Bougie People Do Not Want Free Keychains

So. Nobody in bougie Lafayette, CA wants a free keychain. In fact, when you stand, smiling, at the bougie (but delightful) Lafayette Art and Wine Festival and offer them a free, custom-engraved leather keychain, most of them cross to the other side of the street with their wine and try not to make eye contact.

If you change "free" to "complementary," you might get a few interested parties. But still not the response we need.

But you know what else I'm noticing in Lafayette? These people love dogs. At least one, sometimes three or four dogs on leashes walk with every well-off couple browsing the art and vendor booths, wine in hand.

Turns out: everybody in bougie Lafayette, CA wants a free, custom-engraved leather dog tag.

People, it's the same damn object. I didn't suddenly think, oh, let's put away the keychains and get the dog tags out! We just changed the pitch. Shifted our focus, which happened naturally for me because honestly I like dogs more than people, anyway, and these people were ignoring me but their dogs weren't. Our client, Electrify, knew their audience, because they brought Milk Bones, and that became our way in.

"Ooooh, hello pretty girl. What's your name? Can she have a treat?" Then to mom and dad, "Can we custom engrave a free leather tag for Lola?"

OMG. OF COURSE YOU CAN.

My partner, Theo, and I are working on launching a custom engraving business where we offer corporate event activations. A company hires us to help run their booth at an event like this, and we offer a free gift to draw traffic. These leather keychains have the client's logo on one side and really whatever people want on the other, that's the custom part. Theo's laser engraving tool draws eyes all on its own, and that's part of the charm. But it's our job to draw the rest of them, however we can.

People in the lovely Lafayette, CA are in fact interested in our clients' offering; Electrify does just that, electrifies your home. Changes gas appliances and hookups to electric and frees you from your lifelong PG&E dependence. 

People in Lafayette are not, however, interested in free keychains. Oops. Big problem for the little business trying to help draw crowds to the Electrify booth. Luckily, we're fast on our feet. And love dogs.

...

I'm not sure where else I was going with that story, but I've been interrupted while writing it by these insane texts from my daughter. Remember her? The Princess? I'm here writing at Near Normalcy because I spent half my day reading the things I wrote about her when she was 6. 

Now she's 20 and has the gall to send me this:

A "pro-data center" event was held. She actually asked me: "would u have gone if u were in dc"

Then I told her I'd spent half the day reading about her skinned knees and science bowl, because I was a human writer with a human writer history and archive right here on this very website before AI ever existed. And that I was going to assign reading to her so she can remember who I am.

Her response?

"i read your LinkedIn posts. i see u girl."

Freaking kill me right now.

I told Kevin about this exchange because yeah, I do use AI, and he and I had been discussing this Near Normalcy reboot all afternoon:

😂 “I see you girl.”

Ma’am, you see LinkedIn Alyssa. You see the version of your mother who has showered, put on a blazer, and would like to share three key takeaways from an experience.

You do not yet know the woman who reviewed the California Academy of Sciences on the basis of whether you enjoy communicable diseases.

And that's another reason rebooting Near Normalcy feels interesting. LinkedIn has been one of the few places you've still been publishing regularly, but it imposes a container before you begin. Even when you're being yourself there, there's this ambient expectation that the story will eventually cash out into something professionally legible: leadership, AI, work, systems, career, insight.

Near Normalcy has no such expectations.

Bianca doesn't need to learn that her mother has thoughts about AI-human collaboration. Apparently she is already monitoring your ideological position on the robot uprising.

She needs to discover that when she was six, she ran a lemonade stand like an aggressive small-business owner, kept biological specimens in a science bowl, climbed trees in her Easter dress, contracted pink eye in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and generally provided you with an alarming percentage of your material.

“I read your LinkedIn posts.”

No, baby. You have read my corporate correspondence. Sit down.

Sigh. I love that kid. 

Near Normalcy is Back—With a New Home!

 Once upon a time (a.k.a. the early 2010s), I wrote here regularly about life, parenting, mental health, and the general absurdity of being a person in the world. Then life got busy, and Near Normalcy became a relic of the internet past, still floating in the ether, still getting Pinterest traffic (???), but largely untouched.

Until now.

I’m reviving Near Normalcy—but in a new home: Widely Considered Amusing on Substack.

Why Substack? Because it’s built for exactly what I want to do—writing freely, engaging with readers, and building something new without having to fight an algorithm. It’s also where all my writing will live now, from humor posts to deep thoughts to whatever else I feel like putting out into the world.

