The marketer in me loves social media tools and their ability to find segments of consumers ripe for the picking, er, for “targeted product messaging”.  As a blogger, I use Twitter, Facebook and associated techniques to publicize the crap I write to those most likely to care or laugh (i.e. my friends [...]]]>

Put me out...I'm SOOO done!

The marketer in me loves social media tools and their ability to find segments of consumers ripe for the picking, er, for “targeted product messaging”.  As a blogger, I use Twitter, Facebook and associated techniques to publicize the crap I write to those most likely to care or laugh (i.e. my friends and family).  But all methods of technology-based communication and community-building building have repeatedly confounded me in a particular area:  my personal life.  Witness the social media induced debacle that was my birthday party. 

There’s a regrets RSVP option for a reason

First, I’m getting on in years and also pre-menstrual, so I have a tendency to be inappropriately cranky right now.  I also need to get back into therapy and cease with authoring my recovery into pithy buts of humor.  Nevertheless I’m pretty sure I should be annoyed that only 3 of my friends and family showed up to my birthday party on Monday.  You should know that I share a birthday with one of my oldest and dearest friends, Tanya.  Since we have many of the same friends and also want to celebrate with each other we sometimes throw a joint party.  This year, I sent out our invitation utilizing the first line of defense in party planning – I sent an evite.  As per usual, I was pithy and witty in the invitation text, as you can see: 

We’re pushing 40 but not too old to party on a school night! Come out to the rooftop bar at La Quinta Inn (we keep it classy) and buy us a few celebratory drinks – and a few for yourself – while we bask in the glow of the Empire State Building (kinda) and the neighboring water towers.  Fancy digs it ain’t, but your presence and the terrace-y atmosphere will create more than enough charm to last past sundown and into the night!  Happy Hour drink specials run from 5:30PM – 8:00PM, so come early if you love us but you’re thrifty with your ducats.  And if you bring cute, single hetero boys for the traditional birthday smooch, both of us will be forever in your debt!  Hope y’all can make it. 

Cute, yes?  If you know me or Tanya well, you’ll take the message in the snarky yet earnest manner it was intended.  I was feeling saucy, so I set up the invitation and mailed it to my guest list, then Tanya forwarded it to hers because she was in Alaska for a week and not so much with the planning.  At any rate, I was situated at the bar at 5:45PM – the first to arrive – followed by 10-15 of Tanya’s coworkers.  Fortunately I know most of them, so I had something to do while waiting ANOTHER HOUR FOR MY FIRST GUEST TO ARRIVE!!!!!   To those of you who contacted me directly about not coming:  you’re forgiven.  If you said you were coming and didn’t show (and you know who you are), you’re dead to me for the moment but we may speak again someday if you buy me gifts and ‘fess up to your mistake.   But to the rest of you…there are not words to express my disappointment.  Yes there are:  you suck.  

I thought I followed the accepted protocol:  after the evite, I posted the party on Facebook.  I also dispatched individual invitations to select Twitterati that actually know my real name and have met me in person. Still, radio silence coupled with collective no-show activity.  Not to be a total asstard, I did get many a birthday wish on Facebook, and on Twitter, and I’m really glad to know that so many people remembered me yesterday.  However I’m not exactly sure if it counts as remembrance when I create a hashtag for my birthday (#HappyBirthdayIGuess) and some social media application automatically tells everyone I know what day I was born.   I did everything I could to portray myself as The Birthday Girl and, later, as Rejected and Not Drunk Enough.  If I’d gone to happy hour right after work, and gotten liquored up at some sports bar, I could have partied with more people than bothered to show up for me last night.  Not that I’m not grateful for what I have, I just thought I was going to get a little bit more. 

Social networking:  Neither social nor networking.  Discuss.

In our rush to use digital means to manage our personal lives, we’ve gotten away from the whole in-person aspect to socializing.  Yes, I get a certain kind of pleasure from gaining Twitter followers or from seeing the growth in my blog subscriptions.  But it’s not the same as having actual contact and actual relationships with living people.  Yes, behind (almost) every Twitter account is a real person, or at least there’s a human behind the ‘bot or the Google Reader service that sifts through the ether to find relevant content.  Still when life is just as easily lived behind a digital wall, and its sometimes preferable to send an e-mail than (gasp!) have a phone conversation, a request for a face-to-face meeting is a rarity even when that invitation is in the form of 1′a and 0′s.  So if I actually want to see you then you must mean more to me than the hundreds of people I type at every day.  Remember that I work in marketing, so technically I have a one-way relationship with the entire population of New York City and Nassau and Westchester where my company advertises.  Those public eyeballs don’t mean that much to me, personally, but I’m pretty invested the flesh and blood peepers swirling in the lobes of my friends and family.  Still, I got more feedback and attention from people who barely know me than from folks who have been varying parts of my life for years.  No amount of RTs can erase the feeling that somehow I wasn’t worth spending even a few moments with, or the time it would take to say “sorry, can’t make it, have fun.”  Humph. 

