Do you suffer from Weird Beard?

I have never really been able to grow my facial hair out fully. In my 20s, if I shaved on Monday, I would not get 5 o’clock shadow until about noon on Thursday.  Later in my 30s, the stubble showed up sooner, but it was still like nothing, nothing, nothing, then boom: 5 o’clock shadow that looked like I hadn’t shaved in a week.

I never minded because I’m not a beard, mustache, or goatee person. I know younger guys in leadership roles try to grow their beards to look older (think NFL Quarterbacks) and some guys see facial hair as a symbol of manhood.  I never gave any fucks about that.  The only time it really mattered was one October I wanted to grow some facial hair to augment my Halloween costume: Qui-Gon Jinn.

During this lockdown, shelter in place, self-quarantine, whatever we’re calling it, I decided to see what happens if I let it grow out. I was already putting off shaving in order to keep my blade supply alive. So I decided to see if I could look like Tony Stark.

No luck on the Iron Man alter ego.  Naturally, I consulted the wisdom of my Facebook friends and the results were an even mixture of Yes, No and Do What Makes You Happy.  Some guys look great with facial hair, completely transforming their look.  I’m not really one of those guys.

I think it has taken me two weeks to get to just this point and I’m not really loving it.  It feels funny to have hair on my face and it’s kinda scratchy.  I turn 51 next week and to commemorate, I’m gonna shave it off.

 

Stay tuned.

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What I learned from my impromptu Facebook Diet

Recently I went on a Facebook Diet. I know there are a plethora of blog posts about people giving up Social Media.   Don’t click away… I’m gonna increase the amount of insight, and decrease the amount of self-aggrandizement.  The ratio will be close to perfect.

While the timing overlapped with Lent, it was not something this heathen officially gave up for the Catholic season. I just, more or less, made a conscious effort to limit my Facebook activities about this time. It helped that my day job was so busy that checking Facebook first thing in the morning wasn’t always an option. I don’t commute to work anymore but my mornings are spent getting moose and squirrel ready and off to daycare.  Therefore I no longer engage in my commuter ritual of burying my face in my phone and ignoring all the unwashed masses on the Blue Line.

I still checked FB regularly for the distractions. Working from home, Facebook is my way of keeping up with friends Life Achievements and a poor way of interacting with people on a virtual level. Admittedly it is also the source of the majority of my news.   I still maintain that FB can be an excellent archival tool to remember what you did x years ago and who you did it with.

But I didn’t post as many status updates as I have in the past. By the scientific method of making shit up, I’d say I posted only 10% of what I normally do. I still checked into places, posted pictures of my douche nugget cute kids and tagged friends where appropriate.  Also, I didn’t make it Facebook official by ironically announcing it on any social media platform.

What did I learn? The less you engage with FB, the less it engages with you. One of the few posts I did share during this diet was that one about “if you knew me in high school, ” I got a few comments but not nearly as many as some of my other posts if This Year in Facebook is to be believed.  That is even adjusting for all the people who have hidden or taken a break from me, and vice versa.

I don’t know much about the FB algorithm, other than it is evil and more regressive than the tax code, but it does seem to be based on interaction.

Facebook is a bit like high school in more ways than one. It mirrors my High School experience in that freshmen year we were all equals. Then the cliques formed and people factioned off. By senior year I had a handful of close friends and the rest were classmates that I use to know. On FB I have some friends who have never interacted with me and vice versa. SomedayI might purge them.  Or just leave them in the FB archive, a souvenir to prove to the world we were once friends.

 

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Reflections on my 10 year Facebook Anniversary

Facebook told me that it is our 10th anniversary. Apparently I signed up in June of 2008. That sound about right. I had come back from a trip to Europe and sent around my Prague Marathon story. Back then I did my blog posts and status updates the old fashion way: annoying emails that most people deleted without reading.

A friend wrote back, asking if I was on Facebook. I said no but would sign up as soon as I figured out what Facebook was. I figured it was something like MySpace and Friendster and whatever Microsoft was trying at the moment. I created an account and saw that I already had two friends, others who had invited me to join FB. One has since deleted her account.