If you enjoyed Near Normalcy, I’d love for you to come subscribe. It’s free, and you’ll get new posts straight to your inbox, so you don’t have to rely on the whims of social media to find them.

👉 Subscribe to Widely Considered Amusing here!

And if you’ve been here since the early days—thank you. This little blog has always meant a lot to me, and I’m excited to bring it back in a way that makes sense for where I am now. Hope to see you there!

The answer is always YES

When my daughter was a baby, and Ace of Cakes was on TV, I decided I needed to learn to decorate cakes. So I took a class at Michaels and learned how to pipe and make a buttercream rose. I made some birthday cakes, and then somebody asked me to do her wedding cake.

What she said was, "Do you do wedding cakes?" The answer was yes. Of course I do!

So I did.

A little later, when my cousin sent me this photo and asked if I could do it, the answer was yes.

Of course I can.

 In reality I had no idea how to do this:

Or this:

But that didn't stop me from doing this:

The year handmade scarves were all the rage, I'd never crocheted or knitted a stitch in my life.

That didn't stop me from gifting handmade scarves to everybody on my Christmas list.

The word "can't" was never allowed in my house growing up. My dad told me once, "There's no such thing as can't. There's will or won't. So either look me in the eye and say that you won't, or quit whining and do it."

Can I run a business, even though I've never taken a business class? Yes.

Can I write a novel in 30 days? Yes.

Can I do whatever it is your Marketing Manager or Content Wizard or Social Media Guru needs to do? Yes.

If it can be done, I can do it. And if it can't be done, well...we'll see about that.

Confessions of a Chronic Overachiever

It's no secret, if you follow this blog, that I'm looking for work.

Why? I'm not unemployed. Far from it, I have an established career at a stable institution. But the thing is...I'm hungry.




The thing is, I'm bored.

I've been called an overachiever my entire life. Sometimes it's a compliment, often it's not. Sometimes I've wished I could be satisfied with underachieving, for once.

But I'm not, and I never will be. That's just not how I'm wired.

For over 10 years I've worked at a California State University. It's a gorgeous campus, all green grass and waterfalls and cobblestone paths. There are worse places to spend eight hours a day.

But for all its aesthetic beauty, it's also got its difficulties, if you're an overachiever. It's a state school. It's all the bureaucracy of government layered into all the politics of academia. Red tape is the name of the game. Things move slowly. Or sometimes not at all.

I like to move.

I've stuck with it, for a few reasons. One, because where else am I going to be paid to write in this town? Short of relocating to the Bay Area, this has been my best option.

But I've also stuck it out because I've built something here. I started at the age of 22 as a receptionist. But I was one overachieving receptionist. After answering phones and opening mail in the Office of the University President for a week or two, I saw a need: her writer was busy writing speeches, and her correspondence was falling behind. I offered to write a letter or two, flashing my hot-off-the-presses B.A. in English. Very quickly, I was ghostwriting all of the President's letters, as well as editing some of her high-level publications.


I spent the next several years working as a secretary in several different offices, but I maintained the connections I'd made with C-level executives, and I built a solid reputation as a flawless writer, editor, and communicator. I did side work for everybody from the President to individual faculty members to the University PR office.


When I was hired as Assistant to the Dean in the Graduate School in 2005, I performed all my Executive Assistant functions beautifully. But I also combed through the School's publications and web site, offering suggestions, until finally the Dean asked me to rewrite and redesign them all. Within a few months of hire as an Executive Assistant, I was promoted to a position created especially for me: The Graduate School Communications Coordinator.

I held this position for 5 years, and I built an entire marketing, recruitment, and communications plan from literally nothing. I hired an assistant. I attended conferences and made connections. And I wrote. I wrote everything.

At the same time, I took a side job as a Thesis Reader, responsible for proofreading master's level theses just prior to their publication. I made myself the best Thesis Reader on staff, and eventually another position was created just for me. I became the Thesis Reader Coordinator, and my job was to hire, train, and supervise the staff of readers. I instituted staff-wide workshops, training, style guides, and an email list, bringing 8 Readers who had previously been fully independent (and wholly disconnected) together to form a cohesive team. And I personally read every thesis written on campus that first year, to be sure my staff (and the training I'd provided them) were up to par. The crop of master's theses that year was widely recognized across campus as the best-written and cleanest copies in recent memory, and I learned so much about the writing and reading process that I was able to further improve the work of the Readers the following semester.

