Campfyre Stories

Yep, it’s a product review.

Periodically, I find information on becoming a product tester or promoter.  I’ve done this for many companies in many different ways.  I’m good at it, test thoroughly and don’t pull my punches when I review.  It’s one of the things that makes me an effective and well-followed (for Albany) reviewer on Yelp.

So I joined this site called Influenster and they sent me a “Vox Box” with natural items.  Most of what I got I didn’t like.  The food in the box tasted nasty, the cleanser had an ingredient I’m allergic to and I don’t regularly wear lip color.  Of the 8 products I received, one was so good that I actually want to share it with everyone I know.  (I do not get anything in return for this blog post.)

JASON Pure Hand Soap.  So impressed.

Now I’m not actually a big fan of liquid hand soap.  Even though it’s not, it feels like a waste and I just never buy it, but I’m a product tester, so I set it up at the kitchen sink, where I figured it would get the most use.  Now I think I’ll be buying it regularly.

Not only does it work for regular washing, it also works on random stickiness and caked on nasty dirt.  My brother and step-father are both electricians and they both found it as effective as the caustic go-to cleanser for construction workers (the name of which I have completely forgotten).  But this isn’t caustic.  It’s made with natural ingredients and has soothing aloe vera in it.  Even those construction guys can get clean hands with a little extra softness.

Basically, if you’re looking for a heavy-duty soap that won’t kill your hands, this is a fantastic product.

And if you want to sign up to be a product tester, I’m sold on Influenster, so come on over and join me.

I’m the type of girl who turns around and asks catcallers “Does that ever actually work?  You know, girls actually prefer ‘Hello’ to ‘Hey, sexy mama, work it!’.”

I’m the type of girl who scolds disrespectful teenagers in bad neighborhoods.

I’m the type of girl who has taken so many self-defense classes, I almost want to be able to use them, but instead I am exceptional at keeping myself safe.

I’m the type of girl who walks alone after dark.  I’m the type of girl who actively makes myself look crazy, so that the scary-looking guys coming down the sidewalk are the ones who cross the street to avoid me.

I’m the type of girl who shouts at the tricked out cars blasting bass-heavy music “Oooh!  I bet he has a big penis.  It makes me want to drop my pants Right.  Here.  Right.  Not.”

I’m the type of girl who, when my packages were being stolen, put out a decoy package with a nasty note inside and called out the random asshole in my vestibule with a visual of me coming toward him down my hallway and a “Can I help you?  No, you’re not ‘just’ doing anything.  Are you here to see me?  No?  Then you have no business here.  Next time I call the cops.”  but I never actually had to call the cops.

I’m the girl who goes outside to see if there is someone outside the window.  I’m the girl who says “Okay, I give up, why are you whistling outside of my window?”

I’m not the type of girl who calls the cops because I’m scared.  I’m not the type of girl who calls the cops before I say something directly.  Hell, I’m not even the type of girl to call 911, I’m more the type of girl to call the local non-emergency number because, frankly, my definition of emergency is pretty severe.

I am not the type of girl who needs rescuing.  And, frankly, I resent being made to feel like a different type of girl than I am.

…  there are times when I wish I had a man around.  Like when I am sexually harassed in my own living room by someone standing, whistling, catcalling outside of my window.

It’s not the catcalling or the harassment, it’s the invasion into my safe space.  When I’m in shared territory, I have my own tricks and plans to keep myself safe, which I do well, but when I’m home, relaxed, comfortable…  I don’t expect that sense of safety to be invaded, and the scared little girl inside of me longs for a big, strong man to protect me.

I know that it’s silly and all the other negative words that come to mind.  I know that having a man around wouldn’t necessarily make me any safer, or help me feel any safer.  Hell, looking at my exes, it’s possible that I might be more capable than any man of mine when it comes to scaring off creepers and robbers and other things that go bump in the dark.  But it doesn’t stop me from wishing for some strong, loving arms to comfort me, or a soothing voice to tell me that it’s okay, he’s gone now.

And, you know, acknowledging just having these thoughts makes me feel weak.  Weak, stupid, incapable, helpless, scared, intimidated…  I have a whole long list of negative words that keep running through my head.  I don’t believe those words are true, but it’s hard to convince myself of that.  Especially when I find myself feeling sick to my stomach, dreading the possibilities of tonight.

And all I want right now is someone to hold me and tell me that it’s okay.  You’re safe.  I love you.

So you have a blog, huh?  Wow, that’s great!  It’s really easy to have a blog, it’s even easy to build a following.  In fact, it’s not that difficult to set up link shares and Facebook updates and spam the hell out of your blog so that every random person in the blogosphere has, at the very least, heard of you.

But that doesn’t make you famous.

