the Diva Platform

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I realized that the last day of the year would be a good time to make one final post here.

One final post?!

Yes, I’ve decided to stop posting here at the Diva Platform.  Why?  Well, it’s time for a little change.  Blogs have evolved over the last few years, and I think the more successful blogs focus on some sort of topic–whether it’s cakes or beer or being a mom or secrets.  Unless you’re famous or were an early blogger who managed to gain a large readership just because you were first, it’s hard to find an audience when you’re just a random person writing about random things.

I, being a writer, want to find an audience.  I’ve been throwing random blogs at the interwebs for a few years now, and yet, my readership isn’t quite where I’d like it to be (”quite” being an understatement).  I’d like to shake things up and try something different and see if that doesn’t help my work find a new audience.

Therefore, I’ve decided to start a new blog, and although it will still be partly random and partly ranting, it will be in the form of letters.  Two of the categories on this blog that I love writing are the “Letters” and “Postcards from…”, so I’ve created a new blog called “Your Pal, Jill,” that launches tomorrow.  It will exclusively be letters and postcards.  If I write them to an actual person (say, Mariah Carey, whose letter will be forthcoming), I’ll send them out and see if I get any response.  If I do, I’ll post it.

It’ll be a fun, new project, and I’ll see where it takes me.  I still hope to publish five days a week, but be patient with me.  It may take me a little while to get into a groove.  If you have any tips that you think might be up my alley, feel free to send them to me.  If I get riled up enough, I’ll send out a letter!  E-mail, as always, is jilljaracz AT yahoo DOT com.

So what will happen to this site, especially since I have my resume on it?  Well, it will stay up for a while (read your archives while you can), and I’ll revamp it to be a little more professional.

Thanks for reading the Diva Platform for the last few years.  I hope you’ll join me at the new site!

Today we’re headed to Florida for the holidays.  Since we bought plane tickets while the Boy was still unemployed, we focused on price.  Not surprisingly, flights to Florida during Christmas and New Year’s can get a little expensive, so we spread our dates out pretty far in order to save money.  We’ll be there for three weeks, which will be our longest stint yet.  We figured we had plenty of time to spare–and we could freelance from there.  Well, the Boy has to work at his new job, but since he’s telecommuting, he can do it from Florida just as well.

Hopefully the in-laws won’t get sick of me, lounging around on the couch, watching loads of cable reality TV (must watch “Hoarders“), and heading off to the fitness trail to work out.  I’m looking forward to a restful three weeks–even though I’ll be working as well–because I’m sure when we get back and our East Coast relocation starts in earnest, life will be a might busy.

While I’m gone, I think the blogging may be a little spotty.  I’d like to refuel and recharge a little bit more–even that week I took off, I didn’t really get a chance to take care of my to do list (for instance, my website still needs to be upgraded).  I’d like to experience life a little and come up with a nice little list of bloggable topics.  Oh, I won’t take the whole three weeks off–I’m sure there will be plenty of Floridian idiosyncracies to write about.  I just am going to hang loose a little when it comes to keeping a set blogging schedule.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the Accenture meeting, when company representatives decided that Tiger Woods wasn’t an appropriate spokesperson for their company.  You know, after they had the tag line, “Go on, be a Tiger.”

To be fair, hindsight makes this situation ironic, so you can’t fault Accenture or say they made a big mistake in hiring Tiger Woods in the first place.

The really funny times are when companies make huge blunders and say the dumbest things.  You’d think corporate leaders would be bright enough to keep their traps shut sometimes, but apparently the stupid button gets pushed by even the best of them.  Marketers don’t often do any better….ah, some good laughs in those links for you!

Last Sunday was the Windy City Rollers annual Black & Blue Ball, which celebrates the end of the year’s home and travel team seasons.  I didn’t know what the heck to expect–after all, the dress code was “formal, whatever that means to you.”  So few rules left me hanging, but people came wearing t-shirts, people wore a lot of sequins, Scorey Feldman put on blue face, and one skater even wore her wedding dress (I WILL wear it again!  I’ll show you!).  Thanks to H&M, I got a blue shirt with black sequins, so I felt a little sparkly and appropriate.

