Note to Self: Do Not Bless Sully

"Okay, Sully, it's time to go to sleep."

"Okay but I need water."

"You have water."

(Looks at me doubtfully)

"Yeah but it's not cold."

"Okay. Here's some cold water. Goodnight. Bless you." I don't know why I said that. I meant to say love you.

"Bless me? Bless me, mommy?" (starts to get worked up, makes worried face) "Bless me??? MOM! Bless me TO WHAT? TOOOO WHAAAAAT MAAAAAM???"

"Bud, calm down. I meant to say love you."

"Mom! WHAT IS THE BLESS?!"

"Sully. I love you. That's what I meant."

"Okay." (looks relieved) "You should go put on your fancy purple dress."

"I...don't have a fancy purple dress."

"You do. I coloured it for you with a marker." (gesturing wildly in the air) "It has a purple flower and--" (pinches fingers together and squints his eyes) "--a tiiiiiiiiny little square!"

"Ah. Great."

I haven't gone to my closet to fact check but it's the thought that counts, anyway.

Bless his heart. But don't tell him I said that.

Mini Songbook

I just finished reading The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout. I liked things about it, but could never quite gain momentum--it took me an embarrassingly long time to get through. My reward for finally finishing is Songbook by Nick Hornby, which is the book I wish I'd thought to write (I suppose, though, you have to have already written a book like High Fidelity before people will pay to hear your ramblings on music).

Songbook, as I understand it, is basically a playlist in book form(!!); each chapter is a song and why the song is good (not for him personally, but why it's objectively great). I haven't started reading it yet; I try to use nap times for writing and evenings for reading, but I've been thinking about it so much. I've been thinking about what songs I would choose if I had written that book and what I'd say about them. And I didn't write High Fidelity, but blog posts are free, so, here:

(I know you wouldn't know this if I didn't tell you, because you're reading it after the fact, but I just took a picture of the book to add to the top of this blog post and then opened the book and started reading even though I said I wasn't going to. Nap time is almost over, and I'm disappointed in myself. This list is going to have to be short. I will say, though, that Nick Hornby appears to be kind of snobby, with sweeping statements like, "Anyone who likes music knows who so-and-so is," or, "Anyone who says a song reminds them of their honeymoon really must not like music very much." He talks about not being a big Dylan fan but owning four of his albums because, "Anyone who likes music owns these." That's just straight-up weird. What the heck, Hornby? I'm still determined to love this book, but I'm bristling a little.)

Anyway, ahem:

Mini Songbook

by Suzy Krause, who has a lot of opinions but has yet to write a book about music that later becomes a movie starring John Cusack but hey, her fingers are crossed because if you dream it you can achieve it

1. "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap

This song was my introduction to the vocoder which, as far as I can tell, is a device that allows you to 'play' your voice. She was by no means the first person to use it (Pink Floyd used it, putting the sound of a barking dog through it in "Dogs", Phil Collins used it in "In the Air Tonight," Styx used it in "Mr. Roboto," and the list goes on--Michael Jackson, Coldplay, Daft Punk, etc). The difference is that in this song, it's just Heap and her vocoder and her synthesizer, no other instruments at all, and the effect is haunting. It might not have been the first time I heard a vocoder, but it was the first time I realized I was hearing one and went, "What. Is. That?" I don't remember what city I was in when I heard it (Winnipeg, maybe?), but I know I was in a car with a bunch of people I didn't know and one of them had just purchased Speak for Yourself and when "Hide and Seek" came on everyone in the car fell silent and got simultaneous goosebumps.

Now I'm trying to think of where I was and why I was there and who was with me and why I never kept in touch with any of those people but all I can picture is a dark car and silhouettes. Maybe Hornby's right on this one point. Maybe if a song is really good, the memory of hearing it for the first time won't be of anything except the song itself. 

2. "Marching Bands of Manhattan" by Death Cab for Cutie

The first great thing about this song is that it's the first song on Plans, which is Death Cab's best album (fight me), and it sounds like a first song. When you listen to it, you feel like you're cresting a hill, approaching a new and exciting city. Like Calgary. Or Swift Current. I don't know how else to describe it, but it's a very good way to start an album, in my opinion.

