So I thought I was overdue in posting photos, in fact this post was going to begin with, “I’m overdue in posting photos” however I just went and looked and unless I want to upload all the shots I took yesterday which I put on twitpic, which I don’t, I’m really not that overdue. Hence my reliance on Plan B. The Morning After Duckling.
By the way, that’s not my hand holding the duck. It’s not even my duck. How I wish it were!
Also, last night Dustin and I tried to do a livestream from his iPhone. This is what it sounded like: Lasht night Dushtin and I tried do do a liveshtream from his iPhone. We sounded drunk! But we weren’t! It was the audio! I shwear!
Also I have a couple little trips coming up and I couldn’t be more excited. Could I be more excited? I just said I couldn’t. Must I repeat everything?
Must I repeat everything?
Last week Tom Rapp played live on the show and it was amazing. I have all the footage sitting in my iMovie event pane and yet I can’t bring myself to begin editing. My ass is revolting. “Don’t sit on me!” it’s saying. Incidentally that was originally the slogan for the Continental Navy until a very early marketer came along and adjusted his powdered wig, had an affair with scullery maid, got drunk on moonshine and then belched something about synergy and call to action.
In other news, there is no other news. Actually, there may be but I don’t know if I feel like sharing.
Well I will tell you that two things are on my mind. One of them is that maybe I need to make some kind of special website for the show however what’s a good website that would have the video window and also the chat window? I’ve been looking at wordpress and tumblr themes and haven’t found anything that looks perfect or near perfect yet.
Also, I miss writing. This happens to me often. I bounce back and forth between missing performing and missing writing. When I miss writing it’s because a part of me looks at everything I’m doing and thinks, “What the hell are you doing?” and longs to feel like I’m actually adding something meaningful to discourse/culture. When I miss performing it’s because part of me looks at what I’m writing and thinks, “This is about hair.”
Ok that’s not true. I only wrote one story about hair, titled “The Braid Bunch” and it was pretty good if I do say so myself, which I just did.
There’s a lot of talk in this new media world about “passion.” I imagine there’s a lot of talk about it on couples’ retreats as well. But inasmuch as it applies to branding and point of view and labeling and stuff which fundamentally makes me feel icky and yet is so necessary in this world it’s shorthand for “what do you stand for in a couple words.” So I’ve been thinking about what my passion is. By the way, you can’t say your passion is being entertaining. Or being funny. Or being liked. So I’ve been thinking about the inverse: what really pisses me off. Granted that’s not really the inverse of passion but you know. Things which piss me off? Stupidity, rigidity, lack of self-awareness, people who think they can outsmart you, bullshit, lack of ducklings.
Actually, I’m cutting myself off because I was just reminded of a different direction I wanted to go: there is something which has been pissing me off lately. Growing up I was a quiet conscientious overweight nerd. The nicest quiet conscientious overweight nerd you’d want to meet, but you get my drift. And then I was a professional writer for years and years. And now all of a sudden I’m on TV and I’m pretty and people react to me as an attractive person and while part of me accepts it, there’s a part of me that doesn’t connect at all with the person who people are reacting to. Does that make sense? It doesn’t really need to. So for awhile being treated as just a pretty face or as an object, if you will, which you will, was sort of thrilling in this very novel sense. Because the vulnerable part of me was the looks part, not the brains part. I’ve never questioned my intellingence and what I’ve accomplished, those parts of my identity are ironclad and for that reason I also don’t really ram them down people’s throats. I just figure that people will google search my name and see I’ve published thousands of articles or maybe I never thought it through enough to really realize that’s what they would need to do.
So fast forward to now-ish when occasionally I get treated like one of those talking heads on TV whose title is made up to give them a reason to go on TV and who is fundamentally an insubstantial person who happens to look good and instead of it being a novel or amusing thing it just fills me with rage. I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’ve been treated as stupid and each time stands out to me because it was so jarring. Like being called the wrong name. And I recognize that writing about it here is really just writing for myself because if anyone is reading this they likely already know who I am and etc. But anyway, I know it’s dumb for me to waste my breath on people who didn’t take the time to google anything and who jump to conclusions and whatnot but it’s also a lesson in the fact that I need to somehow get my credentials a little closer to my amazing hair. In fact, I’m going to stuff them into my hair probably. Both for volume and convenience.
What else was I saying? I don’t know, I think I smelled pepperoni in the course of writing this and was distracted.
About your website idea – I dont know if you have been seeing hinting at JUST such a thing or if this is yet another example if your brainwaves being in sync with mine. If its the ladder.. weird.. but either way, I have 2 examples ofwhat you could do, with some ideas of my own to add. I’d love to chat with you about it sometime with out the interuptions of your live chat show… (An episode of “Alison’s Couch” would be a great place to discuss such things). I have address for you but I do not want to SPAM your website.. assuming you OWN AlisonRosen.com, you could easily create a link that won’t interfere with your blogspace. ((… eg the address could be ustream.AlisonRosen.com or… ARIYNBF.AlisonRosen.com or just show.alisonrosen.com )) – you do this with DNS, and can then point the host to a completly different computer.
