She doesn't like the next new food (oatmeal in this case) as much as you might guess from this picture.

Last night I was reading a trashy novel on my iPod while Tom watched a TV show on his laptop. In my book, the heroine’s brother had been incarcerated for hacking into Twitter and bringing it down for 48 hours. Just then a character on Tom’s show talked her way into a trendy restaurant by telling the maitre’d how influential her foodie blog was. I realized a couple of things:

a) we might need to look into some loftier entertainment options

and

b) blogging (and Twitter and zumba and {insert latest trend}) was a lot funner when no one knew what a blog was.

Now I’ve got my grandma(!) defending Mormon Mommy Bloggers (I’m getting to that post; grandma wrote her grand defense on a computer with a 3 1/2 floppy drive and no internet access) and I can’t even read a fun romance without being reminded that I haven’t been on the Twitter much lately.

It’s not that I’m a pop culture snob (obviously), or that I have any trend-setter/early-adopter pretensions (I only started blogging after Tom nagged me for a year, same with Twitter), it’s more something like Groucho Marx’s thing about not wanting to be friends with anyone who would be friends with him. Or something.

Anyone have a fun new hobby?

Q: “Why should I be Utah’s Next Top Sassy?”

A: “World Peace.”

Also too, I like the concept of supporting local businesses; it’s probably a good idea to promote and patronize them so that when the apocalypse is nigh, you’ll have a reliable source for fuel and Mountain Dew. (Maverik gas station is local to the Western U.S., so . . . every fountain drink is like a vote for freedom, right?)

I’d love to review a clothing consignment store (like Kid-to-Kid or My Sister’s Closet, which turns out to be local to Mesa, Arizona, but they just opened in Spanish Fork, so maybe that counts?). What about CSAs and Farmer’s Markets? And Winder Farms? Oh, oh, and we should review some books and then have a reading with great Utah authors like Shannon Hale and Brandon Mull. And someone should ask my opinion about Thai Drift in Lindon. (Spoiler: It’s awesome. Get the massaman curry.)

(There’s also a big fat selfish reason: I would love to see these guys (Steph and Emily and Vanessa and Kristina and Jenny and Camille and Jennifer) more often.)

Here’s my audition video, starring Molly:

There’s a small maternal-infant Freudian slip in there when she says she doesn’t need me around “every single day.” I think she meant “every single hour” or “every single minute.”

If you would like to help me in my quest for local-blogger-reviewerness, please visit the Sassy Scoops on Facebook and “like” my video. You’ll need to “like” Sassy Scoops and click on “SassyScoopsUtah + Others” to see it. Thanks!

I have printed off recipes and information for swimming lessons; I’ll probably go on Tom’s freelance laptop once a week for ten minutes to check our finances, since I don’t feel comfortable leaving them completely unwatched. I bought some candles and a drying rack and . . . oops, today we bought an electric pump to blow up the kiddie swimming pool because just looking at the handpump exhausted me. Guess I’ll be standing in the return line tomorrow. Funny how I can talk this up to the kids every day for a week and totally space that an electric air pump would take — duh — electricity.

I’m excited for this, though today I realized the only music I’ll hear between now and July 10th is whatever I catch on the radio in the car, and the hymns at church. It’s probably better that I don’t really know what to expect: perhaps it’ll be totally sublime with daily epiphanies; perhaps it’ll be intolerable. I plan to write something every day, but the question I want to answer  is one that I’ve wanted to adopt as a focal point for months now, but somehow have never found the time. (And it doesn’t have to do with living a “green” lifestyle.)

It comes from Elder Eyring: “Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?”

If you need me, please email Tom at tomjohnson1492 @ gmail dot com.

I read posts that sound pretentious, shallow, or downright irrational. I wish I could muster the energy to leave flaming comments (I should pretend that I have matured enough to keep my critical thoughts to myself, or even better, become a kind, empathetic person, but the truth is I’m just tired of it all). The weather is mercurial and frustrating (though even a teasing, snowy May first is better than the silent resignation of February). Ten of the first forty swimming lessons of the season, including all the preschool level 1, were full within an hour of online registration being open, and I just want everyone else with kids to take a break for awhile and let me get ahead.

I know it’s me. I know my posts are every bit as self-indulgent and I will be forever grateful to Simon Cowell for that phrase. I know that soon enough I’ll be cursing the heat in my pregnancy-swelled incarnation. I know Spot will probably do fine in the preschool level 2 class, seeing as she’s had what seems like seven years of parent-child class.

I know church will someday again not make me want to slit my own throat in futile protest of lazy cliches, testimonies-that-are-not-testimonies, comments about how true ladies are strong but ever-quiet and modestly reserved, eulogies of people or callings or both, empty iterations of how the church must be true and Christ must be at the helm because our recent stake splitting was quick and seamless instead of the bloody, brutal coup that divine oversight averted by just this much.

I know this is me: I read a post where someone lamented having low self-esteem/being fat ever since adolescence even though she wore the smallest skirt on her cheerleading squad. I guess she didn’t get the memo that you’re not allowed to feel bad about yourself unless you weigh almost as much as me (hey, I’m pregnant, I’ll give you a few grace pounds under my current weight, but normally you better weigh at least 20 pounds more before whining). Since I am not a standard (well, I am pretty close to the U.S. average size, but we’ll let that go; i.e. I was right, but that’s not the point), this is a subjective, self-centered, unsympathetic line of indignation in the sand.

I read a different (funny, faith-affirming) sort of post last Monday. It was Conversion Diary’s When Church Isn’t Fun (really, go read it; I’d risk the cliche of saying she said it so much better than I could, it was that good), though her church-wasn’t-fun was for the less-damning (understandable) reason of hooligan children (which I remember well, but my kids are pretty old for that now). I’ve mentioned before my Catholic envy; really it is an envy for the mysteries, for the holiness some devout, fervent, trying Catholics seem to center their lives on.

Mormonism has mysteries, of course, but often we are a practical people, eschewing unanswerable questions for concrete principles of daily living. Which I like. I need concrete principles and valuable, reasonable theories of how best to live the mundane parts. And we say that taking the Sacrament (our version of Communion) is the most important part of our Sunday meetings, but it is purely symbolic; we don’t have the transubstantiation literalness thing going, nor the pomp and circumstance, so I don’t know if that’s why the Sacrament sometimes seems a hurried ordinance to be gotten through before the meat of the meeting rather than a ritual completion at the end.

But this, too, is me. I could arrive early to church (I think; maybe I should walk alone once a month and sit for awhile by myself before 9) and meditate my heart out on the mysteries of God. I could pinch my kids into squawking so they once again consume my energies that are less-well-spent in finding fault. Which is funny because a) I lamented not being able to concentrate on the speaker for years, and b) I’ll have a new squawker soon enough; probably I should enjoy this peace I longed for.

