Electrolicious

Around Dre’s and my 10 year anniversary a few months ago, I jokingly mentioned that I would write up our top five relationship tips. I never did, and someone just emailed to remind me. Oh yeah.

Ok, so obviously we’re just lucky and stupid and I honestly have no idea how a couple of etards who made out at a New Years rave ended up happily married 10 years later. But here are our theories on how we’ve made it work so far:

Speak the same emotional language
I think this is the biggest. Dre’s and my backgrounds are similar enough that when it comes to talking about feelings, we use the same words and the same communication techniques. My first boyfriend liked yelling to communicate anger, while I was/am a talker, processor and discusser. When we had a disagreement, he would yell while I tried talking and ultimately he just got frustrated and I ended up crying and nothing got resolved.

When Dre and I disagree, we use a common language to express sadness, anger, disappointment, and fear. We use the same techniques (lots of left-coast therapy speak) to express ourselves and resolve disagreements. Our language isn’t any more effective than any one else’s — my “I statements” were useless with my ex-boyfriend because he didn’t understand WTF I was jabbering about — but it’s important that it’s the same language. Maybe you’re both yellers. Maybe you’re both criers. Maybe you’re both fans of the dance-off. Doesn’t matter — you just need to understand each other.
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The other day, I got this question in a comment: “Do you find your fans/followers creepy? the ones you don’t know?”

The think the question was mostly meant in terms of Twitter, where the answer is most definitely no. I have two accounts: the one that’s private (it’s linked to my cell phone, and where I share Dodgeball-style updates about my location) and the new, public account that’s wide open and more a microblog. Granted, when I was at SXSW I was sharing my locations on that Twitter feed, but I was always with big groups of folks and never had any real concerns about being stalked.

So in terms of Twitter, the key for me is maintaining boundaries between the two separate accounts: the one for my “real life” folks, and the one for my internet friends/random strangers. (On this note: beloved internet friends, don’t be miffed if your follow request is denied for my private account.)

But to open the question to a larger context … the answer is a little bit more convoluted.
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Sarah Hepola takes on the “how can I become a writer, too?” question. I especially like the answer to “What else?”

From a comment to my recent post: Don’t [marketing] events like this kill off some small part of your soul? Does every part of our lives need to be sliced up and laid on a platter as a feast for marketers?

I stick my finger into marketing — it smells of nothing.
(with apologies to Kierkegaard)

This is totally a hot topic for me, and I really appreciate the question. To understand my thoughts on marketing, you first need to understand how I got into the industry.

Ten years ago, I started writing for a free rave magazine. I was idealistic and enthusiastic and completely committed to the community I was serving. A year and a half later, I was promoted to Editor in Chief. It was my job to write/edit all sorts of awesome content all about the culture and lifestyle of raving, which I was beyond enthusiastic about. I made very, VERY little money (sound familiar, fellow magazine folks?) but was deeply committed to my work.

Since Lotus was free, it was supported entirely by its advertisers. Most of these advertisers were electronic music and event-related — lots of record labels, production companies, etc. As soon as I became editor, I started getting huge amounts of pressure from the publisher about editorial content. We needed more music coverage! More album reviews! More event listings!

Why did the publisher care? Because that’s what the advertisers wanted to see. Maybe they weren’t going to demand a review of the exact product they were advertising, but they at least wanted to know that readers turned to the magazine for information about that product, and therefore would be receptive to a related advertisement.
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A few times on your blog I’ve seen you refer to your self as “postfeminist” — what exactly does this mean? Is it a particular branch of feminism, or does it stem from a sense that feminism is over?

Oh jesus. You really want to get me in trouble again, don’t you? Ok, I will write out a full answer to this question, but first with some caveats: I haven’t studied feminist theory. I am not a women’s studies grad. I don’t claim to speak for anyone other than myself. I’m not interested in debates about feminism. And finally: it makes me really sad that while 30 years ago a woman answer a question about feminism might fear retributions from men, I am honestly terrified of answering this question for fear of being attacked by other women. Because it’s happened before. And it was really awful, honestly.

But that’s silly — that fear of feminists would keep me from talking openly about my thoughts about my own feminism. So, let me say this first: while I can’t answer your question with anything other than my personal ramblings, women ten times smarter than me have written a lot about post-feminism:

Postfeminism vs. the Third Wave by Alison Piepmeier
Manufacturing Postfeminism by Susan J. Douglas
States of Play: Feminism, Gender Studies, and Performance by Janelle Reinelt

But, if you’re interested in my ramblings, read on. While you’re reading, I’ll strap on my helmet and wait for the bombs to start dropping from the rad-fem blogosphere.
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I grew up a tomboy at a boarding school… with horrid clichéd uniforms. Then my college wardrobe consisted of sweatshirts and pajama pants. Now here I am in my late twenties and I discover I have no personal style. Really honestly shamefully none. And I don’t even where to start. So my question is basically a plea for any tips/pointers for discovering and acquiring a unique personal style. Of course it would be preferable if your response was geared to someone a few steps too close to being a hopeless cause.