Like the current commercial, I came for the friends, and stayed for the connections.  I saw Facebook as a place where people post photos of their grandchildren or their pets. They can post any mundane, fabulous, irrelevant, snarky, pointless, heartbreaking or remarkable thing they want to. It is what it is. Don’t overthink Facebook.

These days I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I enjoy seeing updates from friends near and far as they unlock life achievements or simply share an interesting item or anecdote of their day. And of course it helps me as a writer share my stories.  On the other hand, it is annoying to see otherwise intelligent friends share MEMEs that inadequately sum up or oversimplify an issue.

The thing is, your “Friends” have always been this way, you just didn’t realize it. Facebook just shined a light on it. You are likely friends with someone because you shared some time and space together not because you shared the same view of Roe v Wade.

My biggest pet peeve about FB, as with any technology, is that people feel that the way they use it is not only the right way, but the only way to use it.

Whose move is it?

Take the picture above.  What they are talking about isn’t really important.  What is important is that theoretically they are on the same side and want the same thing.  But Person_Who_Posted set their security settings so no one could share it.  Person_Who_Commented probably knows they could cut and paste but that is annoying and cumbersome.  They are perhaps, backhandedly, asking Person_Who_Posted to change security settings because it is easier to hit a button.   Does Person_Who_Posted not know they can change the settings on just the one post or do they have a very good but not obvious reason for not changing the settings?  Who should bend?

One of the Facebook Frustrations is the little realized fact that not everyone in your friends list sees everything you post and vice versa. If all your friends posted at 5pm and you logged in, you’d only see a snapshot of the postings. Part of it is technical but most of it is those lovely Facebook algorithms. Not to mention that what you see varies from device to device and web.

Remember the friend I mentioned above who asked me if I was on Facebook?  She never comments on any of my statuses, rarely wishes me a happy birthday and only reaches out when she needs something.  Still I haven’t unfriended her because….at least she’s not like many of my racist friends who I keep sound because I am fond of the time we spent together in a sleepy little backwater college town. 

It’s hard to predict what the future holds in store for Facebook but I think it’s safe to say Facebook is here to stay in one form or another.  Uncle Google tells me that tin or aluminum is an appropriate 10th anniversary gift.  I’d settle for peace and civility.

 

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Writer’s block comes in many forms

If you are a ChicagoNow fan or junkie, you probably have noticed a few changes around here.  Some good like the front page getting updated with new posts more often.  Some questionable like the Ask ChicagoNow posts.  ChicagoNow has always been a Hogwart’s for bloggers and our Dumbledoore left a few months ago (at least he wasn’t killed by the Defense Against the Dark Posts blogger).

They are definitely plotting their next move

At the same time, though unrelated, I have been in a slump since the start of the year. First off, my daytime paying job has been busy, stressful and more demanding than usual.

Second, I’m going through what I refer to as the Groundhog Day Phase with my kids.  Everyday it’s pretty much the same thing:  Fight with them to wake up in the morning, get them dressed and off to daycare.  Then scramble to get to work at a time that is in the ballpark of “Start Time”.   Hope that things are quiet enough that I can leave on time and meet my wife at daycare and bring the mini-tyrants home, feed them and fight with them to go to sleep at a decent time.  Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Finally, while I have from time to time thrown my opinion in on Worldy News Events, things happen so fast that by the time I form a useful opinion on something, many more talented people have already opined on it six different ways to Sunday.

The irony is that this is the best time to be blogging for ChicagoNow because a lot of bloggers aren’t publishing as much and most of the heavy hitters are invisible! Minor leagues like me would get more exposure than ever.

You know how everyone is writing their Jimmy Memorial Posts and recalling how they got their blog started? I had to beg for mine and it was only after CN changed its model and let anyone who wanted to blog (and stopped paying bloggers) blog that I got mine. [No disrespect to Dumbledore, I mean Jimmy, he has been nothing but supportive and helpful.]

Another cost cutting move that the Chicago Tribune made was to eliminate all the stipends for those few bloggers at ChicagoNow who were getting one. I was lucky enough to be one of them. I had a contractual agreement to earn $50.00 a month for my blog for the past several years.

