Dopp Juice

The BlogHer Geek Lab in Washington, DC was loaded with questions about how to improve a blog and increase its reach.  I ended up on my soapbox more times than I expected, ranting about misinformation and imploring bloggers to rethink their strategies.

I’m summarizing most of my rants below because I think they’ll be helpful to some people.  Please keep in mind that I’m coming at this from my own experience.  I’m not an “ad revenue” blogger, and there are plenty out there who can give you tips on what they’ve done to be successful. I encourage you to go talk to them, too.

The Goals Rant

If you ask me, “How can I make my blog better?” I’m going to ask you what “better” means.  What are your goals? If you don’t know, stop whatever you’re doing right now and figure them out.  Here are some common ones:

I want to…

• express myself in a creative, positive way.
• vent my frustrations in a safe and constructive way.
• work through some challenging issues.
• document a process or experience.
• create a space for myself that’s separate from my daily life.
• establish a certain kind of reputation.
• convey a certain tone and aesthetic.
• serve a certain community in a certain way.
• build a community that supports me.
• make money with ads and affiliate revenue.
• find new work/jobs/clients/customers.
• maintain my existing work/jobs/clients/customers.
• give friends and family a way to keep track of me.
• keep track of my thoughts and the interesting things I’ve found on the web.

If you have a lot of these goals (and hopefully some others I haven’t named yet), that’s great!  Now you need to prioritize them. Which ONE do you care about first and foremost? How about second? Third? Fourth? Lay them all out in order — NO TIES! It’s fine if your priorities change in the future, but you need to be honest with yourself about what they are right now.

Once you’ve got that, you’ll know what “better” means. And you’ll probably be able to brainstorm about 20 answers to your original question without any help from me now, too.

The Money Rant

So you want to make money from blogging, and you’ve heard that ad revenue is the way to go.  That’s great and I completely support you, but let’s talk about it for a minute.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogher geek lab

Thank you all for the positive responses to my story about spending time with the guy I found by the ocean who was having a bad experience on too many drugs.

Even my mother, fortunately, responded with “I’m so proud of you”… which, I think, is a pretty big deal. Most moms I know would be inclined to scream, “WHAT ON EARTH WERE YOU DOING IN THAT DANGEROUS SITUATION?!”

I’ve gotten some responses, though, that put my actions up on some kind of superhuman pedestal, that’s a little weird to me.  (I got some of that after the
“homicidal drunk on the airplane” story, too)   When people need us (you, me, anyone), we help the way we know how to help, and we don’t think twice about it.  There’s nothing magical about that.  It’s just showing up.

But people can only respond to what I give them, so it seems misleading at this point not to disclose another piece of my history: I’ve gotten help for substance abuse.

Several years ago, I went through a period where I was severely depressed.  I leaned heavily on alcohol to survive it. Pretty quickly, my reliance on alcohol become more destructive than my depression.

There’s a long story here, and I’m going to give you the really short version.  I scared myself, I realized I needed help, and I went into an alcohol abuse recovery program (the famous one — the one you’re not supposed to name). I also started seeing a therapist.  I spent eight months battling my compulsive actions and the depression that caused them, until I finally got to the root of the problem:

I was queer and not accepting it.

(Ain’t that one a stinker?)

I worked through the depression, and then worked with my therapist to experiment with letting alcohol back into my life.  I drank lightly, socially, and didn’t enjoy getting drunk.  I wasn’t, by the program’s definition, an alcoholic.

The recovery program and I had a very sad breakup, in which I couldn’t really explain my story because it didn’t fit their model for recovery.  I’m still a huge fan of their program, though. I’ve seen it help lots of people — people who sincerely want to be helped — and I think, hands-down, it’s one of the best paths out there.  I know it helped me immensely.

But back to why I’m telling you this: the moral of the story is that I’ve spent stretches of time in community with people who are struggling with self-destructive behavior and trying to help each other through it.  I learned strategies that allow me to be present for people without letting their pain and flailing get too close to me.  And after a few minutes of conversation, I can usually tell the difference between someone who’s really looking for help and someone who’s still trying to control the situation.