Sure, you have a following.  You have something to say and people listen to you as if you were an expert.  People follow your reviews and buy your endorsed products.  They come and join you on your excursions to experience whatever it is your local area has to offer, and when you tell your readers what you and your cronies liked, disliked, will revisit, will avoid, they sit up and take notice.  You have cheerleaders who will defend you when someone disagrees with your infinite wisdom.

This doesn’t make you an expert.

You see, this whole idea of “citizen journalism” has really just been used as an excuse to let major media outlets out of such silly things as “copy editing” and “proof reading”.  The realty of citizen journalism is that, for every blogger who breaks real news, there are hundreds who think they matter a whole lot more than the rest of the world thinks.

They don’t.

See, here’s the thing…  I get that you’ve spent more hours than you want to count promoting your personal brand; commenting on local media sites and blogs, handing out your business card to everyone whose hand you shake.  I get that you’ve invested your time and effort into your chosen words and your makeshift events.  I get that you consider your local “great blog!” award to be a major achievement, but you’re missing something here.

The reason you won that award is because you spammed the hell out of your readership.  Not even just about your own award, you tell your entire readership how to vote in every local poll or “best” list, even in categories you are unfamiliar with and categories that are completely subjective.  You’ve got this opinion of yourself that simply doesn’t exist outside of your contained URL.  People don’t actually know who you are.  A handful have heard of your blog.  There is a certain demographic that may think of you when it comes to your niche, but outside of that very small demographic, no one cares.

You see, if people want to read reviews about video games, they go to a site that specializes in video games, where they can get reviews not only from a single reviewer, but from several different reviewers and from laymen who review in the comments.  If people want movie reviews, they go to Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB where they can get information from multiple sources and not rely on an individual whose taste preferences may differ from their own.  This applies to every single category.  It’s why websites like Yelp succeed, because people can take the multiple reviews on a single location and make their own decision, but you’ve decided that you know better than everyone else on your topic of choice, and they should listen to your self-proclaimed expert opinion.

Before you call me a hypocrite, let’s really be honest here.  I may tell people what I think or how to do certain things where I do consider myself an expert (Facebook comes to mind), but I do not actually expect anyone to do what I tell them, simply because I told them.  I hope and expect that people will listen to me because I give sound advice or because I have proven to be reliable on certain topics.  That’s the difference, friend.  You tell people what to like because you think you know better than they do.  I tell people what I like and why and don’t really care if they agree with me.

But you are no more influential than I am.  In fact, you may be less influential because you confine yourself to your narcissistic corner of the internet, while I actually go out and talk to small business owners and consumers to find out where the gaps are between the two.  I’m actually in touch with what’s going on in this region, where you make proclamations and hope that the reality is close to what you read on the internet.

No, friend, you are not as important as you think you are.  You are not as influential, you are not the expert you want to be lauded as.  I won’t burst your bubble, but where our paths cross, your shameless self-promotion is getting a little old.  At the very least, own your self-importance instead of trying to hide it behind a facade of “helping people”.  You’re doing me no favors and you’re not aware of or willing to hear notes on the flaws in your plans.

So enjoy your bubble.  It’s safe, it’s quiet and it’s impermanent, at best.  I won’t take joy when it bursts, but I have a feeling I’ll like you better for it.

When I was a tween, I loved teen fiction, specifically science fiction.  I remember this one book about this girl whose family left an overpopulated Earth to become colonists in a bio dome on the moon.  Early in the book, the girl goes to the mall and daydreams about her family renting an apartment inside the mall.

I always knew it was only a matter of time.

…to the minute, I said “He sounds like a duck,” and with those words, my son entered the world.

Today, he is half my age, the age I was when he was born, a legal adult in the eyes of the nation.

Wow.

I have three marks of financial success for myself.  I have only achieved one.

• Not having to do my own laundry
• Have a tailor put pockets in all my girl clothes (skirts, pants, dresses)
• Custom shoes (that actually fit!)

These are not measures I would ever apply to anyone else.  They are personal, and I assume that everyone has their own list of what constitutes whatever kind of success.  I am 1/3 of the way toward achieving financial success in that I no longer wash/dry/fold my own laundry.

It came about several years ago, after a particularly intense Falcon Ridge.  It had already been a rainy weekend and, while we had already packed the car and moved it out of the camping area, most of the clothes we were bringing home were caked with dried mud.  The mere thought of sitting in a laundromat for the hours it would take to get those clothes clean just made me want to cry.  Then I remembered the laundromat that had a big sign about “Wash/Dry/Fold”.  I figured it would be a one-time (expensive) thing.  And it was expensive, since I wasn’t just paying for the weight of the clothes, but for the weight of the caked on mud, too.

