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?

I actually wrote this on Thursday before I left and scheduled it to run today, so I have no idea how the conference is going.  I don’t even know if I’ve remembered to pack pants at this point.  Only time will tell.

I feel like I should take this opportunity to write something to my future self; to all the future versions of you.  Which is actually the current version of you because you are reading this in my future.  Blowing my mind.

Except I can’t think of anything profound to say.  What is life like on August 3, 2012?  Is it very different from August 2, 2012?  I have to imagine it is since things change on a daily basis.  Perhaps Facebook has folded and Twitter is now passe.  Maybe you’re reading this on a new device, one I can’t even begin to imagine on August 2nd but will be commonplace in the future such as on August 3rd.  Oh my G-d, it just hit me that YOU know the results of the Olympic events that I’m going to watch tonight.  Don’t spoil it for me; don’t tell me a thing!  I don’t want to know what is happening at the Olympics on August 2nd.

In all seriousness, fill me in since I’m at the BlogHer conference, and I know from past experience that I will have no clue what is happening in the world beyond this windowless room.  What is life like for you?  In other words, what are you up to today?

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “The Words We Use” (Journey of a Woman Warrior)
• “The Greatest Show on Earth” (Everyday Stranger)
• “What Causes Adoption” (Write Mind Open Heart)
• “Uff Da” (I Lost a World)
• “This Mortal Coil” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “This is What We Do With Broken Things” (She Laughs at the Days)
• “Lessons in Infertility” (From IF to When)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Hobbit-ish Thoughts and Ramblings has a post about being thankful that she’s not living her life in the public eye with all the pressures a princess goes through to produce an heir.  She writes: “As someone who dealt with years of questions, even before I was married, about when I would begin having children, I take offence on the Duchess’ behalf.  She has only been married for a year and a bit, and she’s still adjusting to her new role within the royal family.  Cut the woman some slack!”  I mostly just loved her hypothetical questions, even though I had no potential answers myself.

My Bum Ovaries has a great post depression and infertility.  She explains her fear: “We started by talking about how I’ve been depressed. I told him I’m worried that this depression isn’t just a phase and that being infertile is actually re-wiring my brain to be different. I know I’ll never be who I was before, but what if I don’t ever get back to being a happy person?”  It’s a beautiful post about trying to find yourself as you are losing yourself, and the ending brought a huge smile.

Lastly, Quietly Southern has a very moving post tying in a memory of almost drowning as a child to how she feels going through her recent loss.  She writes: “For the last month I’ve felt like I’ve been drowning.  Instead of water filling my lungs it’s been loss, despair, sadness, anger, depression and frustration.  Immediately after the miscarriage there were times where I literally couldn’t breathe.  There simply was not enough air on the face of this earth to fill my lungs and push out all the raw hurt I was feeling.”  It is a heartbreaking post; a must-read.

The roundup to the Roundup: Fill me in: what is life like for you today?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 27th and August 3rd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

As you read this, I am on a swanky swank bus traveling up I-95 to the annual BlogHer conference.  Or maybe I’m actually already there by the time you get to this post.  I don’t mean to imply that I am going to be indefinitely traveling the interstate until you read this.

This will be my fifth annual conference.  I think.  Working backwards: I went to San Diego (2011), New York (2010), Chicago (2009), and San Francisco where I distracted Lori from learning about Twitter (2008).  Yes, so this is my fifth conference.  Though perhaps the first one that I am entering without feeling completely discombobulated despite the fact that I have been living on Jupiter all summer.  Some of that comes with the fact that it is closer to home than past years, some of that comes from getting a lot of work accomplished right before I left (just in time to return and be behind again!), and some of that comes from knowing so many people going.  I’m going to get to see a lot of old friends as well as meet people that I have spoken to online for many years.  Plus I woke up an hour before everyone else this morning so I could finish packing while everyone else slept and have time with the twins and Josh once they were awake.

As I’ve done in the past, I’m going to write posts and upload photos when I can from the conference.  I am traveling sans laptop, so we’ll see how well this works.  If nothing else, look forward to seeing a photo montage of a bunch of ALIers when I get home.  But I think I’ve figured out a way to post from the road.

Also know that I’m probably going to be slow to add people to the IComLeavWe list over the next few days or respond to email.  No worries — you don’t need to resend.  I’ll get to it when I get home, but I’m just explaining the lag time.  Not that I’ve been excessively on top of things in recent months so it may just feel like business as usual.

I would love to take you along with me as I have in the past, so feel free to leave a comment below and direct me here or there, to meet people or hear things or take a photo.  I love having you along with me in my pocket for the trip.  It makes the wheels on the bus go round and round.