Just so you know, I’m never throwing another party for myself.  Or if I do, it will involve engraved invitations and a paid assistant to dispatch with follow-up calls to the guest list.  If you don’t find out about that future soiree, consider it a non-vitation and keep it moving. 

I said that I wasn’t going to write another post about Friend Boy, but this one is a special request. The other day, one of my Twitter followers mentioned [...]]]> Excuse my French, but I’m a grown-ass woman so why do I have a “crush” on a man? And why the hell am I using that word?

I said that I wasn’t going to write another post about Friend Boy, but this one is a special request. The other day, one of my Twitter followers mentioned that she liked my relationship blogging and we started talking about a crush she has on a friend.  It struck me then that the word “crush” is pretty juvenile. Remember when you got those indescribable tingly feelings in junior high if the cute boy walked in the room? Or how you felt when you got that poster of Michael Jackson in the yellow sweater-vest? You were experiencing burgeoning physical desires, the beginnings of puberty, and decidedly one-sided relationships with people you didn’t know.  You described those feelings for a boy or a girl as a “crush” because you weren’t mature enough for love, and perhaps not informed enough to want sex, but you knew you felt different.  Your parents – and Donny Osmond – might have called it “puppy love”, which is to say it was a little obedient, a little obsequious, and it would disappear as soon as you saw another cute, fuzzy doggy.  Depth of feeling aside, another key to those middle-school crushes was your unwillingness to tell the object of your affections about your awkward feelings, choosing to share them with your friends at the lunch table in hushed giggles and secretive tones.   You wouldn’t have even thought to make your feelings known for fear of rejection, embarrassment, anxiety, public humiliation and so-forth. Then again, you didn’t really know what your feelings meant at 12 or 13, so what was going to happen anyway?

I never had the least notion.That I could fall with so much emotion. – George and Ira Gershwin, I’ve Got A Crush On You

Flash forward to adulthood and some of us (and by “us” I mean women, mostly) still approach our feelings as though we’re teenagers.  For example, when I casually refer to Friend Boy, I call him “this guy I kinda have a crush on,” at least when I don’t feel like going into details.  My Twitter timeline is replete with all manner of crush conversations at any given time, and I wanted to get to the bottom of what it all meant.  A number of women between 25 and 40 professed to having crushes on people they don’t know:  the striking female basketball star, the gorgeous politically-conscious actor who blogs about socialism.  Other women use “crush” to describe someone they don’t know well:  the casual acquaintance or person they met once and now follow on Twitter.  Other crushes are friends, ex’s, coworkers that women know well enough to care for yet refrain from calling the relationship anything but a crush.   None of the women I talked to have sex or intimate relationships relationships with their crushes, but have varying levels of interest in getting something started, if you know what I mean.

For all the childhood meanings attributed to our crushes, they tend to take over our collective minds and at least some part of our hearts and bodies.  One of my girlfriends professes to “need” a crush on someone to keep her occupied.  Said “occupation” doesn’t include spending her time with the guy she likes, just the occupation of countless braincells in the plotting of where to see the crush, what to say to the crush, what the last conversation with the crush actually meant.  Yeah, it sounds just like fifth grade.  I don’t think of Friend Boy as a crush, yet I do spend some amount of brain power pondering our non-relationship, whether I want to actually have one with him, and why he never makes any plans to hang out with me.  Even though I’m not passing him any notes in study hall, I still feel a little giddy when he calls/texts/Tweets/Facebooks me and calls me “babe.”  (Don’t judge me!)  Yeah, I think I’m a little pathetic, and my friends are pathetic too.  You’d think we could see our way to act like we’ve been dating and having sex for a good number of years instead of hiding away our real feelings and reverting to junior-high shorthand to describe romantic potential.  Or are we just hiding from relationships in general?

I’m not a player, I just crush a lot. – Big Punisher, Still Not a Player

Men, it seems, break down the crush nomenclature a little differently. A male Twitter follower described it like this: “if you day dream about sex with her its simple attraction if you day dream [sic] about GFE then its a crush“. Apparently “GFE” means “girlfriend experience“. I’ve never heard that before, which likely explains why I’m still single.  Anyway, this male crushing behavior is about having a relationship, wanting a girlfriend, seeing something happen.  I know I’m looking at a sample-size of one, but take the rap lyrics I quoted above and note that the word “crush” was actually a substitute for “fuck” in the radio edit of Big Pun’s hit song.  So, he’s not a player but he gets a lot of tail.  In this context, crushing is all about the physical relationship vs. the GFE, but it still connotes action, closure, and disclosure.  After all, Pun isn’t going around fucking a bunch of women who don’t know he’s at least interested in them for something.  Which brings me back to why the women I know – myself included – are carrying a torch for any number of people and keeping it a secret?

