Page 300 of 524

In Praise of Teachers


Let me start with a disclaimer, I was a public school teacher for twenty years. I taught in the Midwest, but contrary to the belief that Midwesterners are mainly rural folk, I taught mainly working class, inner city kids. One of the schools I taught in was populated with nothing but children who thought milk came from the Anderson Erickson building about a quarter of a mile down the street.

There was nothing Norman Rockwell or Mayberry like about the students I saw year after year. Their parents worked at the tire plant or in the service industry and some didn’t work at all. The neighborhoods they lived in were run down and sometimes gang infested. A good number of them drank and did drugs at young ages and the girls ended up young mothers more often than they should have. Read Full Article

Getting Picked Up Again


Another of my pieces at 50 Something Moms will go into syndication the week of December 1st. I am pretty thrilled and slightly impressed with myself though goodness knows why. It’s not like anyone is paying me money and isn’t that how we are ultimately measured? 

Well, maybe not. I would like the opportunity to measure myself monetarily just a bit though where this whole writer gig thing is concerned. I keep hoping someone with the authority to say “Hey, come and write for us” will read me during one of these syndication opportunities because I haven’t any idea who to go to on my own – and believe me I would as I have no shame – or where there is a market for the kind of writer I am, at least on the Internet.

Writing is like real estate. It’s location and a bit of timing and a whole lot of salesmanship.

You can find my next syndicated piece here and my last offering here, if you haven’t caught it already. Let me know what you think!

What’s in Your Internet Closet is a Hump Day Hmmm


I blog, therefore I cannot work in the Obama White House. I also Facebook and have been a member of numerous on line communities from soap opera fan site and widow support groups to parenting sites where I discussed all manner of reproduction minutia that would make the skin literally crawl off anyone assigned the task of checking out my cyber-trail. 

In addition to outing one’s own behavior, good, bad and pornographic on the great WWW, a person coveting a position on the President-elect’s second coming team will also have to cough up the goods on his/her spouse and all their grown children (no word on the age at which they will be considered grown but as any parent can attest, children can be an embarrassment at nearly any point in their lives).

I have blogged so extensively about my life for the last decade I can be certain that I will 1) never get a job with Obama and 2) possibly just never be viably employed again given the work world’s obsessive need to know what I do on my off hours.

I guess I can see the Obama people’s point. Their guy is going to have a tough time as it is. He doesn’t need to worry about what his “people” have been up to on the ‘net. And while I don’t believe it is fair play to dig up blog posts or comments from years ago to try and tarnish a person’s reputation, because this implies we are all set in stone and incapable of growth or change, I can understand an employer’s side of things. Blogging and other social networking is like the tattoo your mom or dad told you not to get because you would regret it someday. But they were old and uncool and you knew better, didn’t you? So now, Lola or Chad is history you can barely recall – because of the amount of alcohol you were consuming back then – but the tat you got in their honor is still there, faded and starting to visibly sag. If only you had listened to your unhip parents. 

The same can be said, of course, for that post you wrote about having sex with that guy you didn’t really want to have sex with or the time you twittered about the pub crawl – while you were mid crawl – and provided photos to boot. Or maybe those pictures are on your MySpace or Facebook page, tagged for all to correctly identify you.

And let’s not forget the mommy bloggers out there who are ruining their children’s futures with every stroke of the keypad.

A full confession for Team Obama includes among other things: all websites, every alias and a recap of every time you flamed someone or went off on a Keith Olbermann rant. Flaming alone would get my resume circularly filed. Soap opera sites are dog eat dog, people.

My worst peccadillo was replying to a post on the widow board about whiny people. The author felt indifferent to the point of  being cold to non-widoweds problems and resented having to listen to them because they were trivial. I replied that this didn’t bother me as much as widowed who did the same thing (whined about little things) because the non-widowed didn’t have a sense of perspective (actually people who have experienced great tragedy in general have this sense of what is really important – well most do). I was chastised off the board while being reminded that only the widowed are allowed to elevate mole hills to mountains – so there. Probably my least shiny moment. One day I might let that go. But not today.

So what’s in your Internet Closet? Publish porn much? Frequent Yahoo chat rooms just to pick ideological fights? Have an alias persona on Facebook? The President-elect would like to know, so he can disqualify you.