Then there's that piano part in the background that just repeats itself over and over near the middle-end but never gets old. Death Cab has the corner on songs that use repetition really well ("Transatlanticism," "I Will Possess Your Heart")--it's a talent that nobody seems to recognize as a talent and even mistake for laziness. A guy once told me he thought they were boring for it, and I thought and still think he's blatantly wrong (move over, Hornby, I'm going to be snobby for a sec). They know how to subtly build on a riff without beating it to death.

Plus, Benjamin Gibbard's lyrics are aways so perfect. As I've said before, it's too bad he sounds, in his own words, like a terrible person.

Huh. I don't remember where I was the first time I heard this song either. Hornby! Wow!


3. "High Hopes" by Pink Floyd

I mean, if you're into anguish. Even the guitar sounds desperately sad. People who can make you feel sorry for their instruments are next level musicians.


4. "Angry Sea" by Mother Mother

Mother Mother isn't great anymore, but they used to be. Their harmonies, their musicianship, their outright strangeness. I think, I'm not sure but I think, they might hold spots one through three for my favourite live shows of all time (back before they ditched Norma Jean or Norma Jean ditched them). And this song is very simple, but the first low note at exactly 32 seconds in? Gets me every time. A very fun song to sing along with.


5. "The Garden" by Rush

Here's what you do: You go to Chapters (Amazon, whatever, wherever), and you buy Clockwork Angels by Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart. You read that, and then you...well. Ideally, you would go back in time and catch Rush's Clockwork Angels tour, which was backed by a string orchestra and was really the best possible way to experience the book's soundtrack. But if you're pressed for time (and time machines), you could just put the album on loudly and listen through headphones. The songs follow the story and the effect is quite breathtaking. Every book should have a soundtrack. This song is the last one on the album and makes me feel like I'm going to cry every time I listen to it, like I've just finished reading the book all over again.

The best books paint a picture in your mind, and same goes for the best songs--the marrying of the two is a solid union.


Sullivan just woke up, so I have to go, but I feel like I could actually go on for several pages. Give me your mini songbook in the comments and I'll build a giant playlist for us.

Every Night I Forgive People

I was reading Elan's blog today and this line jumped out at me.

"Every night I forgive people..."

It was a fragment of a sentence, and I'm taking it completely out of its original context, but it might as well have been a sermon. Elan wrote it like it was part of a perfectly normal nighttime routine--like, "I brush my teeth and wash my face and forgive people and..."

I was talking with a friend earlier this year about closure, about how closure is something you get less and less of the older you are. Like, when you were in junior high and your boyfriend dumped you on MSN, you could just go back on MSN the next night and say exactly what you wanted to say. Same with friendships. But maybe that was just part of growing up in a small town--I only had a few best friends, and those best friends were stuck with me, and I was stuck with them and I liked it like that. It trained my brain to realize that every relationship is salvageable if you want it to be. To this day, if I think someone has a beef with me, I'll outright ask them about it and we'll fix it up and be friends again. I hate the feeling of not knowing what the other person's thinking. I fill in all the blanks. You want to torture me? Act mad and then say you don't want to talk about it. It's my Kryptonite.

But as an adult, living in a city, in the social media age, I find I actually have to just let it go sometimes. If the other person doesn't want to fix it, it's done. The end. Sometimes this means skipping over a problem and pretending like nothing happened, and sometimes it means the end of the friendship altogether.

Problem: My brain doesn't know what to do with this. It short-circuits.

Furthermore, it just so happens that 2016 was The Whole Entire Year of NonClosure and I discovered all of the above things about myself. I discovered that I am the exact opposite of a wild animal: you back me into a corner, I will be thrilled. I will sit down and talk to you and probably cry for the joy of finally sorting us out. But you run away? That's when I get all frantic.

Yup. Oh great I'm one of those people. 

I know there are, like, a million parts to this. It's hard to feel unheard or misunderstood. It sucks to know you're the villain in someone's mind, so there's pride somewhere in there. There's plain old hurt, because who loves losing a friendship? On and on. I've lost a lot of sleep over this this year. And yet, forgiveness has never once crossed my mind.

Is that terrible to say?