At any rate, it was a little food, a little booze, a few awards, and a talent show.  An awesome talent show.  Talents that ranged from a skater standing on her head to show underwear with “shark” written on the butt, another skater who ripped apples apart with her bare hands, some guitar playing, some burlesque, and the officials, who did a little dance to show off all the referee penalty signals.  It was awesome (of course).  I’m down in front with a couple other stats folks, doing my sexy stopwatch twirling.

Check out the video, but prepare to have your mind “officially blown” (or, if you don’t know derby penalty codes, play along at home).

When I was at Ulta on Sunday, I had a momentary lapse of judgment.  See, I was in a hurry, and didn’t want to deal with all the marketing spiels at the checkout counter.  Until the girl at the register asked if I wanted a couple months of In Style magazine for free. 

In a moment of weakness, I said yes.  Forget that I already subscribe to enough magazines.  Forget that I’m moving.  It was a magazine!  With a free subscription!

Ugh.

Now I’ll have to remember to cancel it….though maybe a year of In Style would be fun to get.  What do you think?

Whew!  I’m done with a really stressful writing assignment!  Done done.  Not “turned in, but there might be rewrites.” Done.

I’ve started writing for HowStuffWorks.com, which an old colleague of mine turned me onto.  I’m terribly happy to have the gig–not only is it a good move career-wise, the work is also pretty interesting and right up my alley.  Random stuff to learn?  Figuring out how stuff works?  Sign me up!

So far I’ve written three articles–I’m not sure if any of them have actually published yet though (you’ll hear about it when they do).  The most recent was on a specific type of skin lotion called a mattifying lotion.  Basically, these are lotions that help with oil control and give your skin a matte finish.

One would think writing about cosmetics might be fun, but it’s really about chemistry.  Let me tell you, I certainly struggled with this, seeing as how it’s been ages since my high school chemistry class, and my memories of chemistry class involve spending a lot of time at the teacher’s desk trying to get him to explain the material to me.

Back when I was a researcher, if I had to search a topic I knew nothing about, I’d figure out the keywords and eventually find what would help answer the question.  Now, I actually have to read said material and comprehend it–or at least comprehend it enough to write about it.  I’m on the flip side, and sometimes it’s a bear.

For this assignment, it meant stressing out over not finding much information about mattifiers.  I’d find that they were products, but I’d rarely find out about their chemical makeup.  This was incredibly frustrating and stressful, and all I can say is thank goodness for some Dow Corning white paper I found that went through some skin care chemistry.  After reading it about ten times, I understood a smidgen more and was able to locate other information to help me pound out this article.  A field trip to Ulta also saved my ass.  This great guy who worked at the Benefit counter took me all around the skin care section and showed me different mattifying lotions–which included putting some oil on my hand, then adding a bit of mattifier and seeing how the lotion soaked up the oil.  So cool!

Still, the article took me way more time than I’d planned on, and now that I’m finished with the article, my brain has already reclaimed that space where I put all the chemistry information I learned.  I could tell the second I read the e-mail from my editor saying the article passed muster.  She went on to say something about viscosity and methyls and polymers and some other big chemical-y words, and at that point my brain barely registered them as being in English.

Sigh.  Sometimes it’s tough to admit I just don’t get something, and I don’t think I’ll get much when it comes to chemistry.  Still, I’m relieved to know that I’m able to understand enough about it to be able to communicate it to someone.  For that skill alone, I’m glad to have struggled through this assignment.

This evening I rolled into my apartment around 11:00 (bells, then derby, then derby meeting), glanced around and saw the hovel it’s become.  Newspaper stacked all over (I may have read the paper last week), papers piled around because it’s gotten so cold in the bedroom that I really can’t work in there until we put up the plastic (and even then…)–see, one would think our building with the radiator heat would be nice and toasty warm, but we live in a 7-floor building, and apparently, the boiler’s designed for a 4-story building.  Sure, some heat rises from other floors, and the radiators do spit out some heat, but it’s really not enough.  It’s definitely not the toasty warmth you find on the first few floors.  Those people are probably tooling around their apartments in shorts.  I’m supposed to be tooling around in shorts!  Instead I’m bundled up and have a cold nose.