Thank you for giving me permission to get all crazy vapid here for a while. Evidently, I have a short novel to write in regards to my thoughts on style.

This is mildly embarrassing because I like to think I have better things to think/write about, but whatever. I like playing dress-up. I like street-wear costumes. It’s fun.
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We just got a beautiful little rescue chihuahua, and I keep thinking about Sassafras and what sort of dog she is and how you adjusted to having a dog in your busy working lives - I’m sure I could glean some of your wisdom in our first few weeks with nano! How did life change? Does Sass have any nervousness or fearfulness issues (nano does!)? Any sources of advice you found useful? Was Sass housetrained when you got her, or was there an adjustment period?

Sassafras was definitely a nervous dog when we first got her, and she’s still somewhat shy. That said, moving to Capitol Hill did wonders for her confidence — the two walks a day are full of bonding time as well as nonstop stimulus in the form of other people, dogs, smells, weird garbage in the street, etc. She’s gotten way better socialized just by living in a place where we walk her more.

Also, taking a dog training class made a big difference, not because she needed to be more obedient (she’s ridiculously submissive and a very good dog) but because it gave me clicker training tools to reward her and make her feel good about herself. It’s weird: dogs just want to make you happy. If they don’t know what they need to do, they get anxious. Clickers make it really easy to let them know what you like, and give them clear rewards when they do it.

In terms of how life changed, it’s definitely happier! Sassafras stayed with my mom while we were in Iowa last week, and my mom had her for a couple days on either end of the trip … it was odd being at our house without Sassafras! We missed her presence so much. Coming home is much more fun with a dog. At our place, it means a couple quick hello barks and much scrabbling of toenails on the floor and lots of full body wiggling. It used to mean a little leaking pee, too (aka “Submissive Urination“) but that went away once we figured out that we needed to stop getting her too excited when we got home. That’s different than housetraining though — she was already housetrained when we got her, so I can’t really answer that question.

I’m actually going to punt this question to my friend Dawn, who got a rescue chihuahua named Sprocket in June and had no shortage of challenges with him. He peed everywhere, attacked her friends (drawing blood once!), freaked out whenever anyone got near Dawn. I think she’s used a lot of Cesar Milan’s techniques — the first episode ever of The Dog Whisperer is all about an aggressive rescued chihuahua named Nunu.

Dawn’s thoughts are in the comments.

I was wondering if you could share your top 5 music tracks that make you wanna shake it?

This is an easy one, since I use Last.fm to track my listening habits: Here are my top tracks since 2005, most of which are rump-shakers at various BPMs. You can listen to 30-second previews of many of the tracks on that site. I take responsibility with all the tunes listed there, with the exception of its misrepresentation of Mika. Once, while listening the album, I muted my media PC when I left the room, and accidently left it playing overnight. Last.fm tracked hours and hours of Mika that I didn’t actually listen to. I mean, I like the album ok, but not THAT much.

I’m sort of autistic with my music, and when I find a track I like, I listen to it over and over and over and over again. It rotates biweekly, usually. I’m finally shaking off Britney Spears’ Piece of Me, and this week it’s most of Robyn’s album, but especially Robyn – Cobrastyle (I press trigger I don’t press people button…)

I’d like to know if you would share instructions for making the leg warmers out of the sweater arms.

Hey! Someone’s been reading for a few years! Back in winter 03/04, I wasn’t working much and had to go get crafty myself in an effort to maintain a steady, consistent level of franticness. (I’m trying to get better about that — the whole “having to do something every minute of the day to avoid thinking about stuff” thing.) I made these hat/legwarmer sets called Warmies for various friends and family for Christmas, and then decided to launch a whole branded online retail exercise where I was selling these sets on the internet at at a local craft show called I ♥ Rummage.

I always felt like a bit of a craft fraud. Seriously, here’s how easy it was to make the legwarmers:
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Is the arc of your life somewhat planned or is it as random as it appears. By this I mean, so many moves and job changes etc. Conversely, what are the unchanging elements that mean the most to you?

This is an awesome question. It’s odd to think of my life as seeming random because I am an obsessive planner when it comes to day to day things. I used to be a fan of 5 year plans, but honestly … I’ve had trouble with those lately because some life simply doesn’t go according to your plan and it can be very, VERY frustrating for a premeditated type like myself. In fact, it’s actually sort of nice to hear that my life looks random because it suggests that maybe I’m better at going with the flow than I feel like I am.

Then again, some of the randomness is just a factor of the blog format —
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