I don't know, forgiveness always seemed like a thing that goes with closure. Like the final step. Like you need to get all the blood cleaned up and a bandaid on before you say to someone, "Okay, that's dealt with, and I forgive you." It's not like I've been sitting around waiting for an apology, or stewing over it and hating people--I've just been a little stunned and very sad and haven't known how exactly to go about taking care of this kind of cut. I guess I actually forgot about forgiveness.

Which is why I loved Elan's words so much. Every night I forgive people. Every night, consciously sitting down and making a choice not to hang onto this hurt or bitterness or whatever, even if the problem itself will still exist in the morning, or even if you don't get closure, or even if you don't get a friendship back, or even if you don't get to defend yourself.

It may be a different kind of bedtime routine, but in a way, it's exactly like washing your face or brushing your teeth--because isn't the point of all that to keep junk from building up?

#Winterruption17

Sometimes life bunches up--not unlike pantyhose--and a whole bunch of stuff lands on one weekend, and all of the stuff is important and none of the stuff is disposable. When this happens, you just gotta be like, "Okay, I'm going to wear the same outfit all weekend and not sleep and pretend like it's actually one really long day."

This past weekend was like that, and one of the items on the packed schedule was Winterruption.

The fine Folk Fest friends at RFF have added another festival weekend to the year (bless them)--the summer one is at the beginning of August, and now there's a winter one in the middle of January, right when everyone in Saskatchewan is collectively weeping, gnashing teeth, and altogether melodramatizing as a result of -50 temperatures and an endlessly crystallized landscape as far as the ice-encrusted eye can see. It's a good reason to leave the house. If your vehicle will start.

And what a great idea. After all, what does Saskatchewan have that Hawaii or California or New York doesn't have? Right. Actual Winter.

(New York people would probably contest this, and I would contest them right back. With indignance. I mean, they have a thing in January called the No Pants Subway Ride. If you can walk around in January with no pants on, you don't have Actual Winter. IMHO.)

Actual Winter is kind of our Thing, and maybe we should be more proud of it. Like a kid in junior high who gets made fun of for being so tall and lanky and then becomes the star of the basketball team. Maybe winter is going to be our secret weapon that we all hated until now? I figure, instead of running away from the cold, why not have lots of sweet events and make it a place people want to be? Make it so people want to fly north for the winter instead of south?

(This is, admittedly, partly me trying to talk myself into liking winter. It's a thing I do a different variation of every year.)

Anyway, the point is that I went to Winterruption this past weekend. It warmed my heart up, if not my poor, blue fingers.

Highlights:

IsKwé (Thursday night at the Exchange)



I first heard Winnipeg/Hamilton musician IsKwé at last summer's Folk Fest--I walked past her stage just in time to hear her cover Bjork's Army of Me and stayed for the rest of the set (obviously). She has a tremendous voice (I mean, watch the video above), accompanied by powerful storytelling (again, watch the video). Really beautiful, moving show. I'm not sure what her upcoming tour schedule looks like, but if she comes anywhere near you, go.

Begonia (Also Thursday at the Exchange)



Thursday was the night of strong female vocals at the Exchange, I guess. Do you know Begonia? Get to know Begonia. I loved her. She was charming and hilarious and her voice did crazy, dangerous things in a way that never scared me once. Like being in the passenger seat of a skilled stunt car driver. Because I totally know what that's like.

Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids (Friday night at the Artesian)

Welcome to your new favourite podcast, which needs no explanation because it is exactly what it's called. This was my second time sitting in a taping of GRTTWaK and it was just as painful as the first time--and when I say 'painful,' I mean that my face was contorted with laughter for 120 minutes straight and when I left I felt like I'd been getting x-rays at the dentist. My friends Kate and Robyn both read from their childhood diaries/journals and I'm pretty sure they were crowd favourites. This was also the first show I've been to (of any kind) where the audience actually emitted a genuine, collective, loud, "Awww..." when the host told them the evening was over.

This thing comes through town often enough, but it always sells out way in advance, so join the mailing list if you want to go next time. I'll be there for sure.

