I know, I know, I have only posted once this week. I had been doing so well before!
There are some good reasons, however.
First off, there’s always work. We’re entering the last third of the semester, and that’s when the action can really take off. Students are preparing for fall graduation, faculty are preparing their classes for spring, and applicants for the program are coming to visit, making sure that our school is the right decision for them.
This means I do lots and lots of talking at work, so by the time I get home, well, I am ready to be mute for awhile!
I have a hard time believing it myself.
The other reason things have been quiet around here is that I have been doing lots and lots of blog reading! You may have run across some of these posts yourself this week; in case you haven’t, I am going to tell you about some of the things I have paying attention to myself:
First off, I ran across this—Sarah, who is only a couple of hours down the highway from me (as if that makes me more important, really), blogged about being the recipient of hateful comments from other parents when her five year old son wanted desperately to dress like Daphne from Scooby Doo, along with his best friend, for Halloween. Since she blogged about it earlier this week, she’s now gone viral on Facebook, been on the Today show and interviewed by CNN, and had over 34,000 comments on her blog post.
The vast majority of those comments support her decision to allow her five year old dress up as he wanted without constraining him by outdated gender roles. My favorite thing in her post—the fact that a double standard exists. As she stated (and I paraphrase here) the little girl who dressed as Batman in her son’s preschool class did not garner gasps and looks form the other parents, and those girl’s parents were not admonished by other parents.
The next thing I ran across recently deals with copyright and internet plagiarism, again. This issue really seems to be coming to head right now. Of course, this is something we take very seriously at my work—we are a Journalism School, after all. That being said, there are other implications out there that are so damn interesting, it makes you want to study it—like the fact that all of the internets banded together against the magazine editor who ripped off the relatively unknown writer’s blog post (then refused to apologize to her when caught), and have continued their virulent campaign against the magazine for about 48 hours now. Oh, there’s also the fact that other organizations (like Food Network and Real Simple) are now investigating the magazine because they’re thinking that the editor ripped off more than one person’s work.
That magazine editor wouldn’t apologize to the individual she ripped off. I am betting that Food Network will ask for more than an apology. I am pretty sure I am not the only one making that bet.
The fun part about it is the fact that the editor’s name, and an excerpt of the nasty email she sent back to the plagiarized woman when that individual asked for an apology, is quickly becoming part of the culture’s nomenclature and both are trending hashtags on Twitter!
Finally, Babble recently released a list of the top 50 mom blogs! Oh, my! Lots of reading to do here, and I am nowhere near finished! I am happy to say that I had run across several of these blogs via word of mouth before the list came out, but the list does go to show you that mommy bloggers do count.
Let’s talk about that for a second—Mommy bloggers are making a difference! I started reading Damomma’s (look to the left) blog years and years ago, and at first, I thought it was just one or two ingenious women out there who had some writing experience (or at least, the knack for it) and wanted to ease the monotony and boredom of caring for children at home. Then I noticed a few more blogs, and I thought, “Hey! There might be something here!” Now, in the past couple of years, blogging has really become a way for individuals to interact with not only their readers, and people that they might not even know in real life, but our larger culture, our societal norms!
Or maybe I was just a bit slow on the uptake, and I’ve only noticed in the past couple of years. I’ll admit I am not the expert on such things.
The wonderful thing about this movement, to me (besides the fact that bloggers changing the way we deal with motherhood/parenthood, the way we interact with one another and support one another, and the fact that blogging now offers the ability to interact directly with society, tackle a personal issue, and end up on the Today show!) is the fact that it could end up being the way we end the divisiveness, the loneliness that haa become more pervasive in our lives today.
It used to be that your community accepted you as you were because they really had no other choice. They had to accept you and you had to accept them; frankly, you were stuck with one another. That sometimes led to problems, sure, but the increase in mobility (being able to move to the suburbs, and surround yourself with people who are exactly like you) created more problems than it solved. Now, we are witnessing the creation of a community dialogue that transcends our geographical location, our socio-economic status, and our lifestyle enclaves. This conversation could change the way we live.
I have no illusions of grandeur. I do not believe that I will soon become someone with a 500,000 readership per month or huge book deals waiting in the wings. I am still impressed; my own little corner of the interwebs is receiving about 500 individual readers per month, and that they come from dozens of countries. I never expected to move beyond my small handful of friends. My writing started as a way to document our katabasis; to make sense of what had occurred to us, at least in my own mind. Now people are reading it. That never ceases to amaze me.
I doubt that I will ever make it to the top 50 list, but I am part of the larger conversation, and that feels good.
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