Frankly I’m not surprised because I always knew the CN we know (Hogwart’s for bloggers) couldn’t last forever.  I suspect things are going to change even more and someday ChicagoNow might either go away or become irrelevant. I know blasphemy, right.  My advice is to CN Bloggers is to get all the posts you can out of your system and let whatever happens, happen.  Now to just follow my own advice.

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Blogiversary: 5 years at ChicagoNow

Five years ago this week I published my first post.  295 published posts later, the subject matter has obviously changed.  Whenever the anniversary of our first post comes along, bloggers like to write about it because it’s a clever way to make a post about me we sometimes just cannot think of anything else to write about.

I’m gonna share what I’ve learned either in one not too long post or many smaller posts, depending on how much unsolicited wisdom I feel like imparting.

I’m going to focus on blogging at ChicagoNow, though I’m sure a lot of this advice and experience would translate to other platforms.  We are lucky to have the ChicagoNow audience which is backfilled through the Tribune Ecosystem.  Enjoy it while it’s here because nothing lasts forever.

Cute pictures help too

Lesson Zero:  Do not say you just published a new blog!

When referring to a post that you just published, don’t say “I just published a new blog” or “New blog up at MyBlog”.  Unless you literally went from publishing your posts on Baby Sideburn to Mothers who Drink and Swear, It’s incorrect and just makes you look like a moron.

Lesson one: Don’t set yourself up to fail

One of the gimmicks bloggers fall pray to is the 30 days of blogging challenge or promising a series that is way too long.  Unless you already have half of that content ready to go, don’t make promises you cannot keep.  Life will get in the way.  You will lose steam.

Lesson Two: It doesn’t matter when you publish

The real anniversary of my first post is October 1.  But it doesn’t matter when I hit the publish button, within reason.  Obviously I don’t want to wait until November but the Blog Police won’t come after me if this doesn’t post until the middle of the month.  The thing to remember is that a published decent post is infinitely better than an unpublished perfect post.

Lesson Three:  Keep it brief though

I try to keep my posts between 300 and 600 words because society has the attention span of a litter of concussed kittens.  There are some of course where I have more to say but as I learned from my editor days, most articles can be trimmed by ten percent.  There are a handful of bloggers who can get away with excessive wordiness but I’m not usually one of them.

 

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Three bad luck moments that happened at the best time

I refer to this as the Crisis Of the Week, or COW for short. It may not be earth shattering or life threatening, but it generally consumes 80% of your attention. It may not even be an entire week’s length of time. I guess there could be other permutations as well such as:

• COD – Crisis of the Day
• COM – Crisis of the Month
• COY – Crisis of the Year

Lot’s of possibilities.

Then the thing passes. Finals come and go. The deadline arrives and then ends. The breakup occurs. Maybe things were a disaster or maybe they weren’t as bad as they seemed. Whatever happened, the next thing you know, there’s a new new thing on your radar to replace the thing that passed.

Recently my wife and I had three little COWs.  Note: some of these events occurred in the distant past but I only just now got around to publishing this post. 

First COW: my car battery died. My wife was going to pull the car out of the garage into the drive way so we could put spare child car seats in it. But the battery was dead.

Silver lining: we discovered the problem on Sunday of Labor Day weekend instead of Tuesday as I was heading to work.

Second COW: Our not quite 1 year old twins developed hand, foot and mouth disease (I like to say Hoof and Mouth disease for humans). This meant we had to keep them home from daycare — which we still have to pay for!

Silver lining: This happened the Tuesday after Labor Day and we were going out of town the following Friday, which means we only had to scramble for three days instead of a typical week of five.

Third COW: I paid our Home Depot bill twice! This is because I schedule the payment from the Home Depot account and it withdraw from my account, then I also paid it directly from our Joint account.

Silver lining: While $200 is nothing to sneeze at, we will survive being down $200 this month. We will likely buy something else at Home Depot and it will cancel out or eventually HD will send us a check because they are designed to float a balance for all eternity.

The takeaways from this are: 1) it’s never as bad as you think, and 2) while at the time these events occurred, they seemed catastrophic, I can guarantee neither I or my wife even remember how stressful those events were, because they have long since been replaced by other COWs and then more COWs along with a few CODs, COMs and even a COY for good measure.