Fred Penner (Saturday at the Knox-Met)

It's one of those insanely weird life moments when you find yourself sitting next to your son watching Fred Penner sing The Cat Came Back. Because childhood is like a planet you lived on once that blew up when you turned 12, or whatever, and you escaped with only the clothes on your back and then you grew out of those, too. And you became a teenager and then you became a technical adult and then you became an actual adult and then, oh wait, here's Fred Penner waltzing back into your life with his songs about food and his kazoo made of tissue paper and a comb...

Just an absolute trip.

(And I have to admit that I loved it. We took my brother TJ along with us, and he loved it too. It was a good little afternoon date with two of my favourite people. Plus: I feel a little kinship with Fred, because he has a sister named Suzy who has Down Syndrome and I am someone named Suzy who has a brother with DS.)

Anyway, those were the best of the things I made it to, amidst the busyness of the weekend. I wonder if there's any chance of it getting as big as the summer Folk Fest and having day stages?
(Hint, hint, whoever's reading.)

I'm very good at hinting.

Three

A while back, I asked Sullivan what he was going to turn on his next birthday and he said, "Left. I'm going to turn left."

I tried to explain the whole birthday thing to him, like, "No, you're going to turn three. Now, you are two, but on January 21, you will have been hanging out with us for three years, so you will be three."

A few weeks later, we were at my friend Sheila's place and she asked him what he was turning on his next birthday. He looked at me for a minute with deep concentration and then said to her, "Uh...like, North, I sink?"

So I suck at explaining stuff. But! Weird! This weekend, he turned three, whether he knew it or not.

It was a full weekend, with the funeral and the music festival (I'll tell you about that later), but my parents came into town and stayed with us and we had a little family birthday party for him. I even baked a birthday cake! It was one of those things I'd never done before but probably wouldn't whip out in a game of Never Have I Ever. It was a guitar cake, too. Pat me on the back and tell me I'm special. (Full disclosure: my mom helped.)

Now the house is quiet--Sullivan's napping and the company's gone home and I'm sitting in my office eating leftover cake and having my own little birthday celebration. I do this every year: I sit and think about my son, about the day he came to join us, and marvel at the wonder that is bones getting bigger and skin stretching over them and an entire language being learned by someone who, I swear, just yesterday couldn't even hold his own head up. A personality being revealed. Preferences and ideas forming--and relationships, too. All of it happening so silently and miraculously and casually. 

I read his birth story, the one I wrote a couple of weeks after the fact. I feel thankful that I wrote it down, and also thankful that I left the gory parts out and focused on the feelings and what song was playing on the radio, because, frankly, there are parts of that day I don't want to remember. And sure enough, those bits of useless information are fading to the back, blurry, while the parts that I love remain in focus: Wild Country by Wake Owl, Barclay holding my head in the stairwell of the hospital, the moment I met Sullivan, and the way his face appeared on the backs of my eyelids every time I shut my eyes. What a perfect, perfect day.

(It's funny how you can shape your own past by the way you tell about it, hey?) 

Every year that goes by, the birth story becomes more special to me because now I know the baby we were meeting that day. Back then he was a dream, unfamiliar and a little bit scary. Now he's the hilarious kid who fills my house with loud music, who explores cities with me and eats strawberries on the kitchen floor with me, who repeats the things I say and mimics my actions, who helps me get excited about things that had become stale, who brings out a side of Barclay that I absolutely love and wouldn't have gotten to see otherwise, who makes me have to slow down sometimes and speed up sometimes, who can make me laugh louder than anyone and who can absolutely melt my heart just by looking at me. 

The privilege and blessing of being his mom isn't lost on me.

(The photo of me and Sully by the lake was taken by Vivien Francombe and you can see more of her pictures by clicking on it.)

The Best Roommate I Ever Had

"Roommates" is a great conversation starter. Everyone's got a roommate story or two--good or bad or weird or whatever. If you don't, though, don't feel bad; I've got enough for the both of us.

From the time I moved out of my parents' house at 18 to the time Barclay became my final housemate of choice (well, and we decided to let Sullivan live with us too), I lived with 20 different people - some of them twice. I guess there was a time where I moved around a fair amount (because I could), but I've also done the sardine thing more than once (like the time we packed five girls into a tiny two bedroom apartment for the summer in Saskatoon or the time there were six or seven of us in a trailer in the mountains).

You wanna talk roommates? Love to, always.