While it’s not quite the same thing you were describing in the last half of your post, I’ve experienced a massive change in how people perceive who I am.
This goes back to the days before I could grow any sort of facial hair. I was a tiny, skinny little pale nerd. Loved nerdy things, very quiet, very introverted. I had a group of close nerdy friends who liked me for me, and knew exactly who I was and what I stood for. Then, out of nowhere, someone must have shot me full of male growth hormones, because I gained about 50lbs of solid muscle in one summer, a much deeper voice, and about 4 inches to my height. That summer I tried out for football and found myself mixed in with a stereotype of people I had no real connection with other then the love to compete.
People always assumed I was a dumb jock, forgetting that the year before, I was as big of a nerd as the next guy. And I still am today. I seem to get a lot more credit for my geekness now since technology is a whole lot more socially acceptable. But it was very overwhelming at times to have people not take you seriously, just because I loved the game of football and dressed the part. I felt like an outsider before that growth spurt and even more so afterwards.
I could barely ever hang around my fellow teammates because we only had that one common interest. And the geek crowd barely took me serious anymore because I no longer fit the mold. I was stuck in the middle between these two social cliques. And it was frustrating.
Not quite the same thing you are writing about, but similar in the sense of not fitting that stereotypical mold, subsequently resulting in not being taken seriously enough.
Hopefully that made sense. I’m still a little hung over… :-/
It made sense and thank you for sharing this. And happy bday!
I just finished breakfast and sat down and read the “rest” of the story.. And I beleive the answer to your credential problem may in your first point (your website idea).
If you broadcast yourself from your own website, show.alisonrosen.com and then just have a few moderators behind on the ustream chat to direct users to your actual website (and use your OWN chat). – while it will be initially difficult to get people to engage and stay behind in youstream, once YOUR people have made the switch, You’ve separated the Wheat from teh Chaff and you’re left with people who are really interested in your hair or your amazing pencil dancing. And of course, sprinkled about your new web page would be all sorts of neat stuff about who you are and where people can read your Brilliance…
Additionally you could use the ustream chat page much as you do on your http://alisonrosen.com/chat however, there are better chat programs out there..
There is something about women that I’ve always admired that men don’t seem to do nearly as well. Women seem to know how to reinvent themselves. I’m not sure why this is the case. Maybe it’s because there are so many different looks a woman can adopt to change how people perceive her. This was one reason why in the past I’ve suggested Alison take on a shorter haircut. Her hair is beautiful long, but I think society doesn’t take young women with long hair nearly as seriously as a woman with shorter hair and something to say. It never bothered me that Alison was so negative to getting her haircut, because that type of change is so completely dramatic. It’s the kind of change that many men are so adverse to making, or possibly incapable of making. There is some type of aversion to men changing his appearance too much or suffer some behind-the-back ridicule by the people close to him. But when a woman makes a dramatic change, it seems like it is mostly positively accepted with only a few exceptions to the rule (Felicity never should have cut her hair short).
About your website idea – I dont know if you have been seeing hinting at JUST such a thing or if this is yet another example if your brainwaves being in sync with mine. If its the ladder.. weird.. but either way, I have 2 examples ofwhat you could do, with some ideas of my own to add. I'd love to chat with you about it sometime with out the interuptions of your live chat show… (An episode of “Alison's Couch” would be a great place to discuss such things). I have address for you but I do not want to SPAM your website.. assuming you OWN AlisonRosen.com, you could easily create a link that won't interfere with your blogspace. ((… eg the address could be ustream.AlisonRosen.com or… ARIYNBF.AlisonRosen.com or just show.alisonrosen.com )) – you do this with DNS, and can then point the host to a completly different computer.
While it's not quite the same thing you were describing in the last half of your post, I've experienced a massive change in how people perceive who I am.
This goes back to the days before I could grow any sort of facial hair. I was a tiny, skinny little pale nerd. Loved nerdy things, very quiet, very introverted. I had a group of close nerdy friends who liked me for me, and knew exactly who I was and what I stood for. Then, out of nowhere, someone must have shot me full of male growth hormones, because I gained about 50lbs of solid muscle in one summer, a much deeper voice, and about 4 inches to my height. That summer I tried out for football and found myself mixed in with a stereotype of people I had no real connection with other then the love to compete.
People always assumed I was a dumb jock, forgetting that the year before, I was as big of a nerd as the next guy. And I still am today. I seem to get a lot more credit for my geekness now since technology is a whole lot more socially acceptable. But it was very overwhelming at times to have people not take you seriously, just because I loved the game of football and dressed the part. I felt like an outsider before that growth spurt and even more so afterwards.
I could barely ever hang around my fellow teammates because we only had that one common interest. And the geek crowd barely took me serious anymore because I no longer fit the mold. I was stuck in the middle between these two social cliques. And it was frustrating.
Not quite the same thing you are writing about, but similar in the sense of not fitting that stereotypical