This complicated stretch of my life, by the way, is also where I learned that hanging out by the ocean is a good way to remember that I’m not in control, either.

Walking down to the beach last night after dinner, I noticed there was a young athletic-looking guy lying on his back on a platform, shirtless and in basketball shorts, staring at the sky.  It looked like a nice place to rest and look up. I walked past him.

Before I got to the water, I heard a loud yell.  Like an “AAH!”  Then a pause.  Then another one.  Then I realized it was coming from him.  No one else was close enough to notice it or respond.

For a minute, I rolled my eyes and shot an accusatory glance at the ocean. That’s nice, but I have to work tonight. Get someone else, okay?

Two more yells.

Okay, fine.

I walked up to him.  “Hey! Are you okay?”

He shook his head like he was trying to talk, and nothing came out.  I saw that he was shivering, and took a few steps closer.

“Hey.  Do you need me to call an ambulance?

He found my face and said, “No. No. No. Please.”

“Okay. No problem. What do you need?  Are you cold?  Do you need a blanket?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.  Did you take drugs?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of drugs?  Did you take LSD?”

“No.”

My brain ran out of other drug ideas.  “What did you take?”

No response.  I looked at his scattered stuff.  There was a backpack, a textbook, a book called Kama Sutra for Gay Men, a towel, and a jacket wrapped around his leg.  He couldn’t move.  I climbed onto the platform and wrapped the towel across his chest.  I pulled the jacket off his leg, lifted him up by the shoulders, and placed it underneath his back.

I ended up spending four hours with him.  The first two were just sitting there, in the cold, trying to get him to talk.  He passed out a few times and I shook him back awake.  His name was Joey. He was 31.  His parents were in Arizona.  He hadn’t seen them in a long time and they didn’t accept him. He was gay.  He was a massage therapist.  He wanted to join the military.  He loved to cook.  He was addicted to meth, and was in a harm reduction program. He was homeless.  He wouldn’t say whether this was a suicide attempt or not. Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, thank you for all the kind notes of support you’ve been sending me over the last month. I’m so grateful for your comfort, inspiration, and encouragement.

I just got back to San Francisco after that three-week emotional roller-coaster. In a nutshell: I got to NH just in time (thanks to you). I held my grandmother as she died. I picked out her casket. I spoke at her funeral. I held the hands of two young cousins as they walked through everything they feared about death. I wrote. I worked. I spent two weeks living with my grandfather, helping him sort through details, clothing, trinkets, sympathy cards, visions for the future, and messy smatterings of sadness. I missed two Queer Open Mics. I left my car parked illegally. I forgot to pay my rent. I attended my cousin’s wedding. I fixed issues on four family computers. I found people. I held space for grief. I invented a new card game. I flew to Colorado and hiked beside the Continental Divide.  I threw a snowball in August.

And the lesson I’m taking home from all this is actually about dancing in China six years ago. It may seem completely unrelated, but it’s not.  Here’s what happened:

The “Dancing in China” Story

In 2002, I spent four months living in China. More than half of that trip was unplanned — I attended a 5-week study abroad program, and then just didn’t get on my plane home. Instead I set up shop in Qingdao, connected with other ex-pats, taught English under the table, and rented an apartment illegally. I spent many nights at a local bar called the Jazz Bar, which was the central hub for foreigners (and Chinese people who wanted to meet foreigners).

The bar was large and had great floor space. A local band named Angel Hair Tobacco played covers of American rock songs three times a week. It was a neighborhood pub set up for drinking, chatting, and playing darts. No one there danced.

My friends and I spent most nights playing cards, where the winner of each game always dared the loser to do something small and silly. After one particular card game, where I came out as the loser, the winner dared me to get up and dance to the next song at the front of bar.  This was a hugely bold dare and my pals laughed at the idea, figuring I would refuse to break the no-dancing taboo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself in a series of (mostly unrelated) events that all drilled into this same themes from different angles:  Women. Technology. Sexism. Sexual tension. Sexuality. Sexual privilege. Sexualization. Sexual harassment. Feminism. Power. Reaction. Anger.