Then a few months passed, all the while I was lugging my laundry to the grimy laundromat around the corner from me.  I’d spend at least 2 hours every time my laundry needed to be done, regardless of the amount of laundry I was doing.  I had to deal with sketchy surroundings, a bizarre mix of people, homeless loiterers (who often spend the night inside, sometimes even during the day), broken washing machines and dryers and, generally, an unpleasant atmosphere.  Taking my laundry elsewhere only resulted in the entire process taking even more time and me having to either pay for a cab or bum a ride from someone.  It was getting old.

So I dropped my laundry off to be washed/dried/folded just because I could, and you know what?  It wasn’t that expensive.  It’s close to $1/lb, and overall, it wasn’t much more than what I was paying for laundry soap, dryer sheets, quarters for the machines and transportation to and from.  I haven’t looked back.

I expected that people would find this pretentious.  It’s not like laundry is a particularly awful job and, considering I live close enough to laundromat that I can start the washers and go home for a half hour (similar with the dryer), it shouldn’t be that obnoxious, but a half hour isn’t very much time to accomplish anything and it’s a hard stop, because if all the machines are full and yours stops, people will remove your wet laundry and put it wherever the hell they feel like.  I even would admit it with a certain amount of shame at first, until someone unexpected made some excellent points.

If people didn’t want the service, it wouldn’t exist.  My time is better used doing other things, even my free time, and my paying to have my laundry w/d/f helps to keep people employed.  I can drop off my laundry on a Monday and go back and pick it up over the weekend.  The convenience of it is amazing.  I’ve developed a rapport with the women who work in the laundromat, and I like knowing that my clothes (which are high-quality) are taken care of well, and to my preferences (no bleach, low heat).

There’s no way I could justify it if I had a washer and dryer in my apartment.  I suppose the case could be made that there’s an element of laziness to not wanting to do my laundry, but it’s more of a logistics issue.  If there comes a point where I live in an apartment where doing laundry does not require quarters, I’ll scale back (at least) sending my laundry out, but in the meantime, as long as I can afford it, it’s one luxury I don’t plan on giving up.

I finally realized that I had been holding myself back.  The easy answer is to blame “Society“, but I don’t like to take the easy answers.  The truth is that I did it to myself, even if maybe I was taught by society at large to act in those ways.  You see, there are things that we all “know”, like “women don’t negotiate“, which leads to wage disparity.

Well, we know all about how the one leads to the other, but we don’t often take it to heart.  The reasons for women not negotiating are ingrained, not only in us, but in everyone.  Women who negotiate are labeled “bitches”, “cold”, “calculating” and, when coupled with assertiveness in other areas, “high-maintenance”.  Rarely are men labeled that way, because they’re expected to stand up for themselves.  Men who don’t are called names reminiscent of women like “sissy” (for sister?) or “pussy” (I hope I don’t need to explain this one…).

So be it.  If it means I can get what I need out of my career, go ahead an label me any of those negative things.  I won’t be a girl about my career anymore, I need to be a man about it and, so far, it’s serving me well.

It occurred to me that maybe there were more aspects than just my career where I could be well-served by more of a man-like attitude.  I’ve always loved that guys can get into a knock-down, drag-out fight one day and the next resolve it as simply as “We cool, bro?”  “Yeah, we’re cool”.  Women don’t do that.  We insist, largely, on talking out all the reasons we got into the fight and the underlying subtext and how we can avoid getting there again.  Ugh.  I really don’t need or want the drama.  How about I be more of a man about that, too?

I guess I’m just tired of gender roles, arbitrarily assigned because of a mindset from a culture that has moved past those sensibilities.  When my son was little, I was more of the traditional “Father” role and my ex played the “Mother” part.  The only problem was that Mother and Father are assigned by gender, but have meanings and connotations that go well beyond it.  Of course, in being the female parent, I have always been the mother, but in the sense of being the more nurturing, comforting, protective parent, that was his dad.  I was the disciplinarian, I was the primary financial provider, after the divorce, I was the one who took him out to do fun things and who pushed for his increase freedoms.

There are a lot of situations in which I fall into the traditional man’s role.  The thing is that I like being a girl.  I like my female parts, I like wearing skirts, I like pretty things, pink, cute shoes…  I appreciate my femininity and embrace it in many different ways. I am soft and (I like to think) pretty.  There’s no question that I’m a woman, sometimes even a girl (at 36 – heh), but I play the man’s part exceptionally well, and I largely enjoy it.  I just don’t like my femininity being belittled or my reputation besmirched because of it.

You see, I’ve decided that I’m not going to put too much stock in whether or not people call me (or think of me as) a bitch, cold, or even high-maintenance.  The truth is that I’m none of those things, quite the opposite, but I can’t afford to let my sunny, warm and easy-going disposition get in the way of doing what’s right for me.  So I’m gonna step up and “be a man”, and I’ll retain my warmth and femininity through it, even if it goes unnoticed.

But I think I can pull it off.