Updated at the bottom

I was reading a post on Cafemom yesterday about the inability to make friends after 30, right as I’m leaving for the annual BlogHer conference which is for all intents and purposes the equivalent of sleepaway camp for adults.  We’re even going to steal someone’s bra and run it up the flag pole Friday morning.  I bet you $10 that it will be Martha Stewart’s undergarments.

Meeting people at the conference is like shooting fish in a barrel as long as you are willing to dive into conversations with strangers.  Last year, I plopped myself down at a lunch table for book bloggers and walked away with 15 book recommendations and a new blog to read.  It’s also very easy to go there and have the whole outing feel like that game show staple where you have to catch dollar bills blowing through the air while you’re in a glass box (come on, you know exactly what I’m talking about).  It’s people, people everywhere and not a friend to be made.  And that can be INCREDIBLY lonely.  There is really nothing lonelier than being amongst 4500 people and feeling like you’re not connecting with any of them.

I had a large outpouring of new friendships this past spring; a Friendnaissance, if you will.  Some of the new friends are neighbours, some have kids who are in the same activities as my kids, some are the parents of the twins’ friends, and some are random people I’ve met from volunteering or activities.  Three or four have entered daily phone call/just drop by status.  The Friendnaissance was as surprising as seeing Brunelleschi’s Baptistery doors on the heels of the Middle Ages.  The thirties can bring a bit of a new friend drought, and even longstanding friendships can get weedy as attention is split in multiple directions.

During my twenties, most of the people I met were on the same tier: new job/maybe dating someone.  Now, in my late thirties, most of the people around me are on different, non-matching tiers.  I have newly married friends and newly divorced friends and long married friends and single friends.  I have some with kids and some without kids and all the kids are different ages.  I have some who are working and others who are not and still others who work bizarre hours in the house tucked around their children’s routine.  It’s harder to make friends because people are busy, and it’s harder to keep friends because schedules don’t always mesh when people are in different life stages.  My newly married, no kids friends want to go out at night.  My newly divorced, older kid friends want to meet for lunch.  My long married, not working, new baby friends want a playdate in the middle of the day.

It’s not just that the opportunities to meet people dwindle when you’re in your thirties; it’s just hard to make something stick that works equally well for both people.  I lost a few friendships because our kids were at drastically different stages of life and our schedules didn’t mesh, and a few others who ceased to put out an effort around the same I phoned it in too, and the friendship drifted away.

So the Friendnaissance was surprising and much appreciated; it was like getting a fantastic new outfit after feeling a little dumpy for a few months.  Getting a new friend made me feel good about myself, which probably made me more enticing to be around, which netted me more friends.  And now there are all these people around.  And there are all of you.

I’ve said before that a dearth of friends in childhood has made me cling to people much in the same way our grandparent’s generation clung to money after coming through the Great Depression.

I never felt as if I had enough friends.

It’s that feeling you get when you sit down to eat, fully expecting to be satiated by the end of the meal, especially when you see the amount of food at your disposal. But you walk away from the table with this gnawing hunger still present. And what is it? A failure of my own body to not recognize that there is food in my stomach? A true need unfulfilled? How do you know if it’s something wrong with you or something truly missing?

The same could be said for my heart. I had friends and I obviously connected with people and loved many. I’ve never consciously known what was missing or looked for it (or, more accurately, known how to look for it). It was always this small emptiness, a tiny gap of air in the heart. In my mind, I imagined everyone I love squeezed into atriums and ventricles, bodies locked against each other as I carried them inside my chest. And somewhere, free-floating through that mass of love, a tiny space. A pocket of emptiness. And absence searching for a presence.

I’m still trying to make myself understand that I don’t need to amass an army of friends; we’re not fighting an enemy.  We’re just trying to make each other’s lives a little easier.  And you can do that with one other person or you can do it with ten other people, and the number doesn’t matter.  I’m trying to remember that friendships have an ebb and flow, and sometimes they drift away like dandelion fuzz.  That everyone who steps into your life serves some purpose whether it is to get you through a moment in time or a lot of moments in time.

I’m just appreciative of my friends; the ones that came before 30 and the ones that have come after, like all of you.

Are you finding it easier, harder, or the same to make friends later in life?

Updated:

Blanche brings up a fantastic idea.  Anyone in Richmond, VA or have friends in Richmond, VA you can connect with her?  Anyone else looking to meet people?  Throw out the nearest big city to you in the comment section below and please follow someone back to their blog and connect with them (or connect them with a friend) if you live near them.

This summer, having it all has felt very heavy.  At other times, the all is as light as a trophy, feeling as if it might float away if I don’t hold tight to it.  The all feels as airy as a dream that I might forget if I don’t keep repeating the details to myself upon waking.  There are times when I spin around in the lightness of it all and think, “wow — this is my life.”