The tech industry is a male-dominated field, and it doesn’t have a lot of social infrastructure in place for dealing with its sexual transgressions.  To add insult to injury, we’re stuck with woefully inadequate language to describe what’s happening in general terms.  The phrase “women in the tech industry” doesn’t refer to a unified group of people with common opinions and experiences.  Instead it describes a scattering of individuals who are, far too often, trying to get a job done as the only woman in a room.  They face sex-related challenges in professional situations on their own, and they’ve found their own ways of walking through them.

As a young woman in the tech industry who’s still just trying to figure out the rules to the game, I have to admit I’m a little pissed off about how much in-fighting, criticism, and judgment I see women dishing out to each other on the subject of sexism, sexual harassment, and other concepts that start with sex.  Forgive me for sounding naive and idealistic here, but it seems like our energy would be better spent respecting the differences of our individual paths over such a rocky terrain, and throwing each other a rope when needed.

As a gender-bending queer, I’ve always felt like mainstream representations of “women’s issues” included a lot of things I didn’t identify with, relate to, or experience in my daily life.  On the same token, I fight my own unique list of social battles that many “mainstream women” (which is a bullshit notion in itself) don’t have to deal with.  Our paths are different.

Except when they’re not.

Every single person on this planet can look at any large group of people and say, with plenty of evidence, “I’m one of them.”  That same person, looking at the same group of people, can also say with just as much truth and proof, “They’re not like me.”

And when we’re talking about sex -ism/-uality/-ualization/-ual harassment, what we’re talking about is a big fat knot that has no right answers, and we all have to find our own paths through it.

I’d like to walk through it with the support, thoughts, ideas, respect, and understanding of the women around me.

(p.s. Just dawned on me: stuff about sexual harassment in the tech industry is usually about office politics.  I’d just like to say that I work with the best, most respectful team on earth, and that area in my life is just fine.)

Running to the warm night beach before the sky loses all of its pink and the water fades from sapphire to black. 8:52pm

I found magic, and its tide is up. 8:53pm

Standing here alone. I’ve never seen the SF ocean so gorgeous. Want to share it. It smells like sushi. I have no camera. You’re missing it. 8:59pm

Right now, I get it. We’re building all these tools so we can connect everything because connection is the only way anything feels right. 9:02pm

I’m standing feet firm in the sand, dumbstruck that i’m talking to people who have no idea how this air feels, and that I can’t change that. 9:09pm

And at the same time, this conversation puts this experience into my narrative. Because you’re listening, I will remember this. 9:11pm

Our stories are stronger when others interact with them. I can spend entire days alone because I’ve created an audience that isn’t here. 9:17pm

I feel like my reality is changing in a direction I have too much control over. If my experience is so explicitly narrated, my ego owns me. 9:26pm

The sky and the water are both dark grey blue now, both highlighted with specks and streaks of white. But you only know cuz i’m telling you. 9:32pm

If I stand on my tiptoes and sink my feet in deep, the sand is still warm from the heat today. Even tho my head is getting cold from wet air 9:43pm

I’m still here. If you were here, you’d stay, too. But maybe only cuz I’d tell you why you should. I live-narrate meaning in meatspace, too. 10:00pm

Ok, so I don’t have more control. I just have a stronger filter on my perceptions because I have more tools to narrate and frame experience. 10:03pm

And I’ve totally disregarded my self-censoring limits on reasonable twitter frequency and intimacy tonight… making this even more surreal. 10:10pm

Before I walk away, you should know that the waves are moving like that nylon parachute you stood around in gym class and made ripples with. 10:14pm

That’s all. 10:14pm

Twitter is addictive for a lot of reasons.

• You can do it from your cell phone.
• You’re required to be brief (140 characters max).
• You can stay aware of what’s going on in lots of peoples’ lives with very little time investment.
• You can customize your experience by using 3rd party apps that meet your quirky specific needs.

Email, on the other hand, isn’t impressing me so much these days. Why? Because its etiquette is outdated. The following behaviors are still considered rude in the land of email:

• Not responding
• Taking more than 24 hours to respond
• Expecting an immediate response
• Not responding to every point in an email
• Responding to a long email with a very brief email
• Not including friendly small talk at the beginning and end of a message

Email is still trying to be a cross between phone calls and handwritten letters, and we don’t need that anymore. We need to replace Email Culture with a new set of tools and etiquette that helps us convey information and strengthen relationships in less time.

