• Meeting my new nephew
• Traveling to New York City
• Being a bridesmaid in a steampunk wedding
• Working on the Side Project™
• Overindulging on McDonald’s Happy Meals (seriously, within a week of the last blog post, they started offering My Little Pony toys)
• Trying to drop down my search engine rank for the phrase “My Little Pony Porn” (crap, it just went up again)
• Inching ever closer to death (aka turning 30)
• Replaying Kingdom Hearts

…which leads to a tolerable transition to the meat of this post. A year ago the marketing team decided we wanted to write an article about video games for our monthly e-magazine. As the gamer in our small team, I wanted to make sure that gaming was presented fairly. This then led to not just one article, but three rather hefty ones dealing in-depth with the risks and rewards. In general, I think I left the articles in an empowering place for parents – it’s about judging each title individually, not just being all like, “Video Games Are Teh Evil!”

And with that said, it’s time for me to post the links to these articles. After all, Donald and Goofy are waiting for me so we can go rid Hollow Bastion of the Heartless.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3 

One of the coolest things about where I work is the mission. We’re talking truly life-transforming and belief-shaping. Pornography is the easiest example. Before I started at my job, I found it morally objectionable but was personally ambivalent for non-Christians. (This is my default stance on many issues: I may find a behavior objectionable, but I’m not going to force someone who doesn’t share the basic tenants of my faith to live under my moral code.) Now, almost two years later, my opinions on porn are much more closely aligned with my opinions on drugs. In short: “NOOO DON’T DO IT YOU’RE RUINING YOUR BRAIN YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO HAVE A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP STOP WATCHING IT NAOW!” Seriously. There’s a ton of science behind why it’s just about one of the worst things you can do to yourself sexually.

*climbs off soapbox*

So the point of that whole tirade is really to say that I get to dig into a lot of really fascinating issues regarding the brain and social trends. For example, 9 months ago or so I wrote an article about advertising. Fun fact: A lot of advertising standards changed in 1983. I was one year old. So I’m a member of a generation raised under Pavlovian advertising conditions. Advertisers got their hooks into me (us) at a young age and built brand loyalty into us before we even knew what it was.

See also: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. If you know me at all, you know I have a great affection for this show. In fact, it’s one of only two shows I watch (the other is NBC’s Community, which totally deserves its own blog post because it is Just. That. Awesome.)

Anyway. My Little Pony. I have fond memories of the old show. Some of my favorite toys were My Little Ponies. I have a traumatic memory of giving away my favorite My Little Pony ever because I had a misguided concept of sacrifice when I was 8. (By the way, if anyone ever wants to give me a vintage Glory My Little Pony, you’d be my hero for, like, ever.)

And now, as an almost-30 adult, I still watch My Little Pony and buy the toys for myself my niece myself and my niece. And next time McDonald’s offers them as a Happy Meal toy, I am totally going to buy a bajillion Happy Meals. (Also, a hamburger happy meal with Diet Coke is only 13 points on Weight Watchers, so it’s sort of healthy. And cheaper. And comes with a toy.)

Again, I degress. My point is this: A 29-year-old single woman should not be going out of her way to watch a show for 7-year-olds. Yet here I am. Why? Because, in part, advertisers got their hooks on me, saying if you like this cool product you should give us all of your monies forever in order to buy derivative products forevarz. (The fact that current-gen My Little Pony toys are kind of ugly has saved me a ton of money. No joke.)

Is it fair to blame advertisers for my personal desire to own every cool fan-made My Little Pony or Community t-shirt ever created? No and yes. There’s personal responsibility, certainly. On the other hand, my admittedly limited research leads me to the conclusion that there’s something to be said for the whole idea that kids these days have a horrible sense of entitlement. We’re the boomerang generation; we stay with Mom and Dad well after the age our parents would have married and had kids; we waste our lives playing video games and buying toys and stupid t-shirts. And advertisers are at least partially to blame in a very Pavlovian sense.

Without further ado, here’s the article that I wrote for the June 2011 issue of Pure Minds Online.

Sold for Life: How Advertisers Influence Children, and What You Can Do About It

You’ve no doubt seen the kid in the grocery store, throwing a temper tantrum because his parents wouldn’t buy him the new toy or candy he wanted. Maybe you’ve even been that parent, and you know the sting of the dirty looks for not giving up and buying your child the treat, just to get him to calm down.

