Writing

Passive-Aggressive Note to Blogger

Dearest Blogger,

What the dealio, yo? That was a long ass time that your platform was down. Two days of not being able to blog feels like four days of not being able to Tweet and six days of not being able to look at Facebook.

You know, to people like me who obsessively refresh their page every 5 minutes to see if someone posted a new comment, the past two days have been sheer torture. At first I thought you shut down my blog because I talked about my pubes recently. Then I thought, “Maybe I posted a picture of a bunch of penises and totally forgot about it and someone called me in?” Every time I would type in my URL some weird Klingon-looking shit would come up on the screen. Luckily, trusty ol’ Twitter told me that I was not the only one facing this problem. In fact, come to find out, you f’ed up EVERYONE’s blogging day yesterday and today. Look! Now I’m forced to write this half-ass post because I couldn’t write on you last night or this morning.

And now I think you spread your (more…)

May 13, 2011 by
Pop Culture

What is Postmodern Tourism?

Oh, so there is a word for it: Postmodern Tourism.

Postmodern Tourism defines a growing trend in travel where adventurers visit offbeat or unpopular locations for purposes pertaining to both “personal interest and ironic detachment”. Places that hipsters giddily check into on Foursquare and breathlessly wait for their followers’ confused responses. Places such as Roswell, New Mexico, Flint, Michigan, or Chernobyl, Ukraine. Places that tell a story good or bad, that might give us a little insight into who we are. According to the above The Atlantic article, “urban exploration” has become increasingly popular due to high costs of traveling to less depressing places such as Hawaii, desensitization from the Internet, and society’s expanding enlightenment to how we’re f’ing up the world. Postmodern Tourism has a close relationship with a topic I find very interesting: ruin porn. Ruin porn is the sort of stuff that curious or nihilistic artists get off on. It’s the sort of thinking that drives (more…)

May 11, 2011 by
Writing

Twelve Ways to Boost Your Blog Traffic (Without Getting Naked)

I am ridic sick today.
Like, every time I read back the words I wrote they look like dkljpotughfgnjasa.
I can’t even form coherent sentences. I can’t even think of words! It took me roughly 58 seconds to think of the word “coherent”. There is a good chance I’m drooling on myself right now but can’t feel it.
I had to abandon the post I was working on for today. In the meantime, I dug up an old post that I wanted to polish off and revisit. There are some helpful hints in here- ones I should even remind myself.
——————————————————————————
You have nine followers, and one of them is your mother.
You wonder why the hell you’re even blogging.
You speculate if anyone will ever read your words.
You ponder if life is worth living.
Well look no further!
Listed below are twelve sure-fire ways to drive traffic to your blog and instantly boost your self-worth.

1.) Join Blogging Network Sites– The best blog networking website is Twenty-Something (more…)

May 9, 2011 by
Hipstercrite Life

Mommas.

Today I was going to post a guide to Postmodern Tourism, but decided instead to talk about my Momma.

My Momma was born in 1950 in a small town in Upstate, New York. She still lives in that town. In fact, she still lives in the house she grew up in. When she was 24, her father passed away and gave her the house. It was the house she brought my Daddy into and the house I grew up in. It’s a modest house, but it was always filled with screaming kids, Will Smith CDs blaring from the stereo, and love.

I grew up an only child with a single mother. My Dad left when I was a little girl. Heartbroken that her family fell apart, my mother did her best to raise me alone. She brought home poverty level earnings from my grandmother’s clothing store on a dying Main Street, but working for the family afforded her time to pick me up from school and attend every band concert, soccer game, and play. If it was difficult for my mother, I did not know because she made sure I didn’t see it. The few times (more…)

May 6, 2011 by
Hipstercrite Life

Sellin’ Out

So you know how I’ve been going blah blah blah about doing a blog redesign? Well, it’s finally happening.
Throughout this process I’ve written a couple blog posts and sent out some tweets asking for your input because I need constant positive reinforcement in my life.

You guys have been great. Your feedback encouraged me to move to WordPress and to not be such an f’ing pussy about this transition.

A few readers proposed the question, “Why change your blog at all? It’s the content that matters.”

I completely agree.

However, I’m changing the living shit out of this blog and here is why: I want to write more. I want to write about different topics. I want to write more than once a day. I want to write about what is going on in my life, what’s going on in pop culture, social media, non-profit, AND what’s going on in Austin or the World all in one day! I want to write about a cool new start-up venture I heard about in Austin or write about why I get constant charlie horses in my (more…)

May 4, 2011 by
20-Something, Hipstercrite Life

The Twenty-Something and Debt

my $1000 LA studio bedroom…in a closet.
There was a time when I had money.

