I was one of two people from my middle school who went to my high school. So I didn’t have a clique or even any friends, really, when I got there. Eventually, I found my own little group, and three of those girls are still my very best friends, 20 years later. (Yikes.)
I am grateful to them for an endless list of things. One, especially, comes to mind as I sit here, as I have done for more than an hour, reading about SXSW and its aftermath of opinions. I love how just browsing my daily reads leads me to random ends of the internet and then oh look it’s midnight and I’ve had to pee for 2 hours! Sometimes when I’m having a great, lengthy conversation with a really talkative friend, I like to trace back into our conversation to see how we arrived at the current topic. It’s kind of like that. Anyway, I was checking out Katie’s site even though I know her in real life because I like to see what kicky words she’s thrown at us lately. And then I traveled through the web and now I am sitting here seething about advertising on blogs.
Okay, so the thing I am grateful to my best friends for is the fact that we were not cool. Our high school had its cliques, which were not exactly stereotypical because it is an all-girls’ Catholic high school (which comes with its own special stereotypes), but they were definitely cliques. I used to think that I was not part of one, but just because you’re not cool doesn’t make you above cliques, it just makes you an uncool clique. Can I write the word clique one more time?
Being not cool and not caring about it (well, not that much) we were free to do whatever we wanted, and whatever we thought was fun. I remember one weekend night we were all over at Kim’s house having a Halloween sleepover trying to freak each other out by blindfolding each other, putting our hands in spaghetti and saying it was worms. Meanwhile, the cool kids were in some parking lot somewhere, drinking wine coolers and Zima and losing their virginity way too early. Pretty much all of high school was like that for us. We decorated each other’s lockers on our birthdays and threw little parties at our lunch table. We wrote stupid poems and made elaborate costumes for our talent show skits and we stayed after school and had rolling chair races in the hallways. We swooned over cute boys on the bus ride home. We weren’t popular, so we didn’t attract enough attention for our embarrassing antics to actually embarrass us.
It wasn’t an isolated paradise – we definitely pined away for the cute boys and wished we would get invited to the parties that the cool kids threw and we hovered on the outskirts of being included. But we insulated each other from the rejection by and the dangers of that world. We had found lifelong friends in each other and I would not trade those days and nights filled with laughter for one Miller Genuine Draft hand-pumped for me by a sweet-smelling quarterback. That came later, in college.
I am grateful to my friends for helping to build my strong sense of self so that I was okay with not being in the in-crowd, and really, knowing that I actually WAS in the in-crowd. It is this history that I instantly recalled this evening when I was thinking to myself that man, there is such an in-crowd of bloggers out there and I am so not one of them. And then I thought about my little comments section and my faithful readers and I asked myself, would I want to be one of those popular bloggers? Sure, it would be cool to be famous and flown all over the world by companies who want to hear my opinion about blogging and throw piles of money into my lap so that I don’t have to refinance my house to stay at home with my child(ren) for another year. But I never thought of this hobby of mine as a moneymaker. It has saved my sanity and become a place for me to save my stories so that next month when I have lost all memory of what I did or thought about in March 2006 I can come here and say oh yeah, that night while I wrote that post I was freezing my bottom off and why didn’t I just get up out of my seat and turn up the heater?
So. You all know what I am talking about. I found the podcast for the keynote address that Heather Armstrong (Dooce) and Jason Kottke (another famous blogger of whom I actually have never heard and I checked out his site and um, there’s no babies or shoes mentioned so: boring!) gave at SXSW and I was listening to it and Heather described her typical day since she accepted ads on her site and her husband cares for her child while she works. She said she spends the entire afternoon and into the night “working.” Listen, I think it’s fine what she is doing. I am definitely jealous and would love the lifestyle, yes. But I have contended that ever since she started the ads on her site she has posted less and with less overall quality. Not that there’s not a few funny and well written posts, can I disclaimer every statement I make, please? But when I heard her say how many hours she puts into writing the content, I was amazed. If I had someone to watch over Kyle every day for hours, I would like to think that I would come up with more than that.