Or maybe you know a boy whose love for Spider-Man extends so far that his bedroom is decorated solely in that theme, and he’ll only eat Spider-Man mac and cheese because it “tastes better.”

Perhaps you’ve even seen a group of 5-year-old girls celebrating a birthday with pedicures at a salon.

The common thread to these is not bad parenting, as some people may be quick to assume. The common thread is advertising. Marketers are doing everything in their power to influence your purchases through your children.

Read the rest of the article…

I can’t control the holiday’s existence – no matter how much people rant about how commercial it is, it’s not going away. However, I can control my attitude. So the last two years, I’ve been trying to shift myself mentally back into celebrating the holiday for what it’s supposed to be: a celebration of romantic love.

Therefore, I’ve come up with a few ways that singles can celebrate the holiday productively. Holidays shouldn’t be about pity-parties, after all.

1. Make a treat.

Like cookies! Who doesn’t like cookies? The cookies in the photo are my mother’s special mint cookies; they’re a pain to make, but worth it once a year. Tomorrow, I’m bringing them into work. It’s not much, but it makes the day a bit more special for everyone.

2. Throw a party.

No, not a pity party. Round up all the other singles you know and hang out. Eat lots of chocolate, play MASH, and find solidarity. I’m neither throwing nor attending such a party this year, but I know I’ve increasingly been amazed at how not alone in singleness I am. It’s one of the easiest traps to fall into – you attend *another* friend’s wedding and you think, that’ll be everybody else in the world but me. Honestly, though, if you’re ever the only single person you know, you probably need to make more friends. The more I’ve looked around and seen all the singles around me, the more at peace I’ve become with my own perpetual singleness.

3. Treat a married couple.

No, I’m not doing this one either, but only because I didn’t think of it until it’s too late. Here’s the thing: Valentine’s Day is supposed to be a celebration of love. But marriage is really freakin’ hard. So look around you and find an older couple that’s been married for a long time. Preferably, find one of those sweet little old person-type couples who have been married for 50 years or so. Really, the idea is that they are a couple whose marriage has withstood the test of time and is a positive example of what love actually means. Chances are, they weren’t planning on doing anything for Valentine’s day anyway. Buy them flowers and a gift certificate to a local restaurant, and be sure to say that you’re celebrating their love for each other.

Alternately, you could also treat a younger couple out to eat, or possibly babysit for them for free while they date. Will this give you an opening for bitterness? Perhaps. But remember, marriage is tough, and in a lot of ways your freedom as a single is better than their marriage.

Which brings me to my last point:

4. Remind yourself of how awesome it is to be single.

There are a couple of ways you can do this. You might want to read a book about it, for example. Or pick up and do something that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do if you were seeing someone, like experimenting with a weird food or planning out a mostly spontaneous roadtrip for next weekend. Relationships tie you down, so use Valentine’s Day as a reminder not to waste your freedom.

Those are just a few ideas I had floating around in my head. Any other suggestions?

Source image from NASA.

I’ve actually done quite a bit of writing over the last year, mostly for work. Since this website was at one point supposed to be a portfolio, I figure I’ll cross-post some of the pieces I’ve written for anyone who’s interested.

So! Since it went live on Monday, here are my thoughts on singleness via my workplace.

4 Reasons Accountability is Critical for Singles

“It is not good for man to be alone.”

If you’re at all familiar with this verse, you’re probably used to hearing it in the context of marriage. Perhaps you’ve heard it in a sermon or during a wedding ceremony.

And if you’re living in prolonged singleness, perhaps every time you hear it, you feel somewhat less-than-sufficient for not having somebody. Or maybe the opposite is true, and you have a sense of smug superiority, and you think to yourself, “Relationships are for other people. Me? I can do it all on my own.”

But this verse is about more than marriage. Nobody, not even those who choose singleness, is ever called to do life alone. Jesus always sent the disciples out in pairs, and Paul always traveled with companions. Or consider James 5:16, which says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed.”

In reality, we singles need to stick together. Those of us who live alone are especially vulnerable to temptation simply because there’s nobody there to walk in on us. So whether our temptations are to watch pornography or to waste our lives on TV or video games or to wallow in bitterness over our lack of relationships, accountability is critical for us to continue growing in Christ.