There was a time when I thought I had money.

There was a time when I thought I had money and acted as such.
There was a time when I thought I had money and acted as such because it was my only option. This is why I have no money. When I moved to Los Angeles at twenty years of age, I had minimal education on how to manage my finances. Home & Careers class in high school definitely didn’t teach me much.  I mostly learned how to peel a potato and make soup from a $.55 french onion soup pack. Maybe the class was preparing me for a life of processed food poverty? My father lived every day as if it were his last, often randomly jumping on his motorcycle and scooting across the US or indulging in fly-by hobbies such a recumbent bicycling or job quitting, so he wasn’t a great teacher either. My mother was the most solid role model in that she informed me I should only put on my credit (more…)
May 2, 2011 by
20-Something, Hipstercrite Life, Writing

We Are Squirrels

spaz

Along the same lines of my recent post about Millennials and their work ethic, “The Generation of the Confused Working Class“, here is me going blah blah blah some more about the terrible “problems” my generation faces. 

I have the attention span of a squirrel on cocaine.
This is a recent development.
As a child, I was way too self-involved to be distracted by anything.
Being an only child will do that to you.
Sitting for several hours by yourself talking to Trolls will do that to you.

Now that I’m a big kid, I’m self-involved, society-involved, media-involved, and technology-involved.
Now my head is filled with a million notions of what has been and what could be.
Now I drink to make the voices stop.

On-set ADD sucks ass- and I don’t even have ADD. I’m one of those self-diagnosed folks. You know, the ones that figure it’s easier to give a name to something they won’t take responsibility for? Like totally flaking on your friend’s wedding shower because (more…)

April 26, 2011 by
Writing

The Girl Looking for a Connection

Earlier this week, I happened to catch a tweet from a writer in Minnesota directed at the Austin social media community. The writer had come across a suicide note posted that day by an Austin blogger and was wondering if anyone could help. I clicked on the blogger’s link and didn’t recognize the face she attached to her self-penned obituary. The face looking back at me seemed happy. It was a cherub face with a slight smirk. Above, in the blog header, another smiling photo with her three kids. Her blog bio explained that she was a divorcing mom and in the process of trying to figure out what life is all about. The obituary added that the blogger was not able to find what she was looking for, that she hasn’t and will never be able to connect with anyone, and that it was best to move on.

I immediately scrolled down to the comments to tell her to stop. It was difficult to find the words. Cookie cutter phrases like “Don’t give up!” and “People love you!” crept up in my head and I tried to (more…)

April 22, 2011 by
20-Something

The Generation of the Confused Working Class

yay for cheesy stock photos!
I read articles that say my generation doesn’t want to work. That we expect a lot in return for giving very little to a job. We like to run from job to job. That we have no idea what we want to do with our lives so we act indifferently towards our work. We spend too much time socializing at work. We spend too much time on the Internet.  We bitch and moan and complain about how much we hate our job and don’t understand why we dread going to work every morning.

I’m no stranger to these statements. Uninspired, unmotivated, disillusioned, and distracted are all words I’ve experienced at various employments. So much in fact that I’ve had to step back and ask myself, “Is it me or is it the jobs I go after?” (the jobs being in various creative fields, but mostly the film industry).

Tired of being constantly stressed and hearing myself complain, I began analyzing my various employments. I began my career life as a personal assistant. I did (more…)

April 20, 2011 by
Hipstercrite Life

To Dance in Laredo

Life is always an adventure.
Even when it takes you to a border town in Texas where friends and loved ones suggest that your safety will be in great danger if you go.

Texas is 268,581 square miles of curios. Even on the long stretches of dry nothingness or repetitious sand-colored strip malls, the state is never boring. When I first moved to Texas two and a half years ago, I felt like a child seeing the world for the first time. Everything about the state fascinated me and it continues to do so. From the freeways that ascend into the sky to the characters in cowboy hats to the forgotten main streets to the sprawl of major cities, I write a tiny love letter to Texas every day. And now this is my tiny love letter to Laredo.

Laredo, Texas borders the larger Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo. If you Google Nuevo Laredo you will see warnings from US Consulates urging Americans not to travel to Nuevo Laredo and pictures of people’s heads blown open. Laredo is the 88th largest city in the country (more…)

April 19, 2011 by