These are not The Best Blogs or The Best Writing Blogs or even a very comprehensive glimpse into my psyche. I’m a wee little country mouse in this big new blogosphere, and these are just blogs that I happen to have come across in my wanderings which caught my interest enough to keep me coming back for more.
I know you all have blogs you can’t live without. Bring on the barrage of suggestions!
Career advice, especially about work in the new millennium. Also a lot about her own crazy career, her kids, and her sex life. I’m a little addicted to this blog right now, but I feel okay about it because so are 30,000 other people. read more…
Type “empathy” into your search engine these days and many of the top results will surely relate to judicial appointments.
President Obama has been excoriated by the right for expressing his preference for empathetic judges. Even the left has been wary of wholly embracing the term in this context.
Here is the definition of empathy.
empathy
Noun
the ability to sense and understand someone else’s feelings as if they were one’s own [Greek, empatheia-- affection, passion]
Collins Essential English Dictionary 2nd Edition 2006 © HarperCollins Publishers 2004, 2006
How can this be such a terrible quality for a judge to possess?
I am sorry to report that I spent some of this lovely summer weekend stewing about a trivial and poorly delivered piece of feedback. I discovered it during a quick visit to my work email account on Saturday and couldn’t quite get it out of my head. (Maybe the lesson here is actually: stay off your work email on weekends.)
Back in college I was an outdoor education instructor–rock-climbing and camping and such. Outdoor educators are a singularly warm, nurturing and process-oriented bunch, and they taught me several important lessons about feedback that I have carried with me.
Upon reflection, these principles are applicable in other arenas too. read more…
I like chocolate and Cheetos as much as the next gal, but when things get tough my deepest hankerings are not for food, but for books. Not challenging books, or even new books, but tattered old friends that have been with me so long that the spines have turned yellow and the pages have gone soft.
It’s perfectly respectable to re-read things. When digesting dense literary texts, it is mandatory. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I do is much more akin to the comforting ritual of the young child, asking to hear the same story again and again…and again. read more…
I have recently been reminded that Dads won’t be around forever. Take the time to appreciate yours now. Do stuff with him, even if you’re too busy. Go visit him, even if you don’t have the money to travel. Have your kids early, so his grandchildren will know him in his prime. And get your shit together so he can see what becomes of you and your life. But if you don’t have your shit together, share that with him too, because he’ll understand, and maybe he’ll have something smart to say, and no matter how much of a mess you are, he’ll love you anyway. That’s what Dads are for.
Happy Father’s Day.
Several of my friends have brand-new babies, and visiting them has reminded me that parenthood is hard. Okay, I have a toddler, so this is not something I’m really liable to forget. But seeing that wild-eyed look of the first few weeks does bring back memories.
I fear that I may call down the furies by putting this in print, but in the past several months our family life has reached a manageable and apparently stable level of chaos. This shift from crisis to normalcy coincided with two important milestones: weaning and a reliably decent night’s sleep. But I credit it primarily to garlic powder.
Also frozen vegetables, pre-sliced deli meat, paper towels, disposable diapers, and a hundred other mundane shortcuts. This is not an infomercial for convenience products. It is an admission that, for the first time, I’m really learning that isn’t possible to do everything well. Balance is a nice word, but the reality is not so pretty. I think what it comes down to is deciding what you really care about, and giving up on everything else. read more…
I’m pretty sure that the only people following this site right now are my nearest and dearest. And I know you guys. You are not the most avid and worldly consumers of blogs.
So I want to let you know about a very cool tool that may be new to you. See that little orange button in the top right corner of the screen? Right next to “Get the Tinkering RSS Feed”? If you click on it you will have all kinds of options for seeing new content on this blog without having to remember to visit this site.
It will come to you via a news reader–a tool that aggregates web info that you want to track and organizes it for you. Google has one. There are lots of other options too. Watch this short and handy video about RSS to learn how readers work.
Subscribing to this blog with a reader is good for you, because it’s one less thing to remember, and you won’t risk missing the best post ever. And it’s good for me, because you’re much more likely to be a regular reader if all my scintillating new posts automatically show up in front of you.
Thanks for following, and happy reading!
Good writing matters. The world is full of very crappy writing, which is bad news for writers because humans naturally and unconsciously imitate that which surrounds us. (This tendency has broad and interesting implications in many areas of life such as finance and fitness, but we’re talking writing here.) The abundance of lousy writing in the world means that we all spend our days sloshing around in sloppy, jargony, bureaucratic nonsense. And it rubs off. I’ve had some very dark moments re-reading emails and reports that I dashed off in a hurry.
There are three ways to combat the insidious effects of crappy-writing-exposure.
- Surround yourself with great writing. This doesn’t mean you have to spend all your time reading Shakespeare or James Joyce. (Though maintaining a passing acquaintance with literature is not a bad idea.) Read what you love–great writing can be found in many quarters. If you’re like me, you’re tuned into language and instinctively know the difference between good and bad. Don’t waste your time with mediocre words. Immerse yourself in powerful, passionate prose and hope that it will leave its mark on you. read more…
I know what you’re thinking, but this is a real and frustrating problem in my life. My job–the one I drive to an office and wear makeup for–is to persuade people to change a particular set of behaviors. One of the ways we try to do this is by spending money on advertising–radio, TV, newspapers, billboards, online banner ads, and the like–that will reach our target audience. Every year I sit down with some coworkers and decide where we will spend our advertising budget. And every year I am clueless.
We’ve done our homework. We know our audience–who they are, what they respond to, what media they use. We can make some pretty good guesses about where we should put our money. But I want to know how we’ll know if it worked. read more…
You may have correctly gathered that freelance writing doesn’t pay my bills. I have a day job. I like my day job. This blog will focus on my writer-identity and I have a hunch that it may stray into the realm of “I wonder what an optimally fulfilling career would look like.”
My paranoid side can spy my boss–and all of my potential future bosses–reading over my shoulder here, so I would like to state for the record that I am happily employed, I work hard at my job, and have no plans to leave it. Here are a few things I enjoy about it. read more…