Posts from — August 2012

There is this term I learned recently — lebensneid, or life envy.  It was coined — I believe — by Nietzsche (it certainly sounds like a Nietzschean word) to discuss this common human practice of wishing we had things from each other’s lives, this wanting of what we don’t have that we see other people (we believe) enjoying.  Do we want their life with our self intact, or do we want their self (which brings with it their personality, their coping mechanisms, their physical characteristics) coupled with their life?  It’s unclear.

All I know is that while this is not unique to BlogHer (come on, you see this every single day as you pass houses, children, jobs you covet in the face-to-face world), it is inevitable that if you get 5000 people together in a single New York hotel, all people who compete somewhat with one another for page views, you will find people expressing or poorly suppressing their envy of each other’s friendships or readership or awards or opportunities.

I think it’s important to separate out when talking about BlogHer what people brought there and what people found there, and I say this as someone who has been to a lot of BlogHers.  I have only good things to say about the conference itself, the people I met, the information I learned, the keynotes I heard.  BlogHer — the conference — created a lovely frame, a skeleton constructed out of panels and parties, and we as the conference goers filled in the figurative muscles and organs with what we brought with us.  I witnessed the good: extreme generosity, love, and empathy.  And I also witnessed a lot of envy.

People envied the tangible: the invites to private parties, the cool clothes that seemed effortlessly put together and worn, the swag.

My G-d, the Expo Hall, ground zero for coveting.

It wasn’t the items so much as it was what those items represented.  The Expo Hall brought out what amounts to lifestyle envy; to want the life of someone who is sought out, begged, given nice things just because.  What being courted by brands represents, how some people view it as a sign of importance.  Even if you’re not into working with brands, it is heady to be wanted; it is understandable how we want to see the worth of our lives, to have strangers want us (specifically us and not some other bloggers!) to write about their item.  Our families have to love us, but there is something special about our partners who choose us.  And that is how I think some people feel when those brands reach out (or don’t reach out).  It is nice to be the object of someone’s affection just as much as it is nice to be the object of someone’s choice., whether being chosen for a job over all other applicants or chosen to write on our blog about cleaning supplies.

People envied the intangible: accomplishments, a blogger’s style, the fact that she is always surrounded by people.  There was the life envy, wanting other people’s traffic or relationships to another blogger.  I saw people envying the ease of which other speakers spoke.  I saw people wishing they were someone else.  I listened to snippets of conversation around me as people hypothesized the readership of other people’s blogs.

Of course, no one knows the reality of someone’s traffic.  And even if we knew the number, could we really say whether their 5000 daily visitors have 10,000 eyes who care about them?  Or is the 5000 closer to maybe 2000 with 3000 coming over for a quick hit from a Google search, never to return again?  It’s possible to put too much stock in numbers.  Those subscribers, those unique visitors, it’s impossible to say who wouldn’t miss you tomorrow if you were hit by a bus and never updated your blog again, and who would sit there with their hand over their mouth for hours upon hearing the news.

Because one of those categories of people are worth feeling envious about, and the other is simply warm bodies, interchangeable with any other warm body.  It would be like caring which people walk beside you on the sidewalk not interacting with you.  I had hundreds of people around me when I walked to Starbucks on the last night, but only 4 of those people mattered to me.

But I did the worst coveting of all, the most unbecoming coveting, the most literal definition of lebensneid.  I coveted the babies that people carried into sessions, lightly kissing the top of their child’s head while they hung suspended from their mother’s chest in a Baby Bjorn.  I wanted to kiss a baby too.  I wanted to absentmindedly stand in the back of the room, swaying to keep the baby moving while I listened to someone talk about SEO.  I couldn’t stop staring at all the babies, even when people noticed me staring at their child and unconsciously turned their body as if to shield them.

I am not envious of those mother’s lives; I have no idea what goes on in their homes or relationships or if I’d want to be part of their world as a friend much less as them.  What I envy is the life they are holding, the ability to choose to create life and create it.  I am envious that if their heart starts tugging at them years down the road and they have the financial means to do so, they can create more life.

That, of course, is the problem with lebensneid.  I am making assumptions about their fertility knowing full well that people could look at me and think all went easily.  These women holding babies may have back stories that would blow my mind.  But I didn’t see that.  I just saw the milk-scented head popping out of the baby carrier and I coveted, I coveted, I coveted.

I could care less about the brands.  I am okay with my lack of style.  I am comfortable with the size of my readership.  I hold the friendships I do have close to my heart.  But my G-d, I wanted one of those babies.  I wanted to be needed by someone small.

We all have our own version of lebensneid; it is personal, private, uniquely informed by our life experience, by our lack of life experience.

I admitted to mine.  What do you envy?