So the place is a mess, I’m cold, and I’ve had a good deal of difficult work (including an article involving chemistry.  I am woefully weak on chemistry, even if it is in regards to cosmetic products).  I’m taking everything one chunk at a time, and I hope I can just get through until we go to Florida for the holidays.  And although I hate to say it, this blog may be a little weak over the next couple of days.

Which is sad really, because blogging?  I love blogging!

We’re officially into holiday season, and I’m already wondering how people do it.  I don’t do nearly the work some people do for the holidays–for instance, since we go away, I don’t decorate the apartment–and yet, I feel totally sapped right now.  Maybe it’s because I have a decent amount of difficult work and my poor, old computer is getting slower by the hour, but I feel like I just can’t get around to doing the holidays.  Right now, I’m just taking life one task at a time and hoping I can focus on it enough to at least get it done and enjoy it while I do it.

Luckily, we’re headed to Florida soon.  Being in the warmth may feel more like Christmas to me!

We’ve been a little stressed out over the past couple of weeks, and I haven’t wanted to talk about it until we made a final decision.

The Boy’s been offered a job outside of Boston.

Yesterday we decided to take it.

It’s not just the fact that he’s been unemployed for 11 months, but this job is a good way for him to switch careers, something he’s been trying to do.  Me?  I can pick up and move anywhere, which is nice.

We’ve spent the last couple of days in the area, checking it out, making sure we could handle living here.  I think we can make it work.  The area is really pretty and charming.  We’d have to get used to driving everywhere–and the roads here are like Ireland’s:  Narrow, lots of stone walls bordering them, and horrible street signage (if the streets are even marked).

Over the next few months we’ll be in transition–even though the Boy starts right away, we get some time to pack up and relocate.  I’ve never done a full-on relocation like this, so it will be interesting, needless to say.

Well, my attempts at completing a fall reading list failed.  Out of five books I had on the list, I finished one (The Bourne Identity).  I quit another partway through (Ball Four).  And I’ve started a third (Nul Points).  Books four and five?  Might see the light of day.

What happened?  Well, more magazines seemed to happen. I was probably busier.  However, I did make time to read two books for my book club (City of Thieves and The Alchemist), and although neither was long, they did take time away from my personal list.

I also read a book the Doctor loaned me (Kathy Griffin’s book Official Book Club Selection), but the Doctor has a Kindle and bought the Kindle version of this book.

Which meant I had to borrow her entire Kindle.

If you may recall, the Boy is pretty adamant about not having a Kindle in the house, so I had to keep the Kindle pretty hush-hush, lest I incite some violence.  It stayed in my purse the entire time, so I only got to use it when I was commuting somewhere, and to my knowledge, the Boy never knew about it.  Until now, of course. But the Kindle is safely out of the house now.

What did I think of the whole Kindle experience?  Well, the Kindle is good for traveling.  It’s really light, and if you were going on a vacation, it’d be nice to take it instead of several books or travel guides.  It was also handy to read in a packed train, because I only needed one hand to “turn” the page.

However, I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy one anytime soon.  For starters, it took a long time to turn on (and by “long time,” I mean several seconds.  I could flip a book open and find my place quicker).  Then I noticed that even though this Kindle was pretty new, one of the “page forward” buttons was already starting to sink in a bit from use.  Does that break at some point because you’ve pressed it too much?  Although I liked the fact that you could turn a page forward with either hand, you could only flip backwards with the button on the left side (its counterpart on the right side of the device took you “home.”  I went “home” more often than I wanted to).  Also, pictures and captions rarely lined up on the same screen.  I’d see a picture, flip forward for the caption, then have to flip back to see who exactly was in the photo again.  That got old.

The biggest aspect I didn’t like though, was the fact that I never really understood where I was in the book.  Some coding I didn’t understand and a percentage figure run along the bottom of the screen, but it doesn’t really give you a sense of how much you’ve read.  I’m 41% in.  41% of what?  It’s different when you’re listening to a podcast on iTunes.  It tells you how long the show is, and you can figure out how much longer you have to go.  Being 76% of the way through a book of undetermined length doesn’t help me.  I never knew when I could expect to finish it.

Nope, fun gadgets or no, I think I’ll stick with my old-time paper books.  And my reading list?  Well, I’ll keep trying to whittle away on that.