The other day, I was driving with a friend and the topic came up. We exchanged some great Can You Believe It stories and a couple Can't Even ones and then we laughed at ourselves a little (because there's always that cringeworthy moment, right, where you look back at your past self and realize that you were the awful roommate) and then I said the thing I always say when Roommates is the subject matter:

"Barclay's grandma Guzz was the best roommate I ever had."

I lived with her for a summer back in 2009. It was kind of a blur of events leading up to me moving into her basement, and then I was only going to stay a couple of days...but that summer was weird and things with our house renovations took longer than expected and it moved from strange in-between-limbo-situation to I-think-I'm-living-here-is-that-okay type thing.

Do you know what I mean when I say that for some people in my life, I can think of a single story that sums them up? Most of the time it's a trivial little incident or even a moment, but it captures something about that person or about my relationship with that person so well that it always pops into my mind when I think about them. Instead of their face, there's a picture of something else, like the memory is a literal book and the picture is the cover of it.

I have one of those for Guzz; when I think about her, I picture a green pepper, chopped up and sitting on a plate. The story goes like this:

The first morning I woke up at her house, I came up the stairs to find her waiting for me with a box of Raisin Bran and the Yahtzee dice. She seemed nervous, almost frantic. She said, "I don't know what you like to eat for breakfast! This is all I've got in the cupboard!"

I said, "No, this is so great--I love Raisin Bran!" I didn't love Raisin Bran, really. Is it bad that I lied? I just wanted to make a good first (as a roommate) impression, and I didn't know her that well back then, and she was my fiancé's grandmother, and it was so nice of her to even offer me breakfast, and it's not like I hated Raisin Bran, exactly, so...

So I sat down and gratefully polished the bowl off and we played Yahtzee. At some point in the game, she said something about green peppers--I cannot for the life of me remember what it was now--and I, being the felicitous conversationalist that I am, said something about liking them.

I went to work that day, and when I came home there was a raw green pepper on a plate on the table, cut into neat slivers, and the cupboard was stocked to the gills with Raisin Bran.

And good Grandma Guzz did not miss a day with either the peppers or the Raisin Bran. I would come home from work and eat my pepper while we played Yahtzee, and she would sit and watch me with a trace of fascinated disgust on her face. She'd say, "I don't like peppers that much. I don't know how you eat it like that, like an apple!" I didn't tell her that I'd never eaten a pepper like that before either.

But something else I didn't tell her, that I really should've (I really wish I would've), is that there was something amazing about walking into the house after work and seeing that I was anticipated and thought of and cared for, every single day. Do you know what that does to a person? It's incredible. Raw pepper was not my favourite thing, but eating a raw pepper in front of Guzz became my favourite thing.

And at her funeral yesterday, I realized that the green pepper story is a universal one for anyone who knew Guzz. I mean, I was the only one who got a chopped up green pepper, that was my Thing, but that was kind of her love language, trying to figure out the Thing that a person liked so she could give it to them, over and over and over.

Bonus points if she got to watch them enjoy it.

I may not have been a blood grandchild, but I'm really thankful I got to marry in and become an honorary one, even if it was only for a short time. Someone with as big a personality as Guzz had didn't need that much time to make a big impression, anyway.  

The Secret to a Clean House is Not Minimalism, It's Netflix

People are weird when it comes to trendy technology things (think social media sites like Facebook, new iPhones, etc).

The first people to try [whatever it is] are always really proud of themselves, like they invented the thing.

And then a whole bunch of people also get [whatever it is], and it's just normal to have it.

And then there are the stragglers, the handful of people who didn't buy in right away who feel left behind and are a little ashamed to admit they haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet. So they quietly jump on the bandwagon.

And THEN, last but not least, there are the one or two people who never did buy in and are super proud of themselves. Like they're morally superior for holding out or something. Like they're better than you because they still have one of those big black bag phones in their car instead of an iPhone 7 in their pocket.

But even they often realize that they were kind of silly for holding out and join everyone else in the end.

Take me, for example. I got Netflix this week--as in, my parents gave me one of their extra accounts over the Christmas break and I signed in and used it for the first time yesterday.

Verdict: Shoulda done it ages ago.