Dalene has one of those small, simple things in her post today (I do read great Mormon bloggers, too), that reminds me that when we are listening, when we are able to hear, God speaks. He speaks through others, and sometimes He speaks in a gesture, a glance, a communion of spirits knowing and apprehending the same thing at once.

Why didn’t I have an experience like that today? I know it was me. I wasn’t listening. I hope God wasn’t trying to tell me something important today. As if God takes Sunday off with no message for those who would hear. Only I wouldn’t.

I said that sounded good, in fact there are already several (probably hundreds of) great sites out there (including #gno and TwitterMoms.com on Twitter and pages on Facebook, and Today’s Mama and the Motherhood, and various ning social sites, not to mention local message boards and forums and pretty soon it was clear that he didn’t have a clear vision for his company, and he hadn’t done any market research (how sad is it that I think I used that term correctly in a conversation) to see what’s already out there and what he could offer different and special.

What he does have, basically, is the domain SuperMom.com, and the conviction that this could be big, really big. And you know what? It could be, with the right person (a woman who happens to be a mom probably), the right vision, the right strategy, a higher purpose (donating 10% to charity or something), the right relationships with social media gurus, and time and luck.

He wanted me to be that person. I said I’d work on it if he’d pay me. He offered me a share in the company (which is basically, share in the domain SuperMom.com), which might be an opportunity, I suppose, if I could make it my passion.

But it’s not, and I can’t.

I told him about Kalli’s quilting bee I went to last month and Sue’s new blogger charity posse and how the “networks” I participate in are all “organic.” I’m on Twitter, yeah, but only because I enjoy it and there are fun people on there who have interesting ideas or happenings to share. (Yes, a lot of it is beyond banal, but how about this tweet from @QueenScarlett yesterday: 5YO:I like going to Church to have a play date with Jesus. Me:What? 5YO:Church is His house. It’s a reverent play date & Jesus is not whiny.)*

Then I said, to be honest, (prepare yourself): The name “SuperMom” is kind of off-putting to me. I have no interest in being a SuperMom, or an AlphaMom or a Type-A Mom. I even lost interest in being a What About Mom? Mom, though sometimes I think of going back to that.

He still insisted that that person with the vision could be me. I demurred, told him about the social media club of slc and Utah Valley, where he could go and meet people who might be more visionary.

He handed me his business card, told me to think about it, and let him know if I was interested in being a part of the next big thing.

I’m interested, all right, in what people do and think they can do online.

But I lost his card somewhere on the ride home.

—

Here’s what I learned at the Seth Godin thing, for Lauren (@supermomcentral), because I told her I was writing a post about said event, and this post really isn’t much about that, except to say that I know it’s important to have passion, if you want to succeed in business (life). Seth Godin says if you can write down what your job is then “they” can find someone to do it cheaper. And that public school is a scam perpetuated by factory-minded people who want to produce a compliant, obedient, not-thinking-for-themselves workforce.

And that fear is what keeps us from doing great things, from creating great art (the kind that is being awesome at whatever you do because you’re doing it your way). And then he said that the emotionally hard work of being an artist (again, not a painter but a DO-er, a Create-or, etc) is doing it even when you don’t feel like doing it, which I need to think about a lot because I haven’t felt like writing or doing anything lately, and I like to blame my evening pregnancy sickness for that, but really it’s probably also fear — fear of failure, and also fear of success. (Which is nonsense, because really, who fears success?)

The other big take-away I got will be the subject of my post “Lessons for being a Mom from Seth Godin” if I ever get around to writing it, but since I might not, the upshot was I started thinking that probably I can be an artist as a mother, I can do it the way only I can, I can do it my way, a way that can’t be written down in interchangeable parts. I can stop demanding blind obedience (not that I am successful at that) and instead encourage making good choices and trying new things, and I can see that the messier my house is, the better, because it means those kids are DOing something.

A lot of what Seth said sounded like Ayn Rand to me, and I wonder if that means I didn’t get it at all or if he is a not-so-secret Galtist. Because he talked a lot about giving and generosity, but it sounded like non-coerced giving, not namby-pamby “giving back.”

And finally, Seth actually asked me a question, but I didn’t know the answer. I did, however, know the answer to the number one question asked at events like this: “Where is the bathroom?”

—

* If you’re on the fence about Twitter, (and Seth Godin today said it was terrible, that it was what kept people from creating their art (not arty art but whatever it is that you do that no one tells you to do), but you could say that about any distraction that has the potential, if misused, to become a time-suck), consider this:

Fun Happenings that were a direct result of Twitter:

That time I spoke at BYU about Twitter because Kelly King Anderson asked for a substitute on Twitter.

That time I met @sahans on Twitter, who happens to live just 30 minutes away and then she fed my family one night and another night we got to go to the Timpanogos Storytelling Winter Concert for free because she knows how to Direct Message me on Twitter.

All of the times I have discussed meeting at Barry’s in Spanish Fork for Malibu Chicken and the best French fries in the world, and yet the one time I drove down there I was too grungy to ask anyone to meet me on Twitter.

That time I heard about the #gno at Seo.com and I took Chrysanthemum and we ate pizza and laughed with @jet_set and @petitelefant.

That time I attended the Wasatch Woman of the Year luncheon and got all inspired because Pam Baumeister asked for volunteers on Twitter.

That time I attended the Start-up Princess Seth Godin lunch because KKA asked for volunteers on Twitter.

—

I can’t list all of the Utah people I follow on Twitter because I am lazy, but here are the ones who were at lunch today. Just go to Twitter.com and add these fine folk: @jillkaufusi, @sahans, @inevergrewup, @sweetlifeinth, @JoanieAtwater,@emihill, @makeitworkmom, @wasatchwoman, @startupprincess, @bigbags, @thomallen, @newspapergrl, @cuteculturechic, @JylMomIF (I didn’t see her but I’m believin’ she was there), and if I forgot anyone it is because I am a terrible person and you should forgive me (if you even see this because probably if you read me, and if I know that you read me, I would probably have remembered seeing you there today, and so really it’s your fault. Not that all of these people read me religiously, but they should.)

You should also follow @LauraMoncur, because she is the first person in social media that I met in Utah, she’s really nice, and she makes a living online. I know! Crazy, huh?

This post tells such a radically different story than the first essay did. I feel horrified for everyone involved. I understand why they have given up for now on making the boy a part of their family, because it sounds impossibly complicated (maybe, simply, “impossible”). I applaud them for continuing to honor the father’s financial obligation.

But this brings up a slew of interesting writer-audience issues. I can’t apologize for reacting the way I did to the first essay, because my feelings were based not on conjecture or gossip or the writing of a critical reporter, but on the facts and feelings that one of the principal characters shared. In telling a story, the onus is on the writer to present relevant facts, to tell the story, and if things are misunderstood (especially by such large numbers of people), the fault is the writer’s, not the audience’s. If the claims made in the second post are true, then the mother/writer is either a very unreliable narrator, a poor writer, or an irresponsible attention-seeker.