There was one thing I didn’t show, I love him and he doesn’t know – Zhane, Crush

One of my favorite “where are they now?” groups, Zhane, hits the nail on the head with the lyrics of their aptly-named Crush: “Will he turn around, walk away/Will he leave or will he stay if I tell him?”  Okay, ladies, we’re afraid of what will happen if we fess up to ol’ boy (or ol’ girl) that we have some romantic feelings for them.  We’re some punk-ass bitches, and I use the term with the utmost love and sisterhood.  Rejection feels bad, but so does stewing in your own juices.  I’ve given a lot of lip service to thinking about my feelings and proceeding cautiously into romance, but sometimes I’m just kidding myself and hiding behind the positive self-talk.  If you like a guy, or a girl, or a few of each, who not tell them?  If this crush you’re talking about is really about the significant-other experience (like the dudes say), then get off your ass and do something to make it happen.  If your crush is, as my friend Tanya says, something you need to entertain yourself, figure out why you MUST occupy your mind with fantasies that you don’t want to turn into reality.  I’m serious about this.  Decide if someone is worth your mental energy, then pursue them or let it drop and start thinking about something useful like where to put your 401(k) savings or how SB1070 will impact national immigration policy.  Just stop acting like a teenager, WOMAN-UP already, and go for yours.

Now I’m gonna take my own advice and spend the rest of the day getting my FTP site to work.  My tech issues might be less appealing than thinking about how Friend Boy’s hands would feel on my body, but I’ll definitely have something to show for it when I’m finished.

A few months ago, I wrote an innocuous post about how Black folks don’t like the Twilight movies.  In [...]]]> Congratulate me; I’ve MADE IT!!!!  I am officially a member of the Blogosphere, the Twitterati, the Social Media Movers and Shakers.  And to what, you may ask, can I attribute my rise to fame?  Twilight fans and hateration.

A few months ago, I wrote an innocuous post about how Black folks don’t like the Twilight movies.  In case you don’t click on the link, I will describe my post as brimming with my trademark sarcastic wit.  The blog entry in question was also based on my reading of all 4 books in the Twilight series, watching the first movie, and trolling the legions of gay men,  middle-aged housewives, and screaming teenagers pledging their internet love to Edward and Jacob.  First, I just couldn’t see why throngs of grown-ass women were all twisted over it, other than the sexual frustration and lack of romance in their lives.  Second, I didn’t see a lot of color in my research, unless you count the Native American werewolves.  Third, even with my lifelong geekdom and overall interest in the vampire genre, even I couldn’t get with all the vanilla in Stephenie Meyer’s work.  And if I, the nerdiest of all Black girls, couldn’t see the draw, I looked for a cultural angle to my distaste and wrote about it.

Enter “Black Chicks Love Twilight.“ This month, I’m their biggest hater target (even though I got most of my site traffic from them this month, but no comments on my post about how hateful I am…thanks girls!) because of my “stupidity”.  I love it!  The beauty of user-generated content is that average people are free to say what they want, when they want, about whomever they want.  Unlike a lot of people, I’m happy to be an internet target, mostly because I understand that idle insults are par for the course; if thousands and millions of people come across a small part of you every day, someone is bound to misunderstand you.  You can either take issue or let it roll.

This is not the first time I’ve been maligned electronically.  Last year I wrote one of those “Complaint Box” pieces for the New York Times where you complain about inane things and they’ll print it.  I was glad the editors like my writing and kept it moving.  Also, my biggest pet peeve is seeing guys’ underwear because their pants are below the equator.  Anyway, hundreds of people commented on my little essay, which means I struck a chord with Times readers.  Journalistic success!  A bunch of the comments were overwhelmingly negative and lashed out at me personally.  The “me” they had in mind was a snobby (sometimes), old (not yet), White (uh, NOT) woman from the suburbs (yo, I’m from Queens – ya heard?) who didn’t understand “urban” culture.  Again, I thought it was fantastic because the readers parsed my identity from a few words with no photo, and no context for who I really am other than the fact that I read the New York Times.  I can’t really find fault with that because my haters don’t really know me, just an image based on what I say.  That I can perpetrate as a stodgy member of the majority makes me feel pretty good about my literary skills.

I’m glad the girl from Black Chicks Love Twilight went after me.  She clearly understands what this social media business is all about:  namely, that she can express her feelings any way she chooses.  I’m also glad she points out to her readers that it’s OK for Black girls to like certain things without being accused of “acting White”.  She probably doesn’t realize that I heard that phrase for longer than she’s been alive, otherwise she’d be asking my advice instead of criticizing. And speaking of advice, if she’s reading this I do want her to check spelling and grammar before publishing her pages:  if Black Chicks are doing anything in public, we need to come correct!

*picks Angela Davis Afro and throws up Black Power fist*