A few weeks ago, I was approached by the Obama campaign to contribute blog posts for their new Parents for Obama site though I haven’t said anything until now. It is a huge honour to get to share my thoughts on the upcoming election with the general American population, and the twins have been equally excited to get to contribute their story to the re-election campaign. We’re an Obama family, and it is uber-important to me that we’re volunteering as a family to get Obama re-elected.  Though, I will say that some days I can’t tell if the ChickieNob is volunteering because she wants Obama re-elected or if she thinks that by attending things with me, she has a chance to one day be invited by Sasha or Malia to play on the White House swing set.

I am going to cross-post most of my election posts here for posterity (which is a fancy way of saying that I’m really afraid that I’ll one day forget things if I don’t slip them into our written record), but you can read them on the Obama site too. Regardless of your politics, I hope you’ll find the posts meaningful or funny since creating a politically-conscious child crosses all party lines.

So… enjoy!

Why I Take My Children to Vote

The first time I ever voted was in my first grade Weekly Reader, a 4-page mini newspaper that was distributed in public schools in my state. President Carter was up against Ronald Reagan, and I took the casting of my vote very very seriously; so seriously that I remember going around to ask adults why in the world anyone would not vote for someone who had been a peanut farmer. I literally couldn’t fathom a world where actor trumped peanut farmer, and I just wanted to check that I wasn’t missing something before I took my pencil and put a big X in the box next to President Carter’s name. He won in our class by a landslide.

I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, a highly-politicized area where friend’s parents worked in government and classmates came and went as administrations turned over. Discussion of political issues was commonplace; we lived in the nucleus of the American political cell, the ideas of the time written into our DNA. My parents explained the main issues in child-friendly terms, and I was always aware of their political beliefs while they left me room to develop my own.

And then I had my twins.

The first time I took my twins to vote, they were a few months old. Both were on heart monitors that could be carried over my shoulder like a large plastic (albeit very expensive) handbag. I popped them in my Maximom, a twin baby carrier, so I could walk down to the local elementary school to vote in the Kerry/Bush election. I looked like an opossum carrying my young, gathering like-minded politicians who would represent my ideals in Washington instead of acorns, but I really didn’t care if I could barely see over their bald heads to cast my vote or that we were eliciting many strange stares at our get-up. I felt like I was honouring my parents, honouring all the work they did to raise a politically aware and socially active daughter, when I took my children with me to vote.

My husband and I have carried on the work our parents instilled in us by talking about the issues in age-appropriate ways with the twins. They knew exactly what was at stake with the last election, how much this country needed change. I almost considered getting babysitting for them when I heard about the unusually long lines at our polling place, but they promised to behave, and mostly did except for the moments when they swung their four-year-old bodies from the stairway railing and then climbed up to a landing to call out to the crowd as if they were emcees pumping up the crowd before an event: “Mommy is an Obama Mama Mama Mama!  Are you an Obama Mama Mama Mama?”

When we went into our voting booth, I held each of them up so they could vote. One child touched the box next to Barack Obama’s name, and then I set them down and erased the vote to prepare the screen for their twin. My second child touched the box, and I set them down, erasing the screen a final time so that I could vote too. And I started crying as we all hit submit together because this was living history. My children will be able to tell their children that they voted for Barack Obama in the first election, that they brought that change to this country.

And they got it, they understood how much change could come from a presidential election. They stayed up and watched election coverage with us that night, and when Barack Obama became the President Elect, we went into their room and whispered the news into their sleep-warm ears. I picked them up early from preschool to watch the inauguration on television, jumping up and down on my bed when he was sworn in as president. We shared that celebratory moment as a family.

And now we’re sharing the re-election work as a family. Our twins know that their parents are volunteering to get President Obama re-elected, and they’ve said they want to help out too. They want to write about the election, go door-to-door canvasing, and attend rallies. We talk about marriage equality, health care coverage, and electoral law. Instilling a sense of social action in my children is one of the most important lessons I can convey because it extends beyond the election to teaching them how to be a self-advocate, how to be empathetic and aid others, to find what they care about and make change in this world.

This election is not just about this election when it comes to our children; it’s about taking to heart the First Lady’s It Takes One campaign and understand that it is our job to build the next socially-conscious generation, that we raise a group of people in this country who answer every issue with an “I care” instead of a shrug. When we take on the job of parent, we take on all the responsibilities that come with parenthood including raising our children to contribute to society.

And all of that starts with empowering our children to understand they can be part of this vote.

Oh BlogHer ’12, you are over.  The suitcase is unpacked, the Martha Stewart notebooks have been disseminated, and I am ready to sit down and organize how I felt about this year’s conference which was — for me — tied for first place with my other favourite BlogHer conference, good old 2008.  Shall we unpack the good, the bad, and the… well… not necessarily ugly but certainly not the most becoming behaviour.