Honestly, I think I was afraid it was going to be a massive time-suck. Like I'd sign in and turn something on and then just never sign out again. If I get Netflix, I surmised, my brain might as well be a potato. But here's something neat: I have some semblance of self-control! And! Zero attention span!

So, last night, instead of sitting on the couch and watching three hours of Netflix, I put a show on in the background and cleaned my entire house.

MY ENTIRE HOUSE.

I swept under the bed. I threw out a bunch of junk. I cleared out the filing cabinet in the office. I put the loose change in a jar. It was like my brain just needed to be distracted enough to not realize my body was working.

So this is why my house has been a disaster and everyone else's hasn't.

Netflix. 

Sickness and Attic Floorboards, Basically

Sickness has struck our household.

We made it this far though, so that's something. We skipped the communal sickness in October, missed the round in November, sailed through December (despite the fact that Sully licked everything in Vegas, barf), and made it halfway through January.

AND THEN.

On Saturday, I said the unmagic words: "We've made it through this whole season without getting sick!"

Mom Jinx. It is lurking. It will not have mercy. Even as I was saying the words, I knew. And sure enough.

Yesterday, Sullivan coughed so hard he puked. And then he walked through the puke to get to me and puked again. And then he walked through that puke to get to me and puked again--literally the saddest thing I've ever seen.

The last two nights he's been in bed with us, and I've been having dreams about being repeatedly shot in the face (only to wake up and realize that it's a hacking cough, not gunshots).

So, of course we've been inside. Outside, it's a balmy, tropical, beach-worthy +1. Last week, when we were healthy, it was -54. What are you, mom jinx? And why do you loathe me so?

Enough complaining. A thing to be thankful for is that we're sick now and will hopefully be over it by the second half of the week. It's going to be a full one and I want to be all there for it.

In the meantime, I wanted to post a couple of pictures of the old farm house. We dropped by there this Christmas when we went home.

It's kind of in limbo at this point and the progress is hard to see because it's all so nitpicky; they're waiting on electrical and furnace stuff before they can "giv'r on the insulation" (- dad). It's hard to work in a house in Canadian winter with no heating, but they're pressing on. They've put in all new windows and are currently working in the attic, which is eventually going to be the master bedroom with an ensuite. They've ripped up all the floorboards so they can clean and plane them and put them back down, and at present it looks like this:

After the electrical, plumbing, and furnace stuff happens (which is all completely out of their control), I think we'll begin to see some really big, fun changes. Barclay and I are heading down in February to help out, so I'll have a bunch of updates then. Get excited, Internet.

Social Media Bites and a Crazy Thing

So here's a crazy thing:

You know how my name is actually Elena?

(Did you know that? Do I have to tell the story again? Well, skip these brackets if you already know. So, okay, I was born Elena Christensen ((I accidentally just typed "Elena Christmas")), but very early on my mom started calling me her little Suzy Q. Like the CCR song. My older brother joined her in it, and then my dad and then everyone else. So I've been Suzy as long as I can remember, and no one even told me I was really Elena until I was five, when my kindergarten teacher sent me home in tears because she'd labeled all of my stuff wrong and would not call me Suzy, no matter how much I insisted it was my name. She probably thought I was being a brat. I thought she was torturing me for no good reason. My dentist says the stress marks on my teeth are from a bad bout of pneumonia when I was five, but I think they're actually from that incident on my first day of school. Anyway, that's the long and short of it ((but mostly the long)): I've never not been Suzy. And any time I've moved to a new place and attempted to be Elena, for the sake of less confusion, someone from my past has always been there to say, "But we've always called her Suzy." And that's all it takes.)

Okay, the crazy thing now.

The other night, I was at a thing called Social Media Bites (more on that in a sec), and I met this guy, Aidan, and when I said my name was Suzy, he was like, "Hey, my mom's name is Suzy. Well, actually, it's a nickname. Her real name is Eleanor, but when she was born, the nurse said to my mom, Here's your black-eyed Susan, and she's been called Suzy ever since."

I mean. It's not the craziest thing. But pretty crazy right? My name thing has always been one of the more interesting pieces of me trivia I have to offer and people are always like, "How do you get Suzy from Elena? How did it catch on to that extent? How has it stuck this long?" But look at that: the exact same thing happened to someone else out there.