The mother/writer in the first piece sounded shallow, image-conscious, and materialistic. Perhaps (hopefully) she’s not. But that’s how she herself presented herself.

It’s like if Shakespeare came along and said, “Wait! You think Romeo was foolish and short-sighted and impulsive to kill himself when he found Juliet lying on the tomb? He wasn’t! He gathered the top five doctors in Verona and each one pronounced her dead! He waited three days as her body decomposed and THEN he drove the dagger into his heart! DUH! You don’t know anything! You’re so quick to come to conclusions about somebody. … Oh? What? You say I FORGOT to put that in Act 5? Well, shucks, that story is so familiar to me, I thought EVERYBODY knew about the multiple autopsies and the mirror-breath test. You readers are so dumb and quick to judge.”

Except it’s even worse, because to really be a parallel case, it would have to be Romeo who wrote the play and then got hurt, defensive, and morally superior when people came to the inevitable conclusion that he was a big boob.

Another issue is Lisa Belkin’s responsibility in all this. As the writer of the Motherlode blog, she frequently has guest posters, and they often explicitly or implicitly ask for advice. Several times guest posters have been criticized for decisions they have made. Perhaps this is an ugly part of blogging, but it is also, in fact, an intrinsic part of blogging: reader response is the WHOLE POINT OF BLOGGING.

If you write a post on a blog with comments, you ask for and expect responses. If those responses do not include the fawning congratulation or commiseratory sympathy you thought your story deserved, you can’t then say, “How rude! I didn’t ask you to intrude on my private life! How dare you presume to comment!” Because when you posted to a public blog which asks people to “join the discussion,” you ASKED FOR COMMENTS.

I think Lisa Belkin’s editorial policy bears some of the burden here. Since it was not her story (so she presumably at least wasn’t “forgetting” important details), what was the motive for publishing such a damaging, one-sided initial account? Controversy? Link-baiting? In not urging her guest poster to dig deeper for and include these mitigating circumstances, I think she has betrayed the trust of a writer she should have mentored, in favor of the publicity-loving instincts of sensationalistic journalism.

And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

(Except to say that I hope things work out for the family and the boy. What a difficult situation with no easy answers.)

Hello Mari,

I wanted to tell you about a new month-long Bubbles and Bubbly Contest powered by Wisk High-Efficiency detergent, which your readers will surely enjoy. To enter to win, just answer a true or false question that tests your Bubble IQ and no matter if you get it right or wrong you are eligible for a grand prize drawing of a fabulous red HE washer & dryer.  And because we know that all HE machines require HE detergent, we’re also giving away one-year supplies of Wisk HE detergent to 5 lucky runners up. Also, each day 5 people will win a free bottle of Wisk HE.  You can enter up to once a day for a month for the chance to win, so do come back each day for a new question and another chance to win!

Please let me know if you have any questions and if you can help spread the word to your readers.

Best,

Kathleen

@LaundryHE

Done? Okay. Here’s what I came up with:

1. My name is not “Mari.” I’m happy to be called Shannon or Jane; even “MommyBlogger” would be preferable to a name that is not my name. Sally has been reading too much Calvin & Hobbes lately so she calls me “the Mom-Lady,” but she’s eight, you know?

2. “which your readers will surely enjoy.” Yeah, my dad is really interested in Wisk High-Efficiency detergent.

3. “Bubble IQ.” Really?

4. The statement I got upon visiting the site was “True or False: If you swallow bubble gum it will stay in your stomach for 7 years.” I asked Sally this question in case I was dismissing it too quickly. She gave me the look and said, “that’s impossible.” If your quiz doesn’t at least require my eight-year old to think for a minute, why would I enjoy it?

5. The contest entry requires that you submit both your street address and phone number. Uh, I don’t think so. And, maybe you could have mentioned that in this email. I can’t in good conscience encourage people to leave that kind of information on a site that has no visible encryption or privacy policy.

6. The results are the same whether I get the answer right or wrong? Why use words like “question” and “tests” and “IQ” if this is really one of those pinko feel-good non-contests where everyone is a winner (as long as they’re chosen randomly)? Kids gotta learn that not everyone can be the next American Idol.

7. Whatever you do, don’t say what brand the washer and dryer are (as long as it’s not Maytag — like the kind Dooce, oops, it is a Maytag.) But they’re red! (same kind as my laptop) and fabulous!

8. You just said that High-Efficiency detergent is only for those fancy HE machines, right? If you do a simple site search of my blog with the word “laundry,” the first result is this post, which has a picture of my old, ugly (yet reliable) machines. I know, your time is too valuable to pretend to do any research, even the most obvious and easy two-second search. You’re too important to waste time personalizing things for me. I get it. (thanks for the ego hit.)

9. Even if I did have nothing better to do than enter a quiz that isn’t a quiz every day for a month, you think I’d want to broadcast that fact?

—

I noticed this email (among all the other bad pitches I’ve gotten recently) because a guy I met at a blogging for business conference emailed me the other day asking for consultation about a pitch he’s working on. (SMART GUY.)

Seems like it shouldn’t be too hard to write a successful pitch, if you truly love a product and if you’ve ever written a letter to your mom. But of course PR people can’t expect to love every product they work with, and they probably don’t have mothers, either. Maybe if they could get into some sort of headspace where they believed in X product so much they simply HAD to write home to mother about it, the email boxes of mommybloggers across the land would be a much happier place.

—

Now I feel bad. I sent a link to this to Kathleen, and she responded so graciously. I’m a jerk. (But everything I said is still true. — I guess this is what they meant by cognitive dissonance.)

Also, Dick tells me they’re legally required to enter you in the contest whether you’re medically braindead or not. So, my bad.

(Pre.S. 2 Mr. Bennet needs to come to terms with the fact that even celebrity mommy bloggers fart.)

Yesterday I took Sally and Susan to a mommy-blogger PR tour at Thanksgiving Point, and the full disclosure is that they spoiled us with yummy food, gorgeous flowers, awesome dinosaurs, and more delicious food, but if you’ve read this site for any length of time (and I like to think that you’ve been reading since before I started writing) you know that my love for Thanksgiving Point is deep and true, and not influenced by bribery or swag.

Of course, the downside of that is — what more can I say? I love Thanksgiving Point, and everyone should go. The End. (And in August they have the Two-Buck Tuesday so it’s a great time to check it out, though Sue is right, it is HOT, so go early or late and if you are sensitive to noise, I’d, uh, reconsider the Dinosaur Museum until all those awful kids are back in school.)

It was fun to be with just two of my people (my kids always seem easier one-on-one or when at least one of them is missing), but it was also great to talk with the other bloggers who happen to be mothers.