The conference kicked off with an opening keynote from the President of the United States.  His face smiled down at us from live feed screens while Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone sat below. (Jory Des Jardins couldn’t make the conference this year because she was 36 weeks pregnant.)  Not a bad way to kick off a conference, you know, with a talk from POTUS.

That night I went out to the dinner at the Heartland Brewery with a slew of ALI bloggers: Half Baked Life, Too Many Fish to Fry, A Blanket 2 Keep, Dragondreamer’s Lair, Write Mind Open Heart, Bereaved and Blessed, the Rumour Mill, and the Kir Corner.  Dinner can be abbreviated as food, fantastic conversation, the largest cockroach in the world, and a thwarted walk down to Magnolia bakery to get cupcakes.  Seriously, you have never seen someone cajole and charm like Kathy, and they STILL wouldn’t open the damn door and sell us one red velvet bite.

Over the next few days, I went to panels and keynotes.  Favourite session (beyond my own) was on pitching to media; in other words, tips for getting freelance article jobs.  Really really helpful advice that I will type up this week and post for everyone to read.  Favourite keynote had to be Katie Couric.  I am not a television fan, but seeing her speak live convinced me to watch the Katie Show when it starts airing in September.  She was very down-to-earth, realistic, and frank.  I loved the point she made on how she can’t comment on the infamous Slaughter article because she isn’t the average American woman; that her ability to have it all is couched in the fact that she can afford to hire live-in help.

VOTY (Voices of the Year) was amazing, as always.  I laughed hysterically at some posts.  I cried with Kathy over others, especially one where a mother tries to explain a friend’s imminent death to her child who wants to help so badly and can’t understand how none of his ideas could stop death from occurring (oh my G-d — I just felt my throat close up just thinking about this post).  I did a run through of the sponsor room to thank the sponsors for bringing down the cost of the event.  I skipped over brands that I already knew (they didn’t seem to need my presence either) and went for the unknowns, which is how I found out about Zamzee and the very nice guys working the booth gave me some to try out.  You wear it all day and then plug it into the computer before bed, and it measures your movement for the day.  I cannot even explain how much this feeds into my deep need to record everything at the moment.  The twins are loving the ones I gave them, and they are already plotting out ways to move more (“I will just jump up and down in place while you make me my yogurt in the morning!”).  And I listen to their plans and then make my own to MOVE MORE than them, just to prove my superior healthy habits.

*******

BlogHer was huge this year — about 5000 people when all was said and done.  It created a strange phenomenon: it was impossible to walk anywhere without bumping into someone you know (or, at the very least, recognize), but it was too big to actually find specific people, even if you were both in the same room.  I never found Eden at all (Eden?  Eden?)  There were plenty of people that I only saw briefly in passing (Jodifur and Magpie pop to mind).  Sue and I got to grab a whole 10 minutes before we realized that it would be easier to go on an IKEA run when we got home with 6 kids than it would to try to find each other again at BlogHer. (Though how sad is it that I invited myself along on Sue’s IKEA run, trying to convince her that I can be her little helpful shadow as she buys plates?)

And yet, there were people I got to see a lot on the trip, people who were very hard to say goodbye to as we each went back home.  Too Many Fish to Fry left at the very end of the conference to catch a plane back home.  Half Baked Life stayed as late as she could, curled up on one of the lobby chairs while we talked, promising that we would drive at each other soon.  Bereaved and Blessed finally slipped upstairs with her sister after we had shared our neurotic travel stories and high school tales.

And then, I finally had to say goodbye to Write Mind Open Heart at the end of a final breakfast the next morning, after I lingered in her room while she packed, unable to go upstairs and throw my own possessions in a suitcase because that would mean the trip was really really over.  It is so hard to have your friends scattered across the country.  I am so grateful that we were able to all come together at this conference and have the face-to-face time.  I love all of you through the keyboard, but it can’t erase the need for those times when we can actually sit across from one another, touch each other, hand each other tissues.  That good overwrites any of the bad that comes from a conference this size: difficult to navigate hotel, long lines, and problems with meals.  You care less about an elevator wait if you’re standing there with someone you are so grateful to be able to grab time with regardless of what you’re doing.

There was an audio recording made of the session, but I unfortunately can’t upload it because people said very personal things during the session, and I realized that I didn’t feel comfortable making those private moments public.  But I will try to edit a version this week that gives you just the panelists’ portion of the talk.

I have not yet gotten to the unbecoming, but I think I will unfold it in my next post.  Stay tuned.