But like my weight on various planets, the heaviness of the all shifts at times, and instead of living on the moon where I am floating above the surface with my enormous leaps, I am living on Jupiter where my 130 pounds feels more like 300 pounds even though my body doesn’t change at all.  It still looks like my normal body; only heavier.  Much heavier.  And the all has a tendency to do this too, to not change in form but to feel sometimes as if it exists on Mercury at a mere 49 pounds one day and then on Neptune the next day at 146 pounds, even though the all is still just the all:

Marriage, two children, career, house, volunteer work, friendships, family*

I think the mistake we make in taking the all is thinking that it is like going to the help yourself bins at the candy store where you can take one chocolate kiss or ten chocolate kisses, and you pay for your purchase and leave the store.  Instead, the all is more like being told you can purchase a bag of Goldenberg peanut chews — which is simultaneously the most delicious and most disappointing candy in the world.  Do you know Goldenberg peanut chews?  They are a favourite of grandfathers everywhere… well… perhaps more like great-grandfathers at this point.  They were one of the only candies sold at my sleepaway camp in the canteen so everyone ate them, and they’re actually very good — chocolate, chewy peanut cluster bars — and they make me happy because they remind me of camp, and of Josh’s grandfather who ate them.  And yet they’re Goldenberg peanut chews — they’re not a Hershey bar or M&Ms.  People pass over them as a candy choice for good reason.  But having it all is like that — it’s like being told that you can have candy, but the candy is going to be a big bag of Goldenberg peanut chews that you’re going to have to schlep around in your purse whether you want to keep carrying them or not.  Once you buy the candy, you’re going to have to carry it, even if you pass one of those help yourself bins and want to grab one chocolate kiss.  You can’t.  Because your candy is the Goldenberg peanut chews.  And the help yourself bins are for those who are still undecided or working towards the all.

I’m not explaining this well.

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The all is fantastic when it’s fantastic.  But when you opt to take on part of the all, you take on that part of the all regardless of whether you’re on Earth or Jupiter.  When you opt for the marriage, you get the hand holding, and you also get the responsibilities.  You get the mind-blowing sex and you get the “seriously, can you please hang up your jacket in the closet instead of leaving it on the railing because I am going to flip out on you and beat you senseless if you leave that jacket one more time on the end of the bannister WHY DO YOU CREATE SO MUCH FUCKING WORK FOR ME.”  With the house, you both have this space to keep you safe from the elements, a place that reflects your tastes and contains all these items that you love that bring you comfort; and you have the other side of home ownership when the front door breaks and you need to now figure out who you call to repair such a thing and scrape together the money to pay for the new door and bend your schedule around the time period that the repair person can show up.

My job both provides money and is a mental outlet, and it keeps me up at night until 2 am, trying to hit all of my deadlines.  I am running on empty; trying to squeeze work into all the unclaimed minutes of my day.  I don’t think I’d be happy not working, but I’m certainly not happy working either, which is the whole Goldenberg peanut chewiness of it all.  It’s a job — it’s prestige and money — and it’s candy.  But it’s candy that is a big bag of Goldenberg peanut chews.  And sometimes I’m grateful to have candy, and sometimes I just feel like complaining how much space this candy is taking up in my purse and it isn’t even a cute little bag of chocolate kisses — the exact amount I want.  It’s a big lumpy bag of Goldenberg peanut chews.  And I love peanut chews… and I don’t love peanut chews when I see it next to M&Ms… and I love peanut chews… OH MY G-D, DOESN’T ANYONE WANT TO TAKE A GOLDENBERG PEANUT CHEW FROM ME TO GET IT OUT OF MY PURSE?

I can’t imagine taking any of the all of my plate because when I’m on Earth, the all is completely manageable.  I somehow can find time to see friends and take the kids to paint pottery and make dinner for Josh and turn in an assignment and work on the family tree… and it all fits.  It’s all exactly the weight I expect it to be.  But all summer I’ve been on Jupiter, and all the responsibilities have been heavy; heavier than they are in other months.  I can’t get enough done; I am spread too thin, people want more than I can give, and there are few places where I can say no without either offending or losing out on something important.  I have to do lists for my to do lists.  I literally have additional post-it notes that tell me how to approach the other post-it notes.  Because without them, I wouldn’t get it all done.  Too many things would fall through the cracks.  So I make to do lists for my to do lists.  That’s where I am right now.  And I know this will pass, that I’ll be back on Earth later and glad that I traveled to Jupiter even if it does make things quite heavy.  Because — my G-d — I was on Jupiter.  And I never forget the wonder of all that.