Read the rest…

This is my local grocery store. More to the point, this is the construction blocking my usual parking spot at my local grocery store.

I was…less than thrilled when I saw this, mostly because this work required a change in the flow of traffic, and also because there was no advanced warning. Most construction areas have some sort of sign, advertising the future site of some building or other. Nothing here, though, just signs telling you that all of a sudden the drive is one-way, and lots of fences and confusion. All this on a busy Sunday afternoon when the students are back in town. Needless to say, it was not the most enjoyable shopping trip I’ve ever had.

A friend called just after I finished unloading groceries. She’d had a bad week and, understandably, needed to decompress. (Among other, more personal things, she was forced to switch offices because hers had black mold.) And she asked me how a rather large personal project was going. (The answer? Stressful.)

And after she hung up the phone, I thought about the grocery shopping experience in conjunction with my friend’s and my stress, and thought: “Construction is irritating and inconvenient. But this means improvement follows. Sometimes the outcome is visible; sometimes it’s not. But it often means good things are coming.”

1. Visible Outcomes

Inconvenience is easiest to deal with when you know why it’s happening. For example, I’m usually patient with road construction, especially if it’s on a road I drive frequently. I can handle a few months of slower traffic if it means that a large patch of potholes are going away. Or Weight Watchers. I’ve been on it for a year now. It’s a pain to forego the candy or french fries, and I know I’ll always have to be careful about what I eat, but the positive goal of actually being a healthy weight for the first time since high school means I’m willing to keep at it, especially since I’ve already seen certain benefits.

My personal project falls in this camp. It requires a lot of hard work and eats up a lot of my free time, and there’s no guarantee of success, but if things work out it will be well worth the trouble.

(By the way, I’m not quite ready to talk about the personal project on public channels, but I’m willing to talk about it if you ask.)

2. Invisible Outcomes

It’s harder to deal with inconvenience (or worse) when you don’t know why it’s there. My friend’s office move falls into this category. My own office had its own set of stupid drama about a year ago. I’ve seen a depressing number of people lose jobs. My dad was (semi-voluntarily) unemployed for several months. Several friends have had rough pregnancies. At least one has had a miscarriage. My car has broken down more times than I can count. Some of these are worse than others, and I feel bad about lumping things like, say, my office drama and my friend’s miscarriage in the same category. “Inconvenience” is far too mild a word. But large or small, such things result in a (hopefully short-term) lifestyle alteration, often with no visible purpose.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I’m a firm believer that “All things work together for the good of those that love God.” For instance, at my workplace, we had constant upheaval for months. It seemed like just as we finally adapted from the previous change, some new chaos was introduced. But we finally shook things out, and honestly, all the turmoil truly did make the Marketing department, at least, a much better team than we had been. Or for my friend, the inconvenience of having to switch offices may result in better relationships with her new officemates. Or, in a rather dramatic example, my company’s president lost his wife and children in a horrible accident with a semi, and eventually used the settlement money from the trucking company to start the company. I quite possibly would not have a job had he not lost his family years ago, not to mention the fact that the service our president created has helped countless people overcome Internet pornography addictions.

This don’t make inconveniences, big or small, much easier to handle. But just about all inconveniences can be opportunities if you let them.

One of my workplace’s traditions is a Christmas decorating contest. We’re encouraged to go all out on decorations, and one day at lunch the executive team will wander through the office, freely accepting bribes. The winners receive things like free bagels for the department.

Here’s the thing about our Marketing department. We are a busy, jaded bunch who manage to squeeze in more stuff than we can probably technically handle. We’ve had a surprising number of bonding experiences and enjoy each other a lot, but we also don’t really know how to justify “fun” (e.g. “decorating”) when we really have about 20 things to do within the next 5 hours. Last year we pulled together a last-second haphazard Star Wars Christmas theme (complete with a tree topped with a cutout of the Death Star), but our judges being the wrong kind of nerds, we (deservedly) did not even remotely place. Last year’s winners were our Customer Service Representatives (they completely wrapped their desks or something); our User Experience department for creating an interactive event focused on the execs’ experience; and the Developers, for going with a “We’re Developers” theme and doing things like a Christmas tree made out of Mountain Dew cans.

So how would a marketing department compete with that?