I hate when people say this, because if I don’t get invited to some event where people meet awesome people and then write about it on their blog, I feel like I’m in seventh grade all over again (because I’m a secure adult), but I met a few fascinating women yesterday and at the risk of sounding like a prepubescent name-dropper, I am going to gush about them for a minute. (And if they were gracious enough to chat me up, then obviously they would LOVE you.)

First, the PR lady for Thanksgiving Point turned out to be a friend from college (Courtney, remember Heather G. from the Ally? She is still so cute and funny). It was one of those awkward things where I remembered her more than she remembered me at first, but hey, I’m sure that had nothing to do with the 40 pounds I’ve gained and the way-flattering haircut. Right?

Then I met Sue, from Navel Gazing at its Finest, who has been one of my blogging heroes for lo these many years. She is … well, I just really like her, and I wish she’d blog more, and she’s a technical writer so I think she and Mr. Bennet should meet some time, and her kids are cute and normal. (I’m sure she’s relieved to hear that.)

I saw a bunch of the bloggers that I’ve been running into here and there: Evonne, Lauren, Joanie, April, Rachel, Allison’s husband (and her kids, including her oldest girl, who told my oldest girl several jokes that we have been hearing over and over ever since, thank you very much), and Kelcey.

Those ladies are all more professional than me, but one thing I have learned about blogging recently is that, while it is beyond wonderful to have readers who live in other hemispheres (and states), it is very valuable to make connections locally. And by “valuable” I don’t mean I’m planning to use them or “network” with them or whatnot, but just that if you are a new or intermediate blogger and want to {insert smarmy business phrase meaning “take it to the next level}, you could do a lot worse than to meet in person with the other bloggers in your area who have similar-ish blogs.

How do you get invited to these things or find out who the other bloggers are? I have a couple suggestions, but first, let me tell you about meeting Lisa yesterday.

Lisa is a smart, pretty, extroverted lady with a 2 1/2 week old baby and a little girl about Susan’s age there. She and I talked a bit throughout the day, over the rose bushes and while the kids rode the ponies (or maybe it was the erosion table and the butterfly garden, but in any case we talked). She told me about herself, including that this was her first-ever blogging event and that she doesn’t Twitter or read many other blogs. (She also graduated from BYU the same year I did and has three daughters, which is very enlightened.)

So I felt like quite the blogging-event veteran. At dinner she asked how I had met so many of the women and how I’d gotten into the loop of getting invited to some of these things, and I spent ten minutes of her life that she’ll never get back tracing my blogging-in-real-life roots to the first time I met Laura Moncur at a geek dinner almost two years ago.

(It is a pretty fancy story.)

She looked suitably impressed, and then I asked her how she’d gotten on the list for Thanksgiving Point, and she said that she goes on Good Things Utah every six weeks and I thought she meant she goes online and checks out what they’re up to or something. And then she had to explain that she actually goes on the TV show every six weeks to share her science/math/music/art/reading activities for parents to do with their kids.

Then I made Mr. Bennet take another picture of us. Just in case. I mean, I fully expect to dine with Hugh Laurie and Ingrid Michaelson someday, but if not . . . I’ll always have Lisa Bergantz.

I only wish this was a staged photo

(If you have no idea where to find local bloggers of interest, get on Twitter, join the relevant Social Media Club chapter, search for blogs by place, and talk about your blog at every awkward check-out line opportunity — someone you meet is bound to know someone who knows some people.)

Then I talked to Cindi Braby and made funny (original) jokes about how similar her name is to Cindy Brady. (I also met Kalli, Camille, and wish I’d met everyone else, but hopefully next time!)

I can’t say enough about how gracious Thanksgiving Point was to us. I think I understand a little bit now why nutjob celebrities get that awful sense of entitlement. Because I’m feeling a little bit entitled too now. Why, when I asked Sally to set the table for breakfast and she jumped right up, I merely thought, “dang straight, girl.”

****

The Giveaway: Family four packs to each of Thanksgiving Points’ four venues (Gardens, Dinosaur Museum, Farm Country, Children’s Garden). To enter, simply leave a comment telling me which venue you’d like tickets to. You can get extra entries by doing any of those social media things (twittering this:”Thanksgiving Point Giveaway at http://seagullfountain.com” or facebooking it or blogging about it or writing it in the sky — just leave an extra comment for each extra entry). Contest ends August 5th. (This is open to anyone, but you or friends/family have to be in Utah at some point to use the tickets.)

Seriously, her poems are terse epics, and it’s been speculated that perhaps she would’ve made a fantastic blogger, what with the letter-writing and the staying in her house a lot.

What kind of blogger would she be, though? I’ve read a bunch of BlogHer recap posts about great times with friends online or already met, greedy swaghags, and men asking in elevators if it was a cosmetics convention. (I should possibly note here that if Chick-fil-A and/or Mountain Dew and/or Baked wanted to sponsor me to BlogHer 2010 in New York City next year I could probably donate some insulin to a diabetic toddler from Myanmar as a PR stunt for brand exposure humanitarian gesture, just to generate some general goodwill.)

But I don’t think Emily would’ve left Amherst for a conference, even if there was a chance of Crocs swag:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell!  they’d advertise — you know!

How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a frog –
To tell one’s name — the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

*from the Thomas H. Johnson edited Complete Poems

But. At the risk of sounding like a sheep, I would like to publicly declare that I love Stephanie Nielson. She doesn’t need my love in any way or know of it, but I love the blogging that she is doing, that she has been doing since she started blogging again after the accident. I read her and suddenly, what anybody says about me doesn’t matter. (Actually that’s a line from Some Kind of Wonderful, but you know what I mean.) I read her, and suddenly my kids smell better, my husband looks gleam-y eyed, and my doughy thighs that nevertheless function pretty darn well, even them I am quite grateful for.

I’ve been really emotional for the past couple months, and unfortunately it’s not because I’m pregnant, and I didn’t even know how badly I wanted to be pregnant again until the test this morning was negative. But my odd hormonal fluxes aside, read this post on Love and this Elephants and on Beauty and this one called A Mother, and then tell me you didn’t cry. A lot. In a good, cleansing-cathartic-reborn-renewed sort of way.

Stephanie is having a birthday this Saturday, and The Sweet Tooth Fairy down Provo-way is donating all proceeds from the sale of their vaNIElla cupcakes to the burn fund. I’m so cold and dead at heart that usually even fundraisers for good causes bring on a big Humbug, but I am going to be at the cupcake store buying cupcakes on Saturday. Tom and I have had these cupcakes, and though Tom says the frosting is almost too sweet (it isn’t), he really likes the cake part, which has an intriguing hint of nutmeg or cardamom (which I know aren’t that similar, it’s probably just nutmeg, but I have dreams that it could be cardamom).

