembly. I mean, big deal, right? The assembly space was a large room in the basement of the school. As I walked down the stairs, I saw Ellie and Morgan on the other side of the room. I mouthed, “I looked for you,” and gave a kind of puzzled shrug. Two faces of stone met my gaze. Ellie mouthed, “SURE,” and turned away.

What the fuck?

Thus began a seemingly endless cycle of Ellie being “mad” at either me or Morgan, and having the other one act as her confederate. Morgan and I went along with this, I can’t tell you why. Because we were fourteen, I guess. I can’t even remember all the things she got “mad” at us about. Sometimes it was because we talked to someone Ellie didn’t like (as you may imagine, Ellie had a very long list of people she didn’t like). I also recall huge dramas about clothes—every evening we would talk on the phone about what we were going to wear the next day. If by some chance we, oh, I don’t know, changed our fucking minds, and wore something other than the outfit that had been “approved” in the conversation with Ellie, she would be “mad.”

“You said you were going to wear your turquoise double dyed jeans. If you hadn’t said that, I would have worn my pink ones, but I didn’t want us both to show up in something so similar.”

She would express her anger in the form of a hostile silence, and whomever she was “mad” at would initially have to plead to even understand the transgression, then (assuming she would deign to reveal this) we would spew apologies and regrets, begging to return to her good graces. She would make us suffer—“But you always act like this when such and such happens, and I’m just sick of it,” she would lecture. After a day or two she’d simmer down and we’d all be friends again. For a little while.

The slightest thing would set her off, and she loathed not being the center of attention (which often was what set her off). She had a soap opera habit, and she was in the process of converting me. We liked to watch “Days of our Lives” at my house. One afternoon at school our English teacher walked up to me and handed me a 3 inch long pencil that had almost no eraser and had been lightly gnawed. It said “I [heart] the Soaps” on it.

“Here,” he smiled, “I found this; it must be yours.”

He was being kind, trying to reach out to connect with a snotty, disaffected fourteen year old (who, to be honest, didn’t want to be connected with—I’m sorry, Mr. Weinstein; I was an asshole, and I appreciate your teaching me that “alright” is not a word, even though spell check let it pass when I typed it just now).

“What is it?” Ellie asked.

“Just a pencil,” I said, showing it to her. Ellie pounced on me.

“That’s mine!” she insisted vehemently, “Mine. I used it today during our quiz in History class!”

I should have called her on it. I should have said, “Actually, during the quiz you were using one of those erasable pens.” (And those things have totally disappeared from the face of the earth, haven’t they? No loss—they didn’t work for shit.) Because I remembered that, but we were a few months into this “getting mad” shit and I was a coward. I couldn’t bear to have her “mad” at me, ganging up with Morgan, standing a few feet away from me whispering and eyeing me, then laughing loudly. And since I was her partner in crime when Morgan was the victim, I knew the kinds of things they were saying.

“Look at those hideous pants. Who would wear such hideous pants? Someone with no taste, that’s who!” Or, “Ohmahgod, how gross can you get?”

Pencils were bad, but boys were a thousand times worse.

In a way I won’t go into (mostly because I don’t remember it), she started dating a guy named Mike. He didn’t go to our school—I think she just picked him up on a city bus somewhere. One of the few nice things about being a teenager is the odds are pretty low that another teenager is a serial killer, and what with siblings and intramural sports, you likely have lots of mutual friends (which was the case in this instance). So picking up a fifteen year old isn’t quite as risky as picking up a thirty year old guy at a bar.

Ellie was so insecure that she manipulated for the sake of manipulation. With Mike, she wanted to know what he was thinking—how he felt about her, how he felt about other girls, how he visualized their relationship progressing (in her mind, marriage was the natural conclusion. Yes, she was fifteen). Her strategy was to get me to call him and ask him a bunch of questions and then call her and relay the answers. God forbid I was vague or uncertain about how the conversation progressed.

“So, what did he say then?”

“Well, I think that was when he said…”

“You THINK? You THINK? Don’t you KNOW? WHAT DID HE SAY, EXACTLY?!?”

I learned to speak in specifics, never to hedge. “He said X,“ versus, “I think he said X,” even if I wasn’t quite sure. When I was finished, she’d say, “OK, call him back and ask him…” And if she ever didn’t like the answers, it was my fault, and she’d get “mad.” At me. Of course.

I swear I’m not making this shit up.

Then she started dating a guy that she took away from another girl. His name was Adrien and he’d been dating Kate for years when Ellie decided he was irresistible and she had to have him (he was not irresistible; he was gross). This began a whole drama in which he was torn between Kate and Ellie, and cheated on Kate with Ellie before finally breaking up with Kate, and Ellie loved every second of it. Since this is already pretty long, I’ll skip to the end and tell you that she got him, and he was the biggest loser on the planet. He ended up working at a CVS because he had zero ambition. However, that was the catalyst for the demise of our friendship. She was so caught up in her relationship with him that she didn’t have time for me, which turned out to be an excellent thing.

The summer before senior year, when I hadn’t seen her for weeks, and had started hanging out again with the friend I’d dropped, she called me to find out why I hadn’t called her, and we had a very long phone conversation in which I told her just what I thought of her and her bullying ways, and that I wasn’t going to have anything to do with her in the upcoming school year. Surprisingly, she was devastated. Adrien had broken up with her, and her cat had died, she sobbed to me (yes, the fact that her cat died was a reason why she wanted to stay friends with me). She would stop, she would change, she was so sorry she’d hurt me.

For probably the first time in my life, I made a good decision. I told her it was too fucking late, and she should piss off. Not those words exactly, but that was the very obvious gist of my message. And never since have I ever let anyone treat me the way she did, or use me so shamelessly. I won’t say I haven’t gotten myself into similar situations (lookin’ at you Jon Henderson), but as soon as I realized it, I walked out.

You may be thinking, “What the hell were your parents doing through all of this?” and the answer is, wishing their daughter had more of a spine and hoping that she’d eventually develop one (which, as I just said, I did). To be fair, there was a lot of this they didn’t realize was happening, but what they did realize they disapproved of heartily. Her parents didn’t have a clue what a little bitch their daughter was. In fact, early on in senior year, her father confronted me at a school function and flat out demanded that I reinstate my friendship with Ellie. I just turned around and walked away. Thanks to his daughter, that’s how I learned to deal with assholes and drama queens.