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Writing

How to Come up With Fresh Crap for Your Blog

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The biggest obstacle I face with blogging is coming up with fresh content.
And not swearing.
Swearing may be my largest obstacle.

Mom told me that when I moved to Los Angeles I turned into a “raging swearing jerk” that she “no longer recognized”. After LA, I dropped the jerky part, but kept the swearing. It has not only become a problem with my blog and social media profiles (my 92 year-old grandmother de-friended me on Facebook because of “my language”), but also in real life where I often find myself dropping little tiny F turds every now and then at work or in meetings. But my swearing is not the point of this post. I’m not even going to “accidentally” place a “fucking” or “shit” anywhere in that past sentence to try and be humorous.

The number one problemo I have with the bane of my existence, er, blog, is coming up with shit that doesn’t bore people to tears. Ideas I don’t feel like I’ve rehashed, don’t give a crap about, or know that others could (more…)

May 26, 2011 by
Fashion/Design

Televangelism Fashion

In honor of the shitty week that Harold Camping must be having, I thought I’d revisit a post I wrote about the awesome fashion sense of evangelists….

Sometimes I think about turning my blog into a fashion blog.

Fashion blogs always seem to be the belle of the ball.
The hit of the party.
The slut of the kegger.
They always get the most traffic and the most comments.
Which is interesting, because they’re usually written by a doe-eyed thirteen year-old girl from Winnipeg who likes to stand pigeon-toed and wear her Grandma’s reading glasses.
Anytime I do write about fashion, it’s one of three things- vintage clothing, making fun of American Apparel, and making fun of American Apparel while forgetting that I’m wearing an entire American Apparel ensemble.
However, I thought today that I might write a fashion post for a dude named Oral.
Yes, Oral.
Oral died recently and I had no idea who the heck he was. In fact, I’m super hung-up on the fact that a couple decided to name their (more…)
May 24, 2011 by
Austin

Can’t I Go to Both Hell AND Texas?

Yesterday my mother emailed me the above picture with the caption, “Remember this picture? I call it “Future Texan”.

I’d like to call it, “Future Toddlers and Tiaras Reject”, but “Future Texan” will suffice.

I’m a Northerner. A Yankee. I come from land where for six months of the year social interaction and entertainment is hunted for it’s rare and delicious meat. My ass had never seen the sun nor had my virgin taste buds made love to anything spicier than vanilla bean. Vanilla bean is not spicy, you say? You’re right. The word “vanilla” just seemed appropriate in this paragraph. Growing up in central New York makes you vanilla. I was vanilla. Diverse culture and cuisine are not prevalent in central New York. That’s not true. Diverse culture and cuisine outside of all the white people from Old Country is not prevalent. I had never even seen a Mexican restaurant until I moved to California. Sushi? Indian? Ethiopian? These things did not exist where I was from. I once heard there (more…)

May 20, 2011 by
20-Something, Hipstercrite Life

The Dizziness of Freedom

I recently discussed on my blog how I’ve developed crippling anxiety attacks at nighttime. Crippling is a strong word. More like curling up in a ball and whimpering myself into exhaustion. I’ve become absolutely convinced every night someone is trying to break into the house. Every single night. Like people have nothing better to do than hang outside my house and contemplate stealing the useless stuff I have to offer them every single day.

I know that these fears are irrational, though they are somewhat founded in recent violent goings-on in my neighborhood. Last week, two separate muggings occurred at popular east side bars, one where a young lady was brutally punched in the head. My boyfriend also lives in close proximity to the one intersection in all of Austin that houses every crackhead, prostitute, and pimp. Needless to say I envision a Thriller-like ragtag group parading in on the house as soon as the clock strikes 3AM.

On the surface my anxiety stems directly from these (more…)

May 19, 2011 by
Fashion/Design

The Rise and Fall of American Apparel

I have a secret to tell you.
I worked off and on at American Apparel for three years.

It’s true.
I was one of them.

I often felt this fact was a tiny mar on my resume and should be excluded from the story of my life. For a long time I simply didn’t tell anyone that I worked for the company. I was kind of embarrassed. I knew what many people thought of the company, but more importantly I knew what people thought that we, the employees, thought about ourselves. Which is that we are all stuck-up, pretentious hipsters who would rather stare at the ceiling and flash side-boob instead of smile at a customer. I mean, I think of ourselves that way sometimes. Having visited a number of American Apparels I can tell you that in some cases that statement is accurate. The company is not known for their customer service training. In fact, there is zero customer training other than looking “hip”. However, if the company is lucky enough to hire employees that already understand that greeting (more…)

May 16, 2011 by
Writing

Passive-Aggressive Note to Blogger

Dearest Blogger,

What the dealio, yo? That was a long ass time that your platform was down. Two days of not being able to blog feels like four days of not being able to Tweet and six days of not being able to look at Facebook.