I feel like I can hear the far-off sound of eyes rolling around in their sockets.

Okay then, can I tell you about this Social Media Bites thing?

I was invited by the Regina Downtown Improvement people (not Tourism Regina, a separate entity) on Tuesday to a local pub. The invitation was a little cryptic; it was like, "Do you want to come eat food at 7 at The Fat Badger? We're buying." And I was like, "Yep." I never even ask questions when people send this kind of message. I just get excited and go. So, if you ever want to kidnap me, totally just send a Twitter message like, "Hey Suzy, meet me in the back alley behind O'Han's. There will be free food." Easy.

So I showed up, and there was a table of people that I mostly knew but had never met before. Isn't that funny, in this day and age? That you can go somewhere and know an entire group of strangers? I quickly realized that the common denominator was social media; we're all all over it, blogging and Tweeting and 'gramming and such. Hence: Social Media Bites. In which a bunch of social media people eat a lot of food and, they were probably hoping, Tweet about it. Which we did. Sellouts! All of us! My blog ain't for sale, but, yeah, you can buy my Twitter feed with good food. I'm only human.

So I sat down and Chef Terry just started bringing the food. He brought whole chicken wings covered in this strange but delightful cream sauce, and then deli-style flatbread pizza, and then spinach dip.

And I was like, "That was a great supper. Thank you." And then he was like, "That was just appetizers." And I was like, "Thaaaaank youuuuuu."

Then he brought us meat that had been braised in chocolate milk. Chocolate beef, I think he called it. Doesn't that sound like it could be either amazing or awful but nowhere in between? It was amazing. It made me want to convert to food blogger. (I won't, though.)

And then he brought us so many more things. It got to the point where every time he brought out a new dish, I just laughed. There were smashed creamer potatoes and Korean BBQ pork steak and shrimp stir fry and fettuccine with smoky slab bacon and jalapeño cheddar waffles with Southern spiced chicken... He brought us every entree on the menu. It was a dream I never knew I had, come true. The chef came and sat with us afterward and told us about all the places he's traveled and eaten and studied. I liked that part as much as the eating part - I've become a really big bonus material person, both in DVDs and real life. I like knowing the backstory.

And! It was Tuesday! Which, it just so happens, is live music night at the Badger. The Alley Dogs were playing really old, good country songs. (If any of them are reading this, I have a musical request for next time: Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. Thanks, guys.)

The people I knew but had never met were really funny and neat. Three hours flew by and we laughed so much my cheeks hurt by the end. Schmutzie even offered to set me up with a new domain (see above? NICE).

So yeah. Good, good times.

And someone else out there is Suzy for no good reason. Life is cute.

The History & Future of the Unmonetized Personal Blog

I'm going to make a prediction.

2017: the year the unmonetized personal blog makes its comeback. 

I don't mean my unmonetized personal blog (where would it come back from? It never left, though it was quiet for a while). 

I mean the unmonetized personal blog. I mean the dorky little community of people who blog because they love writing and reading, both, and aren't looking to make an easy buck, and aren't desperate to 'go viral,' and aren't convinced the world needs them or their words or their wisdom. 

I don't think the monetized ones are going anywhere, and that's fine. But I'm sensing a little resurrection in the air for those of us who just loved what this whole thing was before it got to where it is.

See, here's a basic blogging history timeline as I understood it from my point of view (feel free to correct me at any point):

It was probably, what, 2005(ish?) when blogging became underground popular. People who liked to write set up a little Blogspot page and wrote very scattered, stream-of-consciousness-type posts. They were usually unedited or sloppily so, but it didn't matter. The photography ranged from professional quality to cell-phone pics (I'm talking about 2007 Samsung flip phones here).

Many (myself included) didn't tell anyone what they were doing, and even tried to keep it a secret. Share a post on Facebook? NEVER. NEVER NEVER NEVER. We learned a tiny bit of basic html so we could decorate our pages. We read the blogs of strangers from around the world and commented on them and became friends with them, but we felt weird about admitting that to anyone. Blogging was a hobby and a way to connect with other writers/creatives/photographers/whatever in a really safe, unpretentious way. You could send them some encouragement in the comments section or share their blog buttons on your sidebar (for free, of course), so that other people could find and read them. 