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What to do with your laptop when you need to go to the bathroom at a coffee shop

A lot of people, writers especially, like to work at a coffee shop instead of a home office or den. I’m not sure what the exact appeal is.  Maybe writers think they are emulating Hemingway or they enjoy the convenience of being able to order food and drink without having to stop working.  Maybe it’s the same reason people go to a bar instead of drinking at home. You want the potential of company without the obligation of company.

Whatever the reason, the results are the same. You score a seat, perhaps on the comfiest chair, the one nearest the power outlet. You get your laptop set up and are ready to write. Suddenly your bladder decides to chime in. What do you do with your laptop and other stuff when you have to answer Nature’s Call?

Photo Credit: Citrixonline

We carefully and thoroughly deliberated this subject in the Super Secret ChicagoNow Bloggers Only Facebook Group and came up with a variety of options.

• You can take your laptop with you to the bathroom.
• You can leave it and hope for the best.
• You can ask someone to keep an eye on it for you.
• Or you can hold your bladder as long as possible.

Each solution has its ups and downs.

Nina of Youknowneen opts for the Leaving It There and Hoping for the Best strategy.  This is playing the odds, which are probably in your favor until they aren’t.  Most people at the coffee shop are off in their own world and if they did notice you getting up to go to the washroom, their thought process would be: oh that seat is available.  oh wait, she left her stuff.  back to Facebook.

Marie Larsen of There’s a Bug in My Coffee does not like this solution.  Her husband is a cop and 20+ years his tales from the beat has influenced her outlook to not trust leaving it there.  However, taking your laptop to the bathroom means exposing it to all the bathroom cooties as some of our more Germophopic bloggers pointed out.

Asking someone to keep an eye on it for you may or may not be effective.  Brett Baker of Dry It In The Water has a strategy that is right out of the Poison scene from Princess Bride.  “ I thought about asking the people at the next table to keep an eye on it, but then I thought, What if they’re the thieves? Then I thought about asking two different sets of people to watch it, just so they could stop each other. And if they conspired they’d have to fight about how to divide up the spoils. Obviously, I’ve put way too much thought into this.”

You could just wait it out and see how long you can hold it.  Unless you were planning to spend all day in the coffee shop (who can do that?) eventually you were gonna finish up and go home.  Pack up, hit the bathroom on the way out and all is good.  Unless you have an accident.  Hopefully there’s a clothing store or laundromat near by.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy this post.  Next time another group of ChicagoNow bloggers will Overthink parking lots: should you park closer or farther from the door.

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The First Rule of Write Club: We don’t talk about not posting

Here at ChicagoNow we often get together in our Virtual Club House and talk about blogging challenges.  We give each other advice, support and suggestions for navigating the blogosphere.  That is before things devolve into a virtual pillow fight and soft core porn montage.

A couple of my fellow bloggers have come clean this week and acknowledged that they haven’t posted in a while.  Our Fearless Leader suggests not to draw attention to the fact that you may not have published a post in a while.  He’s usually right but was wrong once a few years ago so he’s due.

This is my one new subscriber! (Photo Curtesy of Debra Paulson)

Alas, I’m in the same boat.  Like everyone else my excuses are a mental cocktail of Lack of Energy, Low Motivation and Life Getting in the Way.  I’ve been a SAHD for the last few months and while that should have provided a boatload of material, it’s really hard to write with twin toddlers nipping at your feet, wanting to be held ALL THE TIME.

When I do get the kids down for nap, I have at most two hours to do anything that cannot be done with small children underfoot like shovel snow or operate heavy machinery.  Sometimes I even take a nap because Moose or Squirrel decided not to sleep through the night.  Some days I’m lucky to brush my teeth before noon.  A shower is a real treat (did I type that out loud?)  And after the kids are put down for the night?  My energy levels are lower than IQs at a Kardashian Reunion.

Blogging is a vicious cycle because you have to write consistently to build an audience but without any interaction it’s hard to motivate yourself to write to an invisible audience.  I’ve written 10 posts this year which isn’t bad for the 14th week of 2016 but instead of being consistent, those posts were in clumps.  I wrote about the cool things we have at CN to inspire bloggers but it’s hard to win best post or gallery if you don’t past.  Darn those draconian rules!