You know, to people like me who obsessively refresh their page every 5 minutes to see if someone posted a new comment, the past two days have been sheer torture. At first I thought you shut down my blog because I talked about my pubes recently. Then I thought, “Maybe I posted a picture of a bunch of penises and totally forgot about it and someone called me in?” Every time I would type in my URL some weird Klingon-looking shit would come up on the screen. Luckily, trusty ol’ Twitter told me that I was not the only one facing this problem. In fact, come to find out, you f’ed up EVERYONE’s blogging day yesterday and today. Look! Now I’m forced to write this half-ass post because I couldn’t write on you last night or this morning.

And now I think you spread your (more…)

May 13, 2011 by
Pop Culture

What is Postmodern Tourism?

Oh, so there is a word for it: Postmodern Tourism.

Postmodern Tourism defines a growing trend in travel where adventurers visit offbeat or unpopular locations for purposes pertaining to both “personal interest and ironic detachment”. Places that hipsters giddily check into on Foursquare and breathlessly wait for their followers’ confused responses. Places such as Roswell, New Mexico, Flint, Michigan, or Chernobyl, Ukraine. Places that tell a story good or bad, that might give us a little insight into who we are. According to the above The Atlantic article, “urban exploration” has become increasingly popular due to high costs of traveling to less depressing places such as Hawaii, desensitization from the Internet, and society’s expanding enlightenment to how we’re f’ing up the world. Postmodern Tourism has a close relationship with a topic I find very interesting: ruin porn. Ruin porn is the sort of stuff that curious or nihilistic artists get off on. It’s the sort of thinking that drives (more…)

May 11, 2011 by
Writing

Twelve Ways to Boost Your Blog Traffic (Without Getting Naked)

I am ridic sick today.
Like, every time I read back the words I wrote they look like dkljpotughfgnjasa.
I can’t even form coherent sentences. I can’t even think of words! It took me roughly 58 seconds to think of the word “coherent”. There is a good chance I’m drooling on myself right now but can’t feel it.
I had to abandon the post I was working on for today. In the meantime, I dug up an old post that I wanted to polish off and revisit. There are some helpful hints in here- ones I should even remind myself.
——————————————————————————
You have nine followers, and one of them is your mother.
You wonder why the hell you’re even blogging.
You speculate if anyone will ever read your words.
You ponder if life is worth living.
Well look no further!
Listed below are twelve sure-fire ways to drive traffic to your blog and instantly boost your self-worth.

1.) Join Blogging Network Sites– The best blog networking website is Twenty-Something (more…)

May 9, 2011 by
Hipstercrite Life

Mommas.

Today I was going to post a guide to Postmodern Tourism, but decided instead to talk about my Momma.

My Momma was born in 1950 in a small town in Upstate, New York. She still lives in that town. In fact, she still lives in the house she grew up in. When she was 24, her father passed away and gave her the house. It was the house she brought my Daddy into and the house I grew up in. It’s a modest house, but it was always filled with screaming kids, Will Smith CDs blaring from the stereo, and love.

I grew up an only child with a single mother. My Dad left when I was a little girl. Heartbroken that her family fell apart, my mother did her best to raise me alone. She brought home poverty level earnings from my grandmother’s clothing store on a dying Main Street, but working for the family afforded her time to pick me up from school and attend every band concert, soccer game, and play. If it was difficult for my mother, I did not know because she made sure I didn’t see it. The few times (more…)

May 6, 2011 by
Hipstercrite Life

Sellin’ Out

So you know how I’ve been going blah blah blah about doing a blog redesign? Well, it’s finally happening.
Throughout this process I’ve written a couple blog posts and sent out some tweets asking for your input because I need constant positive reinforcement in my life.

You guys have been great. Your feedback encouraged me to move to WordPress and to not be such an f’ing pussy about this transition.

A few readers proposed the question, “Why change your blog at all? It’s the content that matters.”

I completely agree.

However, I’m changing the living shit out of this blog and here is why: I want to write more. I want to write about different topics. I want to write more than once a day. I want to write about what is going on in my life, what’s going on in pop culture, social media, non-profit, AND what’s going on in Austin or the World all in one day! I want to write about a cool new start-up venture I heard about in Austin or write about why I get constant charlie horses in my (more…)

May 4, 2011 by