If you don’t live in driving distance of the Provo, you can order cupcakes online, AND, you can enter to win a dozen cupcakes over at my friend Vanessa’s I Never Grew Up blog.

Amen.

I’ve been working with a (talented, patient, spectacular) designer on my new blog header. Alma is worth every penny she charges, but I was lucky enough to promise Dick’s firstborn child (and some ad space on his blog) for most of the cost.

But poor Dick. He has been my whipping boy for blog-and-all-purpose technical help for a long time. I have gladly turned in my Independent Woman card in exchange for a man who will set up our computers, deal with the “router” and negotiate with those pesky pixels.

Interacting with a professional (almost-stranger), therefore, has been a real eye-opener for me. It has taught me a lot about design principles and styles and how to articulate what appeals to me visually, but most of all, it’s made me reflect on how different it is to deal with someone to whom you cannot offer exotic connubial favors in one breath and berate hysterically for “not getting it” the next. VERY disconcerting. (Also, I’m sorry, Dick. I’ll try to treat you like the professional you are in future.)

I am so pleased with how the banner turned out. My new name, Seagull Fountain, is a reference to the rural town we live in, and also to everyday life in America, sort of a Lake Wobegon thing and a Jane of Green Gables Seagull Fountain thing. (I know, I know L. M. Montgomery was Canadian. I’ve named two of my daughters after her, after all. Just work with me here.)

I tried to buy the domain Groundhog Day when I was ready for a change from What About Mom? I do love Bill Murray, but also, isn’t almost every day of our lives like Groundhog Day? Isn’t every day exactly the same, in the ways that really matter? Don’t we see the same people (or the same sorts of people)? Don’t we make choices about how to act or react, how to focus our energies and our times and our talents? Not on the big days that we give birth or do something heroic that saves a life or the day we discover Duncan Hines bulk brownie mix at the WalMart. But the other days. The going-to-work and taking-care-of-the-kid days are all the same.

I want to change myself, improve gradually, just as Bill Murray does in Groundhog Day, without needing the slap in the face of a cosmic wakeup call.

Anyway, Seagull Fountain is a small town, my blog is a small blog. My life is a small life, and I love every bit of it. Somedays I wish I could do something bigger, make a larger impact somewhere, do something about the women and girls in Africa who suffer so incomprehensibly. I hope to someday. For now I am called to spend most of my time and energy and care and thought on the four people I live with, and see every day. People who don’t change much from day to day, small challenges and triumphs that vary little but are no less amazing when viewed with love and humility.

Geez.  Getting a bit maudlin in here.

Where was I? Oh. The blog and related identity crises/name changes. I enjoy blogging because it adds to my life, especially to my relationship with Dick. He makes me feel that I, and my hopes/dreams/outlandish ideas are important, and interesting. This is all very self-centered and me-ish, but isn’t feeling important, and interesting, and necessary, just about the best thing a life-partner can give you?

Last night I was on a panel about Women in Social Media at the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City. It was fun, not least because I got a babysitter for the kids.

Wow, my teeth are pretty white! And my neck, is, uh, pretty fleshy!

Dick said he was worried about me as the introductions were made and as the first three panelists gave their spiels. Each of them had such impressive resumes and honors, he said. What would I say? (Thanks, Dick {shrugs wryly}). Luckily I blog, and attend events and twitter and meet new people and talk blogging because I enjoy it. I am blessed (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) to not have much of an agenda when it comes to these things. I mostly find it all horribly intriguing and fun. And Dick does too, so then we have even more to talk about on date night.

(And I recently read Penelope Trunk’s great post about introducing yourself by telling stories, so my slim resume wasn’t too much of a handicap.)

Of course, the best part of blogging, no matter what your name or schtick is, is meeting people around the world. Like Kirsty from Australia. You can get a sense of who she is and why I think she’s fabulous (and revel in that accent!) by listening to Dick’s podcast with her.

So that’s it, basically. Love what you do and do what you love, or something.

And if you’d like to display one of my gorgeous new buttons, please do.

<a href=”http://www.seagullfountain.com/”><img src=”http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3554/3553932419_855a875c90_o.png”></a>

<a href=”http://www.seagullfountain.com/”><img src=”http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3643/3553926315_96e7db3616_o.png”></a>

Thanks for reading!

(Note: whenever you see blue words on this blog, you can click on them to go to an example or reference for whatever is being discussed.)

Blogging for Church Ladies

Why should I blog?

1. To record what happens around and within you. Of course you can keep a journal, but blogging helps by providing incentives (commiseration, support) and accountability (it’s public, so it’s obvious if you’re not posting). Getting feedback on your activities and thoughts can help you be more reflective about what you do and what you think, what you believe, and why. An Ensign article called Hidden Benefits of Keeping a History (Thanks, Laura) encourages us to record both our successes and failures, and our feelings about them.

One thing I like to do when I’ve wiped soggy cheerios off the kitchen floor seven times in one morning is to pull up my post about Spot’s Elbow Dance. She isn’t always that cute, but knowing that she was, once, unbearably cute, makes me a little more resigned to following her around with a soapy washcloth. Reading other blogs about the naughtiness and cuteness that go hand in hand with children lets me know I’m not alone as a mother.

2. To share the gospel. Two words: Big Love. If we want the world to understand us for who we really are and what we actually believe, we have to witness what that is. Elder Ballard gave a commencement speech at BYU-Hawaii that was later an Ensign article called Sharing the Gospel Using the Internet, and it is a most splendid call to action.

Now, one of my favorite blogs, Conversion Diary, is written by a Catholic who used to be an Atheist, and I’ve made several awesome (blog) friends who are not Mormons. I’m not writing my blog to try and convert them. I admire and respect the faith and devotion they live. But I do want to state, in my own words, what it is that I believe.

Elder Ballard says:

May I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the Internet to share the gospel and to explain in simple and clear terms the message of the Restoration. . . . you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true. . . .

[Church members] have recorded and posted their testimonies of the Restoration, the teachings of the Book of Mormon, and other gospel subjects on popular video-sharing sites. You too can tell your story . . .  Talk honestly and sincerely about the impact the gospel has had in your life, about how it has helped you overcome weaknesses or challenges and helped define your values. The audience . . . may often be small, but the cumulative effect of thousands of such stories can be great. The combined effort is certainly worth the outcome if but a few are influenced by your words of faith and love of God and His Son, Jesus Christ.

I don’t talk Mormon stuff every day. Sometimes I go weeks without mentioning the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but in every post, I try to show that my family and I are pretty normal, pretty friendly: people you wouldn’t mind living next door to, even if we don’t bring a bottle of wine as a housewarming gift.

3. To make friends, fellowship sisters, stay connected to family. The other week I wrote a post about the difficulties of making friends in new places. I was shocked at how many other women are also lonely. Any time I am feeling sorry for myself that no one reaches out to me, I’ll read the comments on that post and remember my resolve to be the one reaching out.