Facebook also does a fucktacular job of showing you what your friends are up to and when I see them liking a faceless Corporate Entities’ FB page, but not mine, I think WTF.

Youknowneen suggests it’s a honest case of “plain forgetting or maybe a ‘oh yeah, I need to like that page,’ and then never getting to it. ”

 

I wish I had her golden attitude.  I also hope my Writing Muse comes back.  But more importantly, I hope I can get my kids back in daycare soon.

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Marathon training and blogging tip: be honest with yourself

Detroit Marathon 2012

When I was a Group Leader for CARA, every summer we’d have a crop of newbies who were training for the Chicago Marathon for the first time.  Most of them usually said the same thing, that they just wanted to finish the race.

18 weeks later they’d run the marathon and they would all finish the race.  But there would inevitably always be one or two runners who were a little disappointed, sad even. I’d ask them what was wrong and the response was usually something along the lines of:

“Well I really wanted to finish with a better time.”  Or “I was hoping to qualify for Boston!”

Well the problem is you were not honest with me, or yourself.  That’s a different type of training and it involves more than just following a mileage schedule.  It takes mental toughness and setting reasonable expectations.  If your top speed is a 10:30 mm you are not going to break 4 hours in the marathon without some major help. On the other hand, if you are a 9 – 9:30 mm runner and you want to break 4 hours, it can be done. It might involve speed work, cross training and even diet.  But it can be done.

I can’t 100% guarantee you will achieve your goal but I can help you improve your chances as long as you are honest with yourself about what you want to accomplish.

As as long as we are being honest, I’d like to share that I definitely was one of those runners who always wanted to finish with a better time than my last marathon. The difference is, I certainly never kept that to myself.   And I tried so hard to Boston Qualify that I ruined my knees running too many back-t0-back marathons.

It’s a costly lesson but I learned from it and am applying what I learned to blogging.  A lot of bloggers claim they just want to write their thoughts and thinky bits and don’t give a crap about readership or page traffic. But the truth is they really really do want readers and pageviews and Algonquin Round Table discussions in the comment section.  Some dream of  being a blogger with an audience of Baby Sideburns, Scary Mommy or even Dooce, and that doesn’t come easy.

When I first started blogging, my blog was just another boring online web journal.  But then I read other blogs and thought: why can’t I do that?  Well, it’s not as easy as it looks.  Truthfully, my talent level isn’t on par with the big guns of the blogosphere and honestly, I don’t have the bandwidth to go there.  Instead I’m using the blog writing as training for writing a book.  I’m hoping that by posting in this space often enough, I will get enough practice honing my writing skills to actually pen a book someday.   Hopefully my readers will help me reach my goals by providing encouragement and feedback every step of the way.
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Small rewards help ChicagoNow bloggers fight Blogger Burnout

In my almost three years of blogging at ChicagoNow, I’ve seen bloggers come and go for a variety of reasons.  Some certainly move on to bigger and better things.  But others fade away  because…blogging is hard.  The Typepad, WordPress and Blogger.com Universe is littered with hundreds of thousands of abandoned blogs by people who have just given up.   Most of the giving up is  Because blogging is hard work.  I suspect a significant factor is the lack of audience interaction.  It can be frustrating when you feel like no one is reading your posts.

No, this isn’t one of those clichéd post about taking a sabbatical that almost every blogger spits out at one time or another.  Usually when they haven’t written published anything in a while.  I intend to vent my spleen here until the ChicagoNow Powers-That-Be™ pry my blog from my cold but properly manicured fingers.  That said, it isn’t as easy as it looks to hammer out a post after post, and publish consistently enough to keep an audience enticed and entertained.

That’s because Blogging is hard, especially at the professional level.  Yes we are professionals even if we don’t get paid in anything besides likes, shares and warm fuzzies. [Maybe I should refer to it as Commercial Blogging.]

The thing is, every now and again you need some type of connection in the form of feedback (hopefully positive).  At ChicagoNow we are lucky to have the ChicagoNow audience which is backfilled through the Tribune Ecosystem.  We also have a few built-in “warm fuzzies” that help mitigate the loneliness of blogging.

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