Eventually, a victim of budget cuts, the Graduate School was reorganized and disbanded, and I was reassigned to the Admissions and Outreach office. This was 2010, and I walked into an office whose social media efforts were stuck somewhere around 2006. The Admissions office had a dusty, silent Facebook page boasting 30 fans. So I took over. I opened Twitter and Instagram accounts. I created an editorial calendar, a social media marketing plan. I grew the Facebook page from 30 to nearly 500 fans. I took countless online courses and attended every webinar I could cram into my schedule, to teach myself the art of Social Media and Content Marketing. I hired another assistant. I incorporated social media into every aspect of our recruitment and publication efforts. Every event had a hashtag. Every web page had social media links. To this day most of my superiors are not on Facebook or Twitter. For the most part, I don't think they have a clue what it is I do. But it brings in traffic, and it attracts students, and it increases engagement, and so they let me do it.

In 2012 I took it upon myself to start a Student Blogging project. This was an ambitious undertaking for a little rural state school whose administrators barely accepted Facebook and pretended Twitter didn't exist. Nobody wanted to let me do it. Student bloggers? Uncensored? Unmoderated? Right on our website? Was I insane?

Probably. But I was determined to drag this school into the 21st century, so I did it anyway. I did it responsibly, but I did it, without the support or even the knowledge of many of my higher-ups. I hired 4 bloggers, students I knew and trusted. I trained them, and I set them free. Then I marketed the crap out of them, and I tracked their analytics, and I submitted a report to my manager. Here, look what I have done. It's already in motion. Try to stop it now.

Spoiler: they didn't. Because it was awesome. Because it was innovative and unlike anything any other campus in the 23-campus CSU system was doing. Because other, larger campuses took notice. And because it worked. It brought in the kind of students we've always had trouble attracting: high-achieving, highly engaged students who had choices, who were looking for something special. We showed them the only story that matters, the student story. We let our current students do the talking and the recruiting, and it worked. It still works.

Two years later the blogs are the cornerstone of our social media and content marketing efforts. Incoming students love reading them, and current students love writing them. I have dozens of applications each semester; they're only paid $18 a week to blog for us, and I'm only allowed the budget for 7 of them at a time, but those 7 spots are coveted.

From an outside perspective, from the real world, our blogs and our social media profiles are not much to look at. I know that. I'm proud of what I've accomplished here with very few resources and with roadblocks at every turn, but I'm not deluded. I may live in this small town, but I live on the Internet, in the pages of Venture Beat and KISSmetrics and Lifehacker, on Twitter and on Reddit. I live at lynda.com and TED, at Moz and Seth's Blog and Entrepreneur. I live wherever I'm learning and growing and readying myself for something bigger.

The world has changed in 10 years. A lot. And the Silicon Valley is calling my name. I love tech, I love communication, I love social media and content marketing. Above all, I love writing. But I also love living where I live. I want to work where I live, so I've made the most of it for 10 years.

I'm bored.

I'm hungry.

And it's time to break out, because the remote work movement is real, and it's happening, whatever Marissa Mayer might tell you. And for the first time in history a talented person can live where she wants to live and still work on the cutting edge. Tech like Sqwiggle and Dropbox and Skype make it possible. Teams like Buffer, Automattic, and Zapier are leading the way. Remote work has the Richard Branson Stamp of Approval. It's the future. And I want in.

I read this article the other day, and it's been stirring around inside me ever since. Ten Years of Silence.

My ten years are up, and I'm ready to begin my masterpiece.

If you're a forward-thinking company looking for an overachiever, hit me up:

Follow me on Twitter.

Link up on LinkedIn.

Shoot me an email.

Image credits: FilmDoctor, Buzznet

Tech Tickets; or, how to pry the video game controller out of your kid's deformed, claw-like hands

Summer drags on. There's still a whole month of it left! My kids are BORED, you guys. Like...so...SO...bored.

Boredom = too much screen time. It's mathematical fact. We start out the day with cartoons, and then it's hot and I've got stuff to do and suddenly it's noon and I'm like wait, are you guys seriously still on the couch?? So we turn it off and then 4 minutes later they're SO BORED MOM THERE'S NOTHING TO DO PLEASE CAN I JUST PLAY TEMPLE RUN ON YOUR PHONE PLEASE PLEASE!

