Prominently displayed on the classroom wall, surrounded by about 20 other self-made books dedicated to caring, loving, wonderfully patient moms, you can find this book, made by my first grader, and dedicated to me, the worst mom ever.
“I dedicate this book to my mom who is sometimes very grouchy.”
Ouch.
Leafing through some women’s magazines while waiting for a hair appointment, I came across an interesting article in a Vogue magazine. In fact, the article’s opening paragraph completely changed my life:
“There are three things a woman really needs at 38: a husband, at least one child, and a dress with long sleeves.”
Brilliant.
The husband and child need not be explained. It is a well-known fact that a woman cannot be complete unless she is married and a mother.
The long sleeves were baffling, until I read further and learned that a woman must always be ashamed of her arms and cover them: “A lot of women who have flabby arms think they have to wear sleeves. But I think if you have muscly arms, you must cover them. You must soften them!”
Of course. Regardless of how your body looks, you must be ashamed of it and cover it. Flabby arms? Cover them! You work out and have great biceps? OMYGOD YOU’RE NOT FEMININE, COVER THOSE UNSIGHTLY MUSCLES! You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.
The article ends with the heartbreaking story of an evening gone very, very wrong: “I made a grave error. I had been invited to a dinner party at a grand house in the English countryside… I decided to wear a sleeveless Zac Posen dress. I arrived to find the hostess in gray silk and diamonds. The other girls were in chiffons… the men were in white tuxedos.”
So we already know this was a party for school girls and adult men. Because who in their right mind would call a grown woman “a girl?” That would be demeaning, belittling and totally inappropriate.
She continues: “It was pouring rain. Despite the storm, the hostess elected to keep the huge windows of her dining room thrown open all night… I was forced to put an inexpensive Club Monaco turtleneck over my Zac dress . I felt cold and unchic. If only I had worn sleeves.”
I think my head just exploded.
Women in vintage ads, especially from the fifties, seem to have a strong emotional reaction to their home appliances and cleaning detergents.
Image credit: Miss Retro Modern
While the woman above looks, err, INTENSE, the one below has a dreamy look in her eyes as she lovingly talks about her… bath towels.
Image credit: jbcurio
This woman is mesmerized by the color choices of her new fridge:
Image credit: bayswater97
This one, from Sweden, has a slightly manic appearance:
Image credit: jaykayess
And the lady below appears to be ECSTATIC about the cleaning power of her laundry detergent:
Image credit: Miss Retro Modern
Finally, the lady on the left scares the hell out of me with her deranged look:
Image credit: bayswater97
Since it was quite common for depressed fifties housewives to use alcohol, cigarettes and tranquillizers to cope with life:
Image credit: Joan TheWlis
The women in these vintage ads may simply be heavily sedated.
I was picking my kids up from school today, as I do every day. Today however was a tad more exciting than usual when I saw THIS in the car in front of me:
At first I thought it was someone in the back seat, but I’m pretty sure it’s the driver herself.
Impressive, don’t you think?
(This is a rhetoric question as comments are closed. Of course it’s impressive).
The nine to five grind has been good to us.
I almost feel like I’m betraying my online friends by saying that. So many talented writers are resisting the idea of a “real” job. So many of us have been miserable doing the nine to five grind. For many, a “real” job means a death sentence to our creativity, to our dreams.
Just a few of the fabulous, fierce, non-compromising people I have had the pleasure of meeting online in recent months:
Evyan of Apricot Tea is uncomfortable with people’s reactions when she tells them she’s not working, but she knows in her heart that staying home is right for her and that a “real job” would make her miserable.
Layoffs at Hunter Nuttall’s workplace have finally enabled him to become a professional blogger.
Jonathan Mead bravely insists on living without a template, even when it means “embarrassment, humiliation and flat out rejection.”
Tim Brownson of The Discomfort Zone refused to remain a well-paid but miserable sales person. He is having the time of his life working as a self-employed life coach.
While I completely respect my friends’ choice to become self-employed, and accept that for many creative types nine to five jobs ARE in fact a death sentence, I wanted to talk a bit about the other side. To remind everyone that some people are truly happy with “real” jobs and “real” careers.
It has been my experience, and especially my husband’s since I did make a career change and then took a long break from my career when my kids were born, that a real job can be very rewarding. The “get a degree, get a job and be damn good at what you do” path can and does work.
If you choose the right career for you, then keep at it long enough and are successful enough, you have freedoms that are usually associated with being your own boss. You can get to a point where you can take long vacations, decide how long to work each day, when to start your day, and whether to work from your home or from the office.
When you not only follow the path of a degree and a career but also remember to save and invest a significant chunk of your earnings each year, and especially if you start to invest in your early twenties, the magic of compound interest means that in your late thirties and during your forties you also have the financial freedom to take risks and chances and make career changes, because you can get by without a salary for many months.
So in a way, if you “give” those 15 years to the system, you get to take back – and you’re even young enough to enjoy it.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we were just lucky to be in the Silicon Valley during the exciting dot com boom. Maybe most careers ARE miserable. After all, our jobs were never the real, mundane, boring “nine to five” ones. A Silicon Valley start-up is hardly a boring place. So that could explain why we’re not as frustrated as others are. Or maybe we’re just a couple of boring, mundane, conformists. That’s a possibility too, especially since we are both firstborns and I seem to recall reading somewhere that firstborns tend to conform rather than rebel.
people always talk about the “nine to five grind”, but working for yourself can create an even worse grind. Monika Mundell, who writes about freelance writing, was unable to work for several weeks after contracting an illness that she attributes to working too hard and stressing her body too much.