Twitter is showing us how it’s done, other social networking websites aren’t far behind, and SMS text messaging has exploded like a pack of Mentos in a bottle of Diet Coke. We’re craving lightweight communication and embracing it however we can. But there’s one lingering problem: Email is still our default form of communication. I might favor Twitter above all else, but I can only use Twitter to talk to other Twitter users. Email, on the other hand, is still the center of everyone’s universe.

So that’s why I’m calling you out, Email. It’s time to change.

• We want email clients that visually cue us to write shorter messages.
• We want really short emails to show up our cell phones as text messages.
• We want threaded message views that take Gmail’s interface a step further and look like iChat.
• We want the same freedom and flexibility that we’ve always had with email, but with tools that reward us for being brief.
• We want long messages to be special again.
• We want guilt-free communication.
• We want to be able to respond to more quickly, and therefore, to respond more.

What’s it gonna take to make this happen?

Tags: change, email, twitter

A Jewish friend of mine called me tonight after attending a lecture on the history of Christianity. When I answered the phone he started speaking a mile a minute about charisma, redaction, contradictions, Paul, gentiles, marketing strategies for salvation in ancient times, and the difference between “what likely happened” and “what was written about later on.” The lecture gave him a framework for looking at the story of Jesus in a way that actually made sense to him for the first time in his life, and he was bursting with revelations.

He said, “I had to talk to someone about this, and I knew you’d understand.”

My mom is a liberal UCC minister who is married to a Catholic. My aunt is a Reiki healer who is married to an Episcopal priest. My uncle is a Methodist minister. His son married a female rabbi. My other uncle and his wife and kids are all born-again Christians who have done extensive missionary work in other countries. My other uncle is 17-years sober recovering alcoholic who hits his knees every single morning and every single night to thank God for keeping him alive another day. My grandmother has been teaching Bible Study since God created the heavens and the earth, and she will continue to teach it until she gets swept up by the Rapture.

My mother says, “There are many ways to get to God, but you need to pick one.”

In the spirit of both acceptance and rebellion, I’ve been calling myself an Eclectic Agnostic since I was 16. This means that I don’t care who wrote what down in any book; I acknowledge that I am human, and that I don’t get to know much of anything at all. It also means that I play around in religion like it’s a swimming pool full of finger paints. I’ve considered myself a Taoist, a Buddhist, a Pagan, a Christian, and a whole lot of other things that I’m not quite sure how to label. As far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re all different words for the same experience of feeling connected and recognizing the importance of life.

A friend of mine in high school said to me, “You can’t just up and be a Taoist.”

I walked away from Christianity when I started picking apart the words. The image of a personified God made absolutely no sense to me. I put my hands on my hips and announced defiantly, “No, there is NOT an old man with a long grey beard in a white robe sitting in a big chair in the sky behind a pearly gate, pushing buttons and turning levers and determining what’s going to happen to us next. Uh-uh. No way. Ya’ll are stupid.” Fortunately for me, my über-religious family is also extraordinarily patient and accepting of the fact that people need to find their own paths. I’m a logic-brained writer. My path takes language very seriously.

If images of God are just metaphors, then aren’t monotheism and polytheism essentially talking about the same thing?

So I picked it apart. For awhile, I was convinced that Time was my higher power. It’s way more powerful than me. I’m always trying to speed it up or slow it down and I have absolutely zero impact on it. It’s also a reliable force to lean on when I need help. If I just let Time do it’s job while I focus on doing my own, it will pretty consistently save my ass.

That’s like God, right?

But I keep coming back to the core of my spirituality — a space in my life that I only started to be able to refer to as God again about a year ago (although I find I get fewer raised eyebrows when I refer to it as “The Universe” in the Bay Area). I recently grappled with it from a gender perspective and ended up with a beautiful poem that healed a lot of my old anger.

If we are all made in the image of God, then how in God’s name can God be gendered?