Another thing that was written about but I didn’t hear it from the horse’s mouth was that she is starting to regret the fact that she has her Nikon D70 camera listed on her website because her camera is malfunctioning and she has never received any money from Nikon for this free advertising they are getting on her site all these years. Does that mean that if she tells us she had a sip of Coke she expects product-placement money from Coke? We get enough of that so many other places (enough of the cheesy Ford videos, American Idol! And okay, we GET IT that Ice Age is a Fox movie and we’re watching Fox, but DO WE CARE what the 10 finalists think of that movie?) do we really need that on blogs, which were once the medium of the uncool clique?
I am not clever with the graphics, but if I was, I would post a picture of Kyle with a “your ad here” sign on his forehead. Because that’s what I think about that. And Fox, American Idol, Coke, Nikon, SXSW, Zima, and Miller – contact me to find out where to send your product placement fee.
I matter to the people I care about. It worked for me for 20 years in real life, and it’s working for me in my blog life, too. So thank you to those readers who have never met me but enjoy reading this website. I throw you a bone every now and then by posting a ridiculously cute picture of Kyle so you’ll keep coming back. And thanks again to my best friends. Only one of you reads this site. The other two are big slackers. But I love you anyway.
Amen!
However, perhaps what Dooce means by “working” is “working on revisions to book manuscript.” It’s not about the website anymore. She’s moving on to something bigger.
Check out Jon Armstrong’s recap of SXSW. The Nikon bit is at the bottom.
http://www.blurbomat.com/archives/2006/03/22/sxsw_the_bloody_recap
Wow, did we have a bug up our ass or what?
I love your blog (prejudiced) and I really like looking at the other ones, but girl, it takes HOURS to get into them and yes it’s midnight and I have to get up to go to work the next morning and where the hell did the time go when I should have been quilting!!!
Stay uncool- even though I don’t think that you are- because that is the blogger we love. I’ll be right there with you.
Anne, that post is what started me on my rampage.
Oh yeah still on the Dooce strike. Her and her slacker husband are a pain in the ass! I used to love what she had to say, now I think it is all about the money. And personally I could never stand her husband. His site is annoying as hell and always has been.
Rant Over!
When I read Blurbomat’s post on SXSW, I immediately thought of you and wondered if it would set you off!
Get post! I like the clique that’s not a clique of non-Dooce bloggers much better anyway!
Okay, you KNOW I love you, Kim… I saw your son come into this world, for crying out loud. And thanks for the mention! Kicky words, huh? I like it.
My opinion:
I started my blog because I wasn’t writing. At all. I needed an excuse to write more, to exercise the talent that I know that I have. And my blog has provided a great outlet for that. You started your blog to allow your friends and family to keep up with you and your husband and son. And that’s exactly what your blog does.
I like Heather’s blog because she’s a great writer. I don’t care about the advertisements. Hell, she’s getting paid to write, and she’s a good writer! Does that make me jealous? Yes, but not because she’s in some blog clique… it’s more because she is getting PAID to WRITE. I never understood why people bitched so much about the advertisements. I don’t even notice them, to tell you the truth. I go there to read her stuff and look at the picutres.
Yes, she is not as prolific as she once was, and that sucks. But you’re still reading. You’re still checking up on her, you know?
If you read on her FAQ, she gets something like a bagillion visitors a day. If I were getting that many visitors, you better be damn sure I’d advertise on my site. If I can make money, why not do it? Of course, I don’t know her, but to my understanding, her fame is a surprise to her… she didn’t set out to make a blog the whole world would read. It just happened. And in the meantime, she started making money off of it and you know what? That’s the American dream, yo.
The thing is, when people start to make money, their content usually suffers. Death Cab for Cutie, Dave Matthews Band. Suddenly there’s more people you have to impress, more people you have to make happy, and I think that’s hard to do for some people.
AND… think of it this way. Forget about it being a popularity contest. If Dan Brown can make as much money as he did off of that piece of trash The DaVinci Code, I’m glad that a great writer like Heather can make money too.