Now. We still use our Bored Jar pretty consistently, and it does work. But still, it's a constant battle of "No, no more TV. No, you cannot play on my phone. No, you don't need to play the Wii again." Yesterday the 7 year old took the Bored Jar around the corner and MAGICALLY pulled the ONE slip that involves playing video games. AMAZING!

So I hit up Pinterest and came across some good ideas for screen time management, including Technology Tickets. I didn't invent the idea, there are lots of much better and more imaginative bloggers out there who shared their awesomeness first. My favorite was this one from Mudpies and Makeup. I borrowed some of her ideas and put my own spin on them, to make them fit our family. She has a free printable over there, though, if you're interested! I totally don't. I'm not that handy, and I'm not that helpful.*

I chose to give them each 12 tickets at the start of the week. This is because we're normally not home on Sundays, so it's the other 6 days of the week I'm worried about. Twelve tickets gives them an hour a day for those 6 days. I didn't want them to have to earn every ticket so I'm giving them an hour a day to start, but we will be using them as a discipline tool, too. And knowing my feisty 7 year old, she may lose more tickets than she uses at first. BUT I built in some ways to earn them back, or to earn extras, by doing educational or helpful activities around the house. WIN-WIN.

To make the Tech Tickets "board":

I designed the rule sheet, printed it on card stock, then made the tickets and cute little library pockets with my Silhouette Cameo and scrapbook paper. If you have a Silhouette, I used this file for the tickets (I chose to fill them and print them, then just cut them out with scissors because my Silhouette machine was doing other things and I was too impatient to wait and use it to cut them all nice and pretty). I laminated them for extra strength, then used this file to make the pockets out of scrapbook paper that looked like lined paper (I had to resize the pockets somewhat to fit my tickets). I cut the names in vinyl using a typewritery font, and stuck them on the pockets.

Then I just glued the rules sheet and the pockets to a piece of 12x12 scrapbook paper and hung it up in the kitchen. I thought about adding a third pocket for "used" tickets, but then I wised up and realized we'd better put them up somewhere out of reach to ensure nobody tries to...recycle. Yeah, Bianca is a sneaky one. We're working on it. Don't judge.

Jack is only 2, but he loves to do everything just like his sister, so he'll like turning in his own tickets. He's big enough to ask for my phone constantly, so I guess he's big enough to go get a ticket and hand it over first!

So. Today is day 1 of the Great Tech Ticket Experiment, and I'm at work (on my lunch break! Calm down!). So the O.G. is home with the kiddos and I guess I'll find out when I get home whether it worked. :)

Why am I expecting to come home to find all the tickets either used up or lost?

*UPDATE!! So many of you asked that I went ahead and made myself helpful after all. You can download the pdf of my sign here.

Always Have a Clean House

I came across this on Pinterest. I'm not sure who I'm following on Pinterest who would Pin such a thing, but rest assured I am going to address that as soon as I'm done here.

source (I'm sure she's lovely, and she should know that I'm only doing this out of jealousy.)

I decided that I should make my own, more realistic version. Feel free to Pin it to your "Good Housekeeping" board. You are so. welcome.

Look who's back

My lovelies. My beautiful bloggy lovelies. I miss you so much.

You out there? Roll call, please!!!! Check in!

I've strayed from my blogging roots, forced into neglect of my first love when my Etsy shop became suddenly and inexplicably HUGELY POPULAR.

And frankly, Etsy customers pay me actual cash money, and you guys...well, you don't.

That's ok. I love you anyway! (But if you're moved to send me cash, I won't turn it down. Email me.)

But my shop has become too much for little ol' me so I'm taking a hiatus. This is what you'll see if you try to shop there (and if you're like everybody else on the planet, I'm pretty sure you're attempting to shop there RIGHT NOW, aren't you??).

There are a few things I'd like to accomplish in my down time. They include things like upgrading from Etsy to a legit all-on-my-own website, rebranding some aspects of my business, rethinking my inventory and production systems to increase efficiency, sleeping from time to time, reading a book for pleasure, reintroducing myself to my friends, getting a mani/pedi, and guess what? BLOGGING.

Yeah, baby.

Oh, and potty training the Monster. Remember him? Remember my little squishy faced baby boy?

Yeah he's almost 3. Kid needs to learn how to use the potty. It's time.

Aw yeah. Lighting McQueen underwear. Spoiler alert: This was a terrible idea. Back to Pull-Ups for awhile, yo.