A depressingly accurate artistic rendition of the Christmas Ball

Fast forward to this year. Our Project Manager came in carrying something the Internets tell me is called a “Kissing Ball.” This green garlandy thing had silver-painted bells and holly pinned to it and a loop for convenient hanging. It jingled when you moved it. It was also pretty dang ugly when hanging like that. On the other hand, it immediately garnered several unique reactions.

“It looks like intercontinental ballistic mistletoe.”

“It’s the Death Star masked in shrubbery!”

At some point in there, we started discussing what we would actually do for our Christmas decorations.

“You know what would be great?” our blogger said. “We should just leave it at this one decoration and do a full presentation on why the Christmas Ball is the ultimate decoration.”

From there, an idea was born. We started gathering reaction quotes from coworkers (“What do you think of our lovely decoration?” “It’s lovely.”) The blogger and I brainstormed some of the features of the Christmas Ball, which we fleshed out in a PowerPoint presentation. The Christmas Ball even invaded my dreams. I woke up at 4:30 last Thursday morning and couldn’t stop giggling because of the way the blogger was presenting it in my dream.

I then got up and created a landing page and lead nurturing campaign.

Oh yes. You see, we’re good little marketers after all the training we’ve had this year. We can spit out stats like none other and run successful presentations in our very dreams. We are marketing machines.

This landing page was followed by two more nights of insomnia (long story), the result of one of which was a brochure. The night before, the Project Manager had the awesome idea of buying some dollar store flashlights to shine on the Christmas Ball, and the day of the judging (12/20), she added the idea of doing a singalong to that great Christmas classic, “O Christmas Ball.”

And the presentation? You can see it for yourself. (The password is MarketingBall79.)

All in all, it was a success. We won third place (coffee and pastries), and we got to make fun of ourselves in the process. For what’s the fun in life if you can’t have a little madness every now and again?

So this post by danah boyd popped up in my RSS feed. Go read it – it’s short – but the gist is that a girl who is forbidden from using Facebook by her parents but uses it anyway has a therapist who (a) lets her use Facebook at her office and (b) actually talks about what she’s doing online.

Now, there are a few things to say about that. First, the girl should have obeyed her parents as long as she’s underage. I mean, it’s one of the 10 Commandments. Even if you don’t agree from the moral perspective, they still have years of experience (and theoretically wisdom) on the girl, and are looking out for her. Second, I don’t think the therapist should have allowed – and actively encouraged! – the girl’s disobedience, even in a controlled environment.

That being said, there’s a remarkable amount of good stuff to glean from such a short article:

1. Parents (probably) shouldn’t forbid their kids from using social networks. danah rightly points out that such parents “don’t understand that they’re pushing their kids to choose between social status and parental obedience.” This girl chose disobedience, which I suspect contributed strongly to her depression.Now, no parent will ever be perfect – my own, for example, in trying to teach me to make wise food decisions, tightly controlled what I ate, and thus made food a bigger deal in my life than it should have been, which partially led to my overindulging and current weight problems. (I think they did an excellent job in most other areas, but fully admit I’m biased.)Point being: prohibition, especially of things other people do commonly (whether it be keeping candy around the house or going on Facebook), may actually encourage disobedience.
2. Parents should talk to their kids about what they do online. The therapist is actually doing the parents’ job for them – “They have discussions around her photos and her friend’s status updates.” This is exactly what parenting is about (and what Covenant Eyes provides) – actually talking through decisions. “Is this photo appropriate for a profile pic? Why or why not?” “How much personal information should you share?” “What privacy settings do you have set up? How can we change those?”

The marketing professional in me says it’s now time to sell you on Covenant Eyes. However, since most of the people who I expect to read this aren’t parents (and since this is supposed to be my personal blog, not a corporate one), I’ll spare you the pitch and instead, close with danah’s final thought:

If you’re a parent, please think twice before you get all control-freak on your teen kids. They need space to engage with friends in a healthy manner. And regardless of how you grew up, that means the Internet today. Exclusion isn’t a solution.

In fact, the main reason I finally broke down to write this post is because it’s 4:00 AM, I have the kind of insomnia that’s curable only by sleeping aids or by solving my problems, and I don’t have my work laptop here to work on the new website.

(“Problem solving” insomnia is my most frequent form. I’ll wake up after 3-4 hours with a problem cycling through my head and be unable to sleep until it is solved. Given that we launch our new website on Monday, I don’t expect to sleep much between then and now.)