OH, and since I’m already making this comment like it’s my own blog, I have to say that I’m surprised Nikon doesn’t pay her. I thought they did. *Shrug* I’m genuinely surprised. They SHOULD pay her, because she HAS been giving them a ton of free advertising.
I know her blog didn’t start out like that. At first, it was just something she loved to do. But now, like musicians that play dinky little clubs for years and years and then finally start getting paid, she’s making money! I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I say, good for her.
That’s just my opinion.
And, by the way, I LOVE your blog, as I’ve told you, and check it more than dooce. You’ll always have a faithful reader in me.
Damn those two slackers!
Kim, I think we would’ve been great friends in High School. Anne would agree that we definitely could have used more people like you there! Everyone else was too concerned with their Zima and their hair.
Ooohh… you took her off of your blogroll!
Snappity snappity SNAP!!!
Ooh, that means there’s room for ME in the blogroll!
Charmingly,
Mom Underground
Anne = not on blogroll = glaring oversight. Management regrets the omission. Mom Underground does not need to pay product placement costs this month!
Great post! I, too, have issues with advertising on blogs. Though I must confess if I thought I could make more than 97 cents per month, I’d probably put it on my blog also. I started blogging when I spent the first few months home with my newborn daughter. And, much as I loved this time with her,felt very isolated and alone. And very grateful for other awesome mommy bloggers I’ve met along the way. You are very cool in my book (also one of the un-cool ones in high school!)
I followed a link from Kelli’s blog to this one, and I must say I LOVED this post. I think advertising in a blog is just unnecessary. We have enough of that everywhere else we go, can we at least document our thoughts without succumbing to the drive for money?
Thanks for the wonderful read, I’ll be back again to read more!
Have a great day!
Muse
You know, with 16 comments on this post maybe YOU should start advertising. he he he.
And Katie,your “snappity,snappity, snap” comment made me laugh out loud.
Thanks for that.
Its not the advertising on Dooce that bugs me. Its the tone of her posts, that she is the only person on earth to have ever had a child or loved her husband. All of lifes wisdom coming out of the mouth of a thirty-year-old is a little hard to swallow, despite the sweet coating of self-deprecation. The other thing that bugs me are the sycophantic comments. But I suspect its just people trying to get traffic to their own blogs, so I wont knock them too hard. Pretty good chance Ill get my name on there soon enough, though I can assure you that it wont be along the lines of, Leta is so lucky to have you as parents. Youre a perfect family. If you werent so famous, Id call you for parenting advice. But maybe youd actually take my call because were really like the same person, you and me. Maybe we could meet for coffee and our children could plot how to take over the world. You were so hilarious today that I snorted soda out my nose. And by the way, I love the hair.
Jealous? Maybe. Its a good gig if you can get it.
Im new to the blog world and have been surprised by the depth of it. But I like House of Prince. And Im a fan of Katies, too.
Wait… you mean there are other people that have children? And love their husbands?
I don’t know how I feel about this. Everything I had thought to be is no longer.
Hold me.
I didn’t think we were as uncool as you just made us. And who is the one who fought for apple juice after the prom!?!?!?!?!?
I’m going OUT with Lee. I’m waiting for her to pick me up. I’m dressed and have makeup on and am leaving at 8:45.
Uncool?
I hear you! I have only been blogging seriously (or semi-seriously – I am rarely entirely serious) for a few months. I noticed the “In crowd” very quickly. Initially I aspired to joining their ranks, but soon I realized I very much preferred the group I was with. There is often a bitter, angry overtone in the IN blogs, whereas the bloggers I read (and who read my blog in return) are open, thoughtful, insightful, well written, and often wickedly funny. Your blog is outstanding; William, Anne, Cat, Tree, Mamma Tulip, Tink… too many others to name are outstanding as well. The IN crowd can have what they’ve got – I am “in” where I want to be, right now.
And I’ll send those placement fees right over to you. 😉 Keep it up!