Some people monetized their blogs using Google AdSense, which stuck a small, unobtrusive ad somewhere on their page and paid per click. I had a friend who bought a new camera lens with the money she earned from hers - over the course of many months. I tried it for an hour, made 14 cents, and quit. That's the only money I've ever made from blogging here (though, admittedly, the jobs I've had over the years as a result of blogging here have been amazing).

Slowly, blogging became much more mainstream, and people found more and more ways to make money off them. They started selling advertising in their sidebars, for other blogs at first and then for brands. The advertising moved from the sidebars to the blog posts themselves. Brands could now pay a blogger to wear a dress or drive a car or go on a vacation. This isn't news to you now, but at the time it kind of blew my mind.

The blogs started looking really shiny and pretty, as people hired professional designers and 'branded' themselves. Obviously, you're not going to be approached by a brand if your blog looks like...well...mine. The blog posts became less This is what I did today! and This is what I think about such-and-such a thing! and much more Here are 10 shoes you need for that trip to Iceland you haaaave to take! Here's a $400 dress you must own if you want to be pretty!

Women were able to support their families through blogging. Husbands were quitting jobs. Blogging became a job. Blogging became a good job, if you played your cards right. 

And blog posts started going viral. 

And everyone wanted to go viral. 

To go viral, you have to either make people blush or laugh or cry or learn something or confirm an unpopular, potentially offensive opinion they already have. So then all the bloggers were trying to do that, and the blogosphere became very noisy and competitive. 

And bloggers started getting TV shows and book deals. People who hadn't wanted to be bloggers suddenly wanted to be bloggers as it became recognized as a vehicle to other kinds of success. You could pay bloggers to take classes on how to blog. 

Alongside all of this, there was Twitter and YouTube and Instagram and even Facebook. Just so many voices. Everyone was (is) 'blogging,' to some extent - microblogging, at the very least. Keeping an online log of their experiences, thoughts, feelings. If you're decent at it, or are at least willing to sell out a bit, you get paid.

It is what it is. I'm not against it. I participate in it - though my payoff has been experiential more than financial. 

Anyway.

A few years ago, the original bunch of bloggers burned out, all at once. Just like that. It was like the blog world was a city that had started out as a dinky little hamlet. And some big corporation had moved in, and the city grew, and the original inhabitants of the city either got out of there because it was suddenly too bustling and chaotic, or they joined the big corporation and moved into the high-rises. 

Because it was dang hard not to get all caught up in the blog as a business thing. It was hard not to feel like you 'weren't doing it right' if you weren't famous or making a lot of money at it. The community aspect wasn't really there anymore, in that everyone stopped commenting on posts and the audiences kind of gravitated toward the professional blogs or to Instagram. 

But here's a thing: I still keep in touch with blog friends from 2008. We follow each other on Instagram and send emails and talk on the phone and meet in real life when the opportunity arises. Weird? Get over it. It was a really cool experience for a lot of us, and it had nothing to do with money or free clothes or Internet Popularity (which I have found, is a super fickle thing anyway - like an untied balloon that just deflates the second you're not blowing into it anymore). 

The point is: I've noticed a bunch of them rebooting their old blogs. I've been writing on mine a bit more often lately too. There seems to be a collective sense of Remember that? That was great. Let's do that again. 

And I think it can coexist just fine alongside the monetized blog world, so long as there's some kind of divide, so long as people pick the world they want to be a part of and stay in it. A lot of people said they felt like the monetization and popularization of blogging was the death of it. Meh. It was just a momentarily stunning and painful offshoot of what started all those years ago. Now it's there, it's self-sufficient, and we can go back to being goofs, posting playlists and writing opinion pieces that will never end up on the Huffington Post or land us a book deal. 

A happy ending for everyone. Cheers to the unmonetized personal blog! Who's still here?


PS: I read this quote the other day (re: the short story and literary magazines) that I loved and it feels like it's somewhat related to this, but in a kind of abstract way: "...I do mourn the passing of the old general reader, who had no artistic aspirations and simply loved to read." - David Galef, The State of Flash Fiction