So: blogging.

My last blog post was posted in August, but set in June. Since then my life has felt like a series of catastrophes.

• My deadlines have been increasing deadlines at work. See also: new website launch scheduled for Monday.
• My car has been in and out of the repair shop all summer (I’m taking it in again on Friday, in fact). This culminated in a dead battery on Thursday night, followed immediately by a flat tire on Friday (a slow leak, fortunately). I think I’ll have put in around $1500 in repairs all told.
• Two good friends have moved out of state.
• My internet went out again for 3 weeks (not the ISP’s fault; just took me too much time to fix).

In all honesty, none of these things would have been unbearable had they been spread out. But when there’s a new crisis every week for three months straight, it gets to be a bit wearing.

Meanwhile, there were roses.

The thing about the pruning is this: it did indeed lead to rather beautiful roses all summer long. I think the new growth started within a day or two, in fact. They finally died, though, somewhere between mid-August and September. No growth of any sort; just dead buds.

And I thought: this is it for the season.

Between that time and now my car had its second batch of issues (the first batch took 3 mechanics to fix, mind). And the second of the two friends moved. And my modem had issues. And the deadlines increased.

I began to regret choosing roses as the symbol for my apartment.

Except: there is one thing still. And that is this: There is always new growth.

I walked outside about five minutes ago and took this photo. It’s not very good, but it shows something I noticed…yesterday, I think, or the day before.

It is Fall. The buds may not survive a cold snap. Or maintenance may come through and hack away again. Or something else unimaginable may happen to halt their growth.

But there is growth, and there will be growth again. And for now, this is enough.

The Last Rose faded to oblivion on a Wednesday. On Thursday, I read Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? while waiting for the technician to arrive. On Sunday my car died. Long story short, but I did not like the dealer where I took it, so I only had them fix one of the two things that went seriously wrong with it. (It since died again and I got the real problem fixed…another saga for another day, perhaps.)

These things are not why it took me so long to write this post.

A friend of mine loaned me a car while mine was in the shop. Driving back from work that Tuesday in late June, my mood still black, I parked and looked in the rear view mirror and nearly cried.

My rosebuds were gone. Maintenance had come through and hacked at the roses. Pruning, technically, but in the same way that tying your hair in a pony tail and chopping it off in one fell swoop is a haircut. One had even been starting to open. Only one bud was left, and for the sole reason that it happened to be lower than the rest.

I picked up my car the next morning, half-fixed, and contemplated Job on the drive. Job, who lost literally everything in a very brief period.

At 3:00 that afternoon, the managers pulled the entire company into the conference room to make an announcement.

Trying to explain this tactfully is why I’ve had a hard time writing this post.

I was only tangentially affected by the announcement, but (keeping this purposefully vague) the decision they announced was not one I – or many coworkers – wholeheartedly agreed with. And there was a distinct sense of loss associated with this decision. I trust them to have not made the decision lightly, and am still happy there. But there was discontent among the ranks for a time after the decision was announced, and for me personally, this moment marked the end of the Honeymoon period. Things are still good there, but (cough hack) the rose-colored glasses are off.

One of the nice things about where I work is that there is strong support for walking – a mile at 11:00 and 3:00 every day for those who want to go. At 3:45 that day many of us took off for our customary walk around the block. All of us were buzzing: “What? Why?”

All I could think about, though, were my roses, so roughly pruned the night before.

There’s a concept – resource allocation. Carefully distributing your resources. In business, this means investing more heavily in one project with higher impact than a low-impact project. My friend Lindsey studies a similar concept in house wrens. I’m probably summarizing her research badly, but basically wrens will invest more heavily in eggs of a certain shell color – a better quality – than others. Plants, I think, are the same way. Sure, you can let a plant go everywhere, but my very rudimentary understanding of, say, grapes on a vine is that grapes grow larger on pruned vines because there are fewer places for a plant to distribute resources than in an untended vine.

This is one of the reasons my rose bushes were pruned, though an actual gardener (as opposed to the apartment maintenance guy) would have probably left more of the buds for me. Pruning happens. Sometimes it is painful, but it is necessary for growth.

And that’s the third lesson of the rose bushes.

When I got home that night, still unhappy from the day, I turned to the last remaining bud.

“You had better be the most beautiful rose yet,” I told it.