*******

I screamed at the twins the other night.  The ChickieNob had lost a doll, and in trying to help her find this doll, we cleaned up a drawer together and we threw out a bunch of pieces of random plastic junk, mostly goody bag fare.  Later that night, when it was time for bed, she decided to let the lower lip start quivering, and she told me that she really had wanted one of those bracelets we had thrown out — a bracelet which was not only a piece of junk but which was currently buried in the garbage bin under the chicken carcasses from dinner’s chicken and rice.  And suddenly, I lost it, thinking about how I had four hours of work ahead of me, and I was going to use precious minutes trying to find a piece of junk jewelry.  I wanted to dump all the garbage on her bed and jump up and down on it screaming, “I HAVE TOO MUCH ON MY PLATE AND NOW YOU’RE ASKING ONE MORE UNNECESSARY THING FROM ME!”  But I didn’t.

Instead I shouted something akin to that (which, in all fairness, was much saner than what I wanted to do as I snapped) and stormed out of her room, leaving Josh to deal with her tears.  And that is the heaviness of the all: it weighs 40 pounds when she wants me to still carry her like a baby, cuddling her head against my shoulder, my sweet girl, my partner-in-crime, my mini best friend.  There are few people I want to spend a day with more than the ChickieNob or the Wolvog when they are 40 pounds, and they are usually 40 pounds.  But then they turn into a Jupiter 94 pounds when I have deadlines screaming at me and my blackberry buzzing non-stop and a sink full of dishes.  And I can’t carry 94 pounds.  It makes me want to just scream hysterically, “who the hell expects me to carry 94 pounds for 24 hours?”  Because that’s what you sign up for when you sign up for the “all” in life: you have to take it whether it’s at an Earth weight or a Jupiter weight.  And you need to carry it even when your arms feel like they’re going to break, when you wonder how you could have ever thought that the all was so light that it might float away if you didn’t hold tight.

I completed all my work by 1 am, and then sat at the kitchen table and cried.  And then I put on a pair of surgical gloves that I use for touching chicken and dug out the bag from inside the garbage can and found the bracelet.  The cheap, plastic bracelet that she probably didn’t give two-shits about but was only mentioning to get out of going to bed.  I bleached the bracelet and wrapped it in an apology note and brought it to the ChickieNob’s room to tell her that I’m sorry even though she was sleeping.  And then I got into bed and stayed up for another hour, unable to sleep because Jupiter does that to you.  It takes five minutes to unwind from a day on Earth; it takes an hour to unwind from a day on Jupiter.  Because when I’m on Jupiter, I sort of hate myself.  I hate that I am so focused on the weight of the all that I don’t remember most of the time the happiness of the all.  And those moments when I realize that, that I’m not appreciating how good I have it, I berate myself.  I hate myself.  I tell myself that I suck because I yelled at my kid because she wanted one more thing from me before she went to sleep.

And all of that, it just adds to the heaviness of Jupiter because I wake with this residue of feelings that I carry with me into the next day, which affects how productively I work, how productively I parent, and the cycle continues because I am overtired, stretched too thin, scanning my to lists for my to do lists.

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I don’t know why I am writing a blog post about this instead of tackling my to do list except that I read an article in Forbes about a woman who was told that she wasn’t infertile if she couldn’t conceive between 34 – 39: she was just in a suboptimal fertile window and she needed to accept the facts of life as told by a random doctor who doesn’t know the first thing about this woman’s personal health history.  While I agreed with large chunks of the article, I also found myself wanting to smack some of the people who delivered quotes in the article (an effect of life on Jupiter — it makes you rage-y) when I was thrown off-guard by the final line:

“These girls and all girls need to know that there are different meanings to ‘having it all’ and different ways they can have it all, or as much as they want.”

As much as they want?  What a horrible thing to teach girls since life isn’t the help yourself bins.  If you want the all, if you want the marriage, two children, career, house, volunteer work, friendships, family, you need to understand that you get the bag of Goldenberg peanut chews, which at camp is the biggest treat of the day, but in the real world drugstore is also the ugly cousin to the Snickers.  It’s both those things; the sweetness and the sweet-ish.  That’s what I want the girls of tomorrow to understand; prepare yourself for the heaviness of Jupiter, enjoy yourself with the lightness of Earth, and know that sometimes you get to choose which planet you’re on and sometimes you don’t, but wherever you are, this weight will change one thousand times before you put down the all.

* This is what my all looks like.  Your all may include travel, caring for aging parents, hobbies, or any of thousands of options which create a personal all; a term which I believe is defined by an individual and not someone else’s idea of an “all” list.

Photo Credit: Jupiter via WikiCommons