Tonight I found my thoughts on someone else’s blog. The completely amazing Emma McCreary wrote a beautiful post about the difference between our culture’s old ideas of God versus its new ideas of God. It perfectly sums up the tension I’ve felt around religions and explains why I keep going back to it: the new ideas work for me. In typical Emma fashion, she writes in a voice that is fluent in both Business and Spirituality — a mix I too rarely get to enjoy. Please go read her post, God is Bottom-Up, and tell me if it doesn’t resolve all of this stuff and put us all onto the same page once and for all.

I think the joy ninja’s got it.

John T. Unger just put up a post called, It’s only life or death. It’s always only life or death. It starts out:

“The best thing that ever happened to me was the night an angry, messed up cab driver pulled me into the back room of a 24 hour diner and held a huge handgun to my head for over ten minutes, all the while describing in intricately fetishistic detail exactly what would happen when he pulled the trigger.

“Why? Because it changes you, staring down a nutjob holding a gun. After that, the small stuff just doesn’t get sweated. You either break, or break through to a mandatory satori of keeping things in proportion that most people never get to walk away from. It’s an ice calm I wouldn’t trade for anything.”

This sounds like something straight out of Fight Club, but he’s exactly right. There’s this line between life and death where the crap that doesn’t really matter falls away.

Last month marked the ten-year anniversary of my failed suicide attempt. Ten years. It’s a good number. I’ve also been building website for ten years, and performing poetry at microphones for ten years. Guess what I started doing when I realized my life wasn’t going to live itself?

A brief backstory: I had a challenging adolescence. Combine growing up queer in a straight-or-gay world with watching my father slowly die of a terminal illness, and you have the perfect formula for depression and self-loathing. I hit a breaking point, devoured a bottle of sleeping pills, woke up the next day (surprise!), spent a week in a mental health ward, and then decided it was time to get a grip on things. I was fourteen years old.

I subscribe to the philosophy of “No Regrets.” We live, we learn, we move on. I reached a point where I was willing, ready, and determined to end my life, and then I lived beyond it. I’m not going to stand here and advocate suicide attempts, but I will say it was the most dramatic positive turning point in my life to date. I discovered that I’m not trapped in a meaningless and oppressive system. I found out that when life and death are on the line, all of the clutter falls away and we finally see the point: that we matter, that there is love all around us, and that all of those rules are really just suggestions. We get to do whatever we want.

As a sidenote… For anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts, I highly recommend the book Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws by Kate Bornstein. The premise is pretty simple: if you feel like you need to choose between doing [blank] and killing yourself, do [blank]. (And she has some great suggestions for “[blank]” if you’re getting bored with your own ideas.) If you want the book but you can’t bring yourself to purchase it, please email me.

Today my friend Nelz came out today on his professional tech programming blog as a tattooed and pierced, silly-flash-mob-organizing, sex-positive Burning Man fanatic. He invoked my favorite web comic and ended by cheering, “Hooray for transparency!”

I’ll add, Hooray for not taking suggestions that don’t work for us!

Tags: suicide

Nic Askew put together a video interview of Seth Godin speaking on curiosity. It’s so great to see Seth‘s animated face and voice speaking on the topics that I usually get only from him via text.

Here’s my quote mashup of the interview, for those who don’t have five minutes to watch:”What’s a fundamentalist? A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it. As opposed to a curious person, who explores first and then considers whether or not they want to accept the ramifications.”

“What we’re seeing is that fundamentalism has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with an outlook, regardless of what your religion is.”

“These are the people who still have a 12 flashing on their VCR. They are fearful, they are stuck, they’re not interested.”

“What we’re seeing is about a 5 or 10 or 15-year period where people start finding their voice, and they start realizing that the safest thing they can do feels risky, and the riskiest thing they can do is play it safe.”

“These people are the curious. Curious is the key word. It has nothing to do with income, nothing to do with education. It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope you’re interested in. Here’s the reason these people count: not because there’s a lot of them, but because these are the ones who talk to the people who are in stupor. They’re the ones who talk to the masses in the middle, who are stuck. The masses in the middle have brainwashed themselves into thinking it’s safe to do nothing.”

Tags: curiosity, seth godin, the creative life