How do I blog?

1. Choose a platform. The easiest way to get started is Blogger. There’s also Typepad (great customer service for $5/month) or WordPress. You can also host your own website, of course, and if you’re interested in that I’d be happy to have you talk to my husband. If you can do email, you can start a blog in Blogger. Try searching on Blogging Basics 101 for further help (or call me! I love talking blogging, if you can believe it). (If you don’t have my number, email me at whataboutmom@gmail.com).

2. Stay safe. Don’t make it easy for the crazies to find you or your family in real life. You can make your blog private, but I would still be careful (and that would sort of counteract Elder Ballard’s plea). Don’t use your last names or your address or ward name or school name, or the birthdays of your kids, and if you do post photographs, don’t post naked shots of the kids in the tub, or shots that include the license plate on your minivan. Don’t mention a family trip or your husband’s business trip until after it’s over. Pretend, with every post, that you’ll be reading it to the person it’s about in front of the entire world.

3. It’s just another way to communicate. Blogging shouldn’t, of course, replace our everyday interactions with each other, but it is a great new way to communicate. Sometimes people are mean on the internet, or petty. And it can be intimidating to put yourself out there like that. But the benefits — of coming to know yourself and the world better, and of discovering people around the world and across Utah lake — have been, in my experience, life-changing.

But I do miss the linky interwebby awesomeness (to quote BooMama) and writing is like any exercise — stop for any length of time and you can’t think of a single reason why you should risk muscle strain while getting all sweaty and out of breath.

Why is it easier to be either completely plugged-in or totally disconnected?

This afternoon, after being “on” all morning at church, I got to hide myself away in my room while the kids napped, lazing around next to Dick’s warm body, and reading a book cover to cover.

That the book was an enjoyable half-historical romance with some deeper themes by Barbara Michaels (Elizabeth Peters) was almost incidental. I found myself thinking that jail time or physical incapacitation of some non-contagious sort wouldn’t really be very bad if I had an unlimited supply of escapist fiction.

Patriot’s Dream was published the year before I was born, but I laughed (OL) at what could have been Barbara Michael’s ahead-of-her-time indictment of blogging:

“. . . I don’t approve of this self-pitying verbal diarrhea known as catharsis; but there are times when people have to spit out what’s bugging them, get it out of their system.” (p. 296)

Last week I read a really unfortunate thread on a Mormon group blog about the relative scope and merits of mommy blogging.

Sometimes I wish my blog were more about writing, or cultural statements, rather than mommy moments. Or that I at least had a profound commentary to offer about the mommy moments: universal truths gleaned or profound insights gained from the daily struggle against temper and tantrums and teenagers-to-be.

But I don’t, and whenever I’m moved enough by something other than cute buns and chubby knees to write outside my self-circumscribed sphere, it’s usually because something is bugging me so much I simply have to get it out.

I’m pretty sure that’s no way to launch a writing career.

Why is it easier to be either completely happy with the life that is and the duties of the day or totally dissatisfied and convinced that ambition is the answer?

This week I’m talking about blogging at a church lady night on family history. Dick and I were talking about it as we drove home from a family dinner. He was pointing out all the different things blogging is and does for me. I got a little frustrated, because I’d told him the spiel was supposed to be about blogging for family history. Period.

And I did tell him that, this morning, as I answered the questions for Sally’s spotlight, I looked back through a month’s worth of posts, trying to come up with a “short, funny story” about Sally. I finally wrote about the time that we took Sally to the zoo in Cairo and paid the zookeepers (it was their idea) to let the giraffe eat food off Sally’s head.

This was the first time I ever remember looking at old posts on my blog and being happy with what I saw. I am relieved to say I’m proud of what has come from my fingers. I own it, and for now I’m not ashamed that my life and concerns are rather narrow.

That life and those concerns are much different than I had envisioned, and, yet, that doesn’t make them wrong (duh). I’ve mostly stopped apologizing to others for not being smart or coordinated enough to do it all (whatever it “all” is). Now I just need to stop apologizing to my eighteen year-old self. What did she know anyway?

Jane

(If you have any thoughts on blogging for family history purposes, I’d appreciate hearing them before Wednesday night.)

These photographs, of Dick helping Spot with her tights and me making princess pancakes, will accompany an article I was interviewed for on Friday. Melissa, an AP freelancer, is writing a response to Parenting magazine’s Mad at Dad article. She wanted my take on the marital sharing of child care and household chores, and whether or not I feel the same anger that many women feel when their husbands do not seem to spend the same amount of mental energy or physical effort on everything it takes to keep a family and house running smoothly.

Do I feel the rage? Why yes, I do. Quite often, in fact, thank you so much for asking.

But what’s more interesting to me is that Melissa found me, two time zones away, through my blog. Not because my blog is big (it’s not) or famous (ditto) (in fact I’m pretty sure I won’t even be getting any free blog publicity out of this), but because I’ve written about Man Laundry.

You see, if you google “man laundry” (and who doesn’t google the odd “man laundry” on a slow Thursday evening?), my post is the third result.

So my credibility stems not from writing such a cool blog (hey, it’s my site, I can print my own delusions), but from the fact that when I watch that movie The Break-Up, and there’s that scene where Jennifer Aniston’s character says “I want you to want to do the dishes,” and Vince Vaughn’s character says (with unforgivably-impeccable logic) “Why would I want to do dishes?” . . .  I cry.

All any woman wants is a man who wants to do the dishes.

Or who’ll at least feel guilty when they sit smirking in the sink.

But I digress. When I was thinking about the interview, I got on Twitter just before midnight Thursday to see if other women identify with the Mad at Dad phenomenon.  Kirsty in Australia and Natasha in Canada and Beth and Stacey in Texas had thoughts.

And sure, I talked about this with Chrysanthemum while the kids decorated sugar cookies, and with Dick while we ate dinner, but . . . the power of blogging, that the writing of a little personal blog in a small corner of the internet on my bare-bones Costco laptop in a kitchen in Seagull Fountain Utah means that a lady in Ohio calls me up to talk about how hard it is to negotiate motherhood and marriage.

And people I’d never have met in real life, on the other side of the world, respond almost-immediately when I type at them in the middle of the night.

How FREAKIN’ cool is that?

Not to mention other sweet people who comment or email and make me feel so ding-dang chirpy I could break into song in a flowery meadow right next to the Mary Poppins penquins.

Motherhood (and perhaps especially, stay-at-home motherhood) can be so isolating. Our modern lives, where we move several times for work or family, can be so socially fragmented. I don’t want to be flippant or simplistic, but I’ve thought on more than one occasion that if only Andrea Yates had had a blogging-Twitter-Facebook-internet community, if only she’d been able to see how other mothers, similar-yet-different-enough, coped with the strains and pressure . . . maybe she would have figured out how to ask for help.