She says, “I have been going at my business flat out for nearly 18 months now of which I have been fully booked for the last 10 months. I am a sucker for not saying no enough and therefore ended up taking all the work offered to me. But as it happens, I can’t go on like this and need to find a balance between my writing work, my niche sites and me. Not to mention my husband and my darling birds. The days are just not long enough to get it all done. You probably know that anyway.”
A major risk when you’re self-employed is not knowing when to stop and rest. This is a serious health risk, and the argument “it’s OK to work nonstop as long as you love what you do” is simply not true. Working in front of the computer 14 hours each day, rarely going outside, never exercising and eating junk WILL HARM YOUR HEALTH sooner or later, even if you love every minute of it.
While a nine to five job isn’t for everyone, it’s not necessarily evil. It depends a lot on the job, on the employer and on how your career advances over the years, but it IS possible to be an employee, have a fabulous career, make good money and be very happy. I suspect many of you will disagree. I’m looking forward to your comments.
Photo credit: jcoldironjr2003
Ugly shoes alert!
Because they’re ugly. Duh.
Photo credit: Menlo School
They make the foot appear wider and the leg shorter. Why would anyone want to do that?
Photo credit: gohsuket
So impractical, it’s plain silly.
Photo credit: sheilaellen
Crocs: You either love them or hate them. I tend to err on the side of hate.
Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik
A style (if you can call it that) that renders me speechless.
From heels
Classic ugly shoes. As demonstrated in the photo, these are especially lovely when worn with SHORTS.
Photo credit: rossination
So yes, this could be just a matter of convention, but to me these heels look ugly.
From Zappos
Ridiculous.
Photo credit: Markus Kolb
The print, the color, the whole thing… it’s mind-blowing, and not in a good way.
Photo credit: pain amp1013
A reader of this blog recently wrote the following entry in their own blog:
I’ve always thought my posts were okay… but since I started this blog I’ve had a conversion rate of only about 0.24% when it comes to the number of unique visitors I get vs. the number of people who actually subscribe. 60% of visitors leave before even 5 seconds have passed. Maybe I need something more eye-catching… or maybe my blog is just a lot more boring than I think it is. It seems like typically, successful blogs became successful within the first two months, so perhaps this is just a waste of my time. I’m going to set a goal: I want to have 20 subscribers by the end of 2008. And if I don’t, I will stop blogging.
Since they closed comments to that post, I emailed them with my completely unasked-for advice, then decided to publish my thoughts here since it occurred to me that many new bloggers will find it useful.
1. Change your WordPress theme. Your current theme is not very appealing, visually. If you can, pay for customization. Customizing a theme is cheaper than building a new website.
2. For easier tracking of your subscribers, burn a feed with feedburner.com. Place the “subscribe” button at the top of the sidebar. Add a “subscribe by email” link as well.
3. Add images to your posts. Flickr.com has a great selection of free images – just search for “creative commons license” images in the search form and credit the photographer. Edited to add: using images has its risks. See Andre’s comment below and my response.
4. Create a community. Find 10-20 small and mid-size blogs in your niche (more on niches later). Start reading them and commenting regularly. This is a good way to build a community around your blog and get comments.
5. Join social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
6. Consider blogging non-anonymously. Anonymity and a lack of a photo make it harder to connect with you.
7. Learn some basic SEO techniques and install the Wordpres SEO plugin. While SEO shouldn’t take over your writing, it’s very important to optimize your posts for search engines. Search engine traffic is important, and you want the right kind of search engine traffic – the kind that sticks around and reads your material rather than the kind that immediately bounces off your site.
8. Decide on a general direction for your blog. What is it about? You don’t have to limit yourself to a very tight niche, but if you can have a general niche, that would help. One of my own challenges with this blog is that I refuse to limit myself to a niche. But anyone who can be happy blogging within a niche should do so, in my opinion. Once you know what your niche is, add a tagline to reflect it.
9. Be patient. It’s not true that blogs succeed after a couple of months. Darren Rowse of Problogger recently said in his interview for Blogging Without A Blog, “For a blog to reach its potential though, you need to give it considerable time. It takes a couple of years to get to its potential.”
10. Ask yourself: what am I trying to achieve with my blog? Remember: most of us will never become famous (how DO you define Interent-famous anyway?) or make serious money from our blogs. So we should have other motives. For some it’s showcasing their work as writers and possibly landing writing gigs or book deals. For others it’s an outlet for their creativity and a way to connect with other people. A blog can also help you attract new customers to your online or offline business.
For me, blogging is about expressing myself in ways, and having a reach and an audience, that would not be available to me without this blog. Making a few extra bucks doing something that I love is a nice bonus. I’m also thinking about this blog in terms of showcasing my work. While I have absolutely no desire to ever write a book, I do love to blog. I currently work part-time writing the UpToUs corporate blog and would like to do more paid writing. My personal blog is a great way to let people know what I’m capable of. One of the items on my to-do list is adding a “hire me” page to this blog.
11. Finally, remember that human nature will cause you to always want more. So when you’ll have 20 subscribers, you’ll want 50 and when you get to 50 you’ll want 100. Think you’ll be satisfied with 500? With 1000? No you won’t. It never ends, which is why setting these goals can lead to perpetual dissatisfaction.
What are YOU trying to achieve with your blog?
Image credit: Annie Mole
I'm Vered DeLeeuw, a blogger for hire and a social media consultant. My social media campaigns increase brand awareness and loyalty, improve search engine rankings and drive targeted traffic to my clients' websites. Momgrind is my personal blog.