So you’re still practicing that budgeting of writing time that we started in lesson three, right?  I know you’re not, so don’t bother telling me that you totally still write for 15 minutes a day.  I know you’re a liar because I’m one too.

You will need to get back into writing at regular intervals once your summer travel or altered routine is over.  Slowly and steady work is better than writing spurts because it is difficult to jump in and out of a project.  If you complete a page daily, you could have 7 decent pages by the end of the week.  If you wait to write for three hours on a random Tuesday because you’ve finally made time, there is little chance that you’re going to walk away with 7 decent pages because you’re going to spending a chunk of that writing time just trying to remember where you wanted to take the story.  Believe me, I speak from experience.

But then there are times when you literally can’t write.  Maybe your computer is broken, and it’s the only medium where you can organize your thoughts so writing long-hand would be a waste of time.  Maybe you’re out of town, and you’re not going to spend your trip crouching in the hotel closet so you can write by yourself for fifteen minutes.  Maybe life is too damn busy to even give 15 minutes.  I’ve had a summer like that where I’m going to bed at 1 am, and the thought of staying up until 1:15 am just to check writing off the to do list feels like too much.  So I let it go.

And now all I do is think about how I’m not writing.

I think about it when I’m in the grocery store, and I think about it while I’m in the car, and I think about it when I finally have two hours to get something done but I choose to get ahead with other work before writing because I’m not currently facing a deadline.  And I feel enormously guilty about it in the same way that I feel guilty when I go days without exercising or days without practicing the guitar.  I feel like I’m getting out of shape, unlearning things, and now I’m going to have to play catch-up when I finally get back to writing again.

And while that’s true — I will have to play catch-up and get back in a writing routine when life returns to normal — it isn’t necessarily a terrible thing.  Taking a much needed break or concentrating on other things that need my attention is just as important as any writing project.  That sometimes you can’t help it, but life gets in the way and makes it a terrible time to write but a wonderful time for something else.

Writing isn’t a race where if I don’t keep up, someone will pass me.  Writing a solitary activity that requires a certain amount of mental recharging along the way; sometimes just a stretch or a few hours, and other times, a few weeks between two projects.  That non-writing time is not non-productive time: you are always writing inside your head, dreaming up characters, noticing small details that you’ll work into future writing, reading things that will influence the way you write.  It’s all part of the larger package of writing, so even when you’re not writing… you’re sort of writing.

Sometimes I just need to write a lesson like this for me as much as it may also be for you.

Homework: If you’re in the middle of a good writing routine, keep writing.  But if you’re not and you’re kicking yourself for not writing at the moment, take an idea collection day.  Go to a museum, read a book, watch a movie, people watch, go on a walk — in other words, do some non-writing writing.

Next week will be the 18th MFA Sunday School, and it seems like a good time to pause the class and ask if there are any questions, not just on things we’ve already covered, but thinking ahead to aspects of writing or publishing that we haven’t reached yet where you have questions.  Please use the comment section below to post any writing or publishing related questions you have.

And a heads up — we’re going to be starting an interactive query letter lesson soon.

This was the 17th lesson for the MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

Sitting on stage, in four-inch orange platform sandals, Martha Stewart expounded on what makes for a successful blog: personal, openness, passionate, sharing.  She spun off on the idea of monetization, of placing a value on your blogging effort, but my mind kept shuffling through the writing side of her advice.

It needs to be personal, showing the personality of the author.  It needs to have openness, giving part of yourself to the reader.  It needs to be passionate, making the reader care as much as you care.  And it needs to be sharing, you need to convey something or what was the point in spending time in the space?

It seemed like such a simplistic – and true – equation for creating a successful blog; a formula for how to create a successful blog.

If you scale each trait from 1 to 5, with 5 being the most and 1 being the least, how does your blog add up?

Personal: how much of your personality shines through?  Have you created an alter-ego online who doesn’t mesh with who you are offline?  Can people define your bloggy voice?  Give yourself 1 – 5 points for how well you’re doing this.

Openness: how open are you with readers?  Do you hold a lot back?  Do you feel like you have an arm up, holding curious people at bay?  Give yourself 1 – 5 points for how well you’re doing this.

Passionate: how excited are you about your own life?  If you’re not living the life you want to live, can you write an exciting blog?  Is a lack of energy in living life seeping into your words?  This is not just about happiness; are you passionately conveying what is in your head?  Give yourself 1 – 5 points for how well you’re doing this.

Sharing: are you conveying something?  Are you conveying new things?  Do you keep rehashing the same thoughts?  Can you think of things that people learned at your site that they couldn’t learn elsewhere, even if it was just something about what is important to you?  Give yourself 1 – 5 points for how well you’re doing this.

Be honest – how did your blog score AND can you now see places where you could improve and change your blog’s fate?