Being connected to you-all makes me a happier mother, is what I’m saying. It makes me a saner person, a healthier wife with more realistic expectations. Sometimes it’s frightening or disappointing or embarrassing, to expose my flaws and express my insecurities.

But it’s always worth it.

Thank you.

Jane

Blogging is similar to stay-at-home motherhood in some unfortunate ways. Stay-at-home motherhood, is, at times, unsatisfying because it doesn’t always seem like a real job. It’s the same with blogging. Which is why comments and ad revenue and bloggy friends to talk with and site traffic are important. (And why the lack of any one of these things can be very, very discouraging).

How Stay-at-home Motherhood and Blogging are Similar

1. No paycheck. Sure, that $50 a month I get from BlogHer is some of the sweetest money I have ever earned (a post in itself), but it doesn’t really compare to the money my husband brings home, and it’s less than he charges for even one hour of freelance work.

2. You’re never finished. In motherhood, you might count successes like when your kid includes the new kid at recess or when she reads Anne of Green Gables and loves it. Or when she participates in your religion’s rituals, but it’s a journey, with small, everyday challenges and small, everyday triumphs. Setbacks and progress are hardly linear. When do you know you’re patient enough, creative enough, wise enough, loving enough, to be a real mother? In blogging, unless you figure out some gimmick like Mom2My6Pack’s Ebay Pokemon story or you win a Bloggy award, how do you know when you’re a real blogger?

3. There’s no promotion. (Unless you count Grand”mother.”) Even if you do own your blog, even if you say: this level of writing I’m doing, and this amount of interaction with my readers, and this amount of ad revenue is good enough, there’s not a promotion. (That I know of; maybe there is, and it’s to the product placement purgatory that Dooce seems to have landed herself in; in which case I hope she’s getting paid A LOT).

4. You can be as serious as a heart attack or as casual as a Facebook friendship. You can dabble in your blog on weekends or you can set aside two hours every day of sacred writing time. You can network and StumbleUpon and guest post and carnivalize till your fingrs are stiff, or you can sit on your couch and watch Seinfeld reruns instead. With motherhood, you can play princess ponies and read seven Dr. Seuss books daily and plan crafts and grind your own wheat or you can sit on your couch and read Wait for What Will Come.

5. And worst (or best) of all, you can be purposeful one week, and a complete slacker the next.

6. Your sphere of influence is (relatively) small. It’s significant to the people within that sphere (especially your kids!), but sometimes that sphere seems small, when you think about all the big needs in the world.

7. You can do both in your pajamas.

Some bloggers will insist that comments, etc, are unimportant. It’s enough to know, they say, that a few people read, that they’re keeping in touch with family and friends, that they have a personal space to share their photos and their important thoughts and feelings.

Part of me admires (and envies) these bloggers, and I also have a sneaking suspicion that these are also the sort of people who feel more satisfied, on a day-to-day basis, with motherhood. People who are unlikely to look at themselves at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon and wonder, “WHAT am I doing with my life?”

Because of course they’re doing something wonderful. I’m doing something wonderful. I believe this. But I also, like Pinocchio, just want to be a real boy (or mom or blogger, you know, whichever).

So external validation is important. (And very little — one comment from a reader or one smile from a baby — can be enough.) In motherhood, a word of praise from a friend or husband or sister or mother(!) can drown out the whining voices. Calculating how much your efforts are worth, monetarily, as a home manager, etc can soothe the sting of being paycheck-less. In blogging, it’s okay to treat it like a job — to expect rewards from your work. To seek sponsors and twitter about yourself and (gasp) market yourself. It’s okay to be discouraged if you’re not seeing the sorts of results you’d like to see.

Of course, you might need to change your strategy or change your expectations or whatnot, because in both motherhood, and blogging (and writing in general), you actually don’t have total control over the outcome. Your blog may be fantastic but just not fashionable. Your mothering may be splendid, and your kids could still turn out to be like Eve’s. Oh, surgeons can’t guarantee a heart transplant, and lawyers can’t guarantee an acquittal, but somehow, to me, the vagaries of motherhood and blogging seem to be even greater. Doing a good job, a fantastic job, as a mother or a blogger is important, but in the end, it’s up to other people (your kids or your readers) to bring back a verdict.

Which is why the similarities between blogging and motherhood don’t stop there. In both, the way to increase job satisfaction is clear. Set concrete goals like no yelling or post (or write) every day. Be purposeful; read and talk with other people about how to do your very best work at both jobs. Focus on what you love about the job, and arrange your life so there are more of those moments — more of the quiet times when your kids are arranged on the other side of the kitchen island while you all cook or create together. Where you can look in each of their faces and engage in a common project. And no one is fighting, for once.

In blogging, I tried to circumvent the whole external validation thing by turning off comments. Because I don’t want to need anything outside myself. I want to be like those mothers, and those bloggers, who say OF COURSE I’M GOOD ENOUGH AND REAL ENOUGH, no matter what the response.

But it didn’t work. Oh, it worked as a plea for reassurance, which I hadn’t planned on. It worked to make me realize that many people read the blog (including the comments) even if they rarely comment themselves. The worst thing (for my no-comment experiment) was that, as I thought of the next few posts I wanted to write, I started thinking about how I couldn’t wait to see what this person or that person had to say. I was sure you’d have an opinion on what’s the best kind of compliment and the progress of my no-yelling resolution.

Because the give and take, the conversation, (and the writing) are what I like best about blogging.

And because there’s one other big way that motherhood and blogging aren’t your typical job:

8. You keep doing it no matter what, because you love it.

Jane

I’m entering Mabel’s Label’s BlogHer 09 contest.

She says “I’d rather have you not see me and think good things about me than have you see me and hate me. Because I can’t afford to have you hate me, Keith. The only things I care about in this life are me, my drums, and you.”

This morning I woke up to zero comments on my Bead Snowflake post. Turning on your computer to zero comments is like standing in front of a bemused Simon Cowell. He shakes his head sadly: “You can’t be serious. That was bloody awful.”

I’ve been thinking for some time about turning off comments. I talked to Marie about it back in September, as a way to make sure that you’re blogging for the “right” reasons, and she pointed out that turning off comments can seem snobbish, as if you don’t care what anyone else has to say.

Well, the truth is, I care too much. Oh, not about what others think, exactly. In fact, I like nothing more than a well-thought-out disagreement. (See the great comments on Bloggy Prostitution or Kids and Cars).

But the comments, or lack thereof. It matters too much, and I hate that it affects how I feel about myself AT ALL. Even encouraging comments mean too much.

Every time I see her, my grandma tells me how much she enjoys my blog. I’m so “unexpected,” she says. (I think Grandma is a bit sheltered, in a good way).

If I can make Grandma happy, what care I for sponsors and trackbacks and followers?

Still. My visceral response to zero comments (or, on days when NOTHING would appease the insatiable comment monster, NOT ENOUGH comments): It’s something I can stomach no longer.

(I’ve tried less drastic remedies. Reaffirmation mantras like “I am a worthwhile human being whether people comment or not” and the Neti Pot. (Not really on the mantras and the Neti Pot was great for my sinuses.) But I did set up a protocol in GMAIL where my comment notification emails bypass my inbox and get quarantined in the WAM Comment folder. Didn’t help. Much. Except I can now check my email without facing my neuroses. Most of the time. And ol’ Sitemeter? We parted ways months ago.)

I’d rather have you not read me and not comment than have you read me and not comment. Or something like that. Really I’d love it if you read and commented and came to sponge my fevered brow while the dinner made itself and the dishwasher deigned to actually CLEANSE THE DISHES when I push Start.

This may be a short experiment; who knows? Blogging is great for the freedom to make a complete idiot of yourself and then make as many corrections as necessary in trying to get it right. I do know that one of my favorite things about NaBloPoMo was that I was too busy thinking about what to write that day to worry if “enough” people liked what I’d written the day before.

As always, I welcome your emails (whataboutmom@gmail.com), and I cannot thank each of you enough for the kind words you’ve sent my way. I’m just afraid that if I end up in a mental institution for Acute Comment Anxiety, I might not get the serious drugs such a condition would require.

Would the doctor even believe that Acute Comment Anxiety exists?

If she’s also a blogger, I’m willing to bet she would.

Jane

But some people really sold out. I mean, really.

If you visit ChristmasWrapped.com, you might think you’ve stumbled on a helpful group blog by some of the biggest mommy bloggers out there — Dooce, PioneerWoman, MightyMaggie, etc.

Here, you might think, I can crack the code of what cool gifts and gadgets are on the wishlists at the big kids’ table.

But as you look around a little more, you might recognize the Target logo and the “Isaac Mizrahi for Target” brand, or that every outlink in every post is to a product page on Target’s website.

Hmmmm.

So you click on the About this Site page and you realize, not from the completely un-iformative and actually diversionary text, but from the FM logo, that these are all bloggers in the Federated Media stable, bloggers who earn their living by running FM ads on their personal sites, and that ChristmasWrapped.com is merely a platform for Target to advertise with Federated Media.

What are supposed to look like spontaneous reviews of (AWESOME! Jon loves this! MarlboroMan wants that!) products are actually barely modified regurgitations of the promotional material provided by Target’s marketing department.

It’s tacky product placement taken to the nth degree.

And it would damage the credibility of the bloggers involved (because nowhere is there a disclaimer that the endorsements are in any way recompensed, which they are — just a bit of business-speak rubbish that says precisely nothing), except they are apparently so embarrassed about their participation in the project that they don’t refer to it on their own sites.

Perhaps because each, in her own way, makes her living on her blog by providing “honest,” “candid,” and “uncensored,” views of the world.

You go girl! Tell it like it is! Keep it real, baby!

How much is too much?

Or have we established that we are all prostitutes and are now just dickering over price?*

Jane

*Google has FAILED me. There’s some anecdote about Coolidge or Truman or some other dead president guy talking to a woman and her saying she’d sleep with him for a million dollars, but when he offers her 10 bucks, she says, indignantly, “Sir, I am not a prostitute” and he says, “Madam, we have already established that you are; now we are just dickering over price.”

And my dad is not answering his phone, and I know he knows what I’m talking about. Dad?

*Updated to add

I’m not saying sponsorship/advertising is bad. It’s just like getting paid to work. (In fact, it’s exactly like getting paid to work).

But that doesn’t mean that all sponsorship/advertising is done well. It might be difficult for sponsorship to be acknowledged, transparent ,and (editorially) as-least-influential-as-possible, but when we trust journalists or bloggers or doctors to be honest, then we expect the journalist to disclose her biases and the blogger her sponsors and the doctor her drug trial involvement. Transparency, while a much-maligned buzzword, is a very worthy goal.

BlogHer tells me, for example, that I can’t swear profusely or use Adult content on this site as part of my contractual agreement. This is chafing at times, but honestly, it’s more the thought that my grandma reads that keeps me on the straight-and-narrow.

Blogging is the easiest and most easily rewarding way to write that I know of. But it can still be discouraging or upsetting or maddening. In the end, I blog (despite not turning blog-famous) because I have something to say.

And also, apparently, to communicate with my husband. Dick writes at IdRatherBeWriting.com, and today he’s got a post up about how living with a mommy blogger is great training for a corporate blogger. He totally misrepresents me in places, but I’m reminded that I fell in love with his thoughts and writing even before his hot body.

If you started reading Seagull Fountain after reading Dick, I only ask that you keep in mind that, while Dick’s college GPA was .02 higher than mine, I smoked him on the ACT, GRE, and dishwashing championships.

Why do YOU blog? (Or not?)

Jane

Before we get to our tips, though, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank Shannon for bringing us together each week as we discuss which post we should link up, and whether Shannon will be tricky and early this week or tricky and late. (By early I mean 9:27 pm and by late I mean 9:35 pm MST; that Shannon is trick-y.)

Making Works-For-Me Wednesday Work For You

1. Write a short(!) post about a useful tip. You can try linking up a clever book review, but people read through the WFMW posts for actual tips that can make their lives better or easier or sweeter-smelling.

2. Link up at the very beginning or at the very end. Middle children will tell you that it’s easy to get lost in a crowd of clamoring voices.

3. Follow the Ding-Dang rules. This won’t actually help you get pageviews or comments, unless you subscribe to the idea of karma or the Golden Rule, but you’ll breathe easier knowing you didn’t sleep your way to fame and fortune. Honestly, nothing makes me wish I had a taser set on stun more than going to a reputable blog and seeing that they’ve stolen (yes, STOLEN) traffic from someone else’s blog without linking back to the carnival. (I’m not talking if you forget once or twice, or if you honestly didn’t realize there were rules, but . . . YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. That’s all I’m gonna say. For now.)

4. Choose your Mr. Linky caption wisely . . . Titles with words like “sex” in them do quite well. This can be a post about sex (Am I the Only One?) or a post about the importance of scheduling (The Unsexy Morning Routine). Sometimes it’s tricky, since the linky caption is supposed to be only four words long (see #3), but it’s usually doable.

I’m pretty sure that if someone followed all of these rules she would be blog-famous in approximately 47 weeks. But I gotta be honest. Number one is the hardest for me to do. I keep trying, though, because even if Works-for-me Wednesday doesn’t translate into instant bloggy stardom, I live in hope that my real life will be enriched and organized and enlightened by my sometimes-frantic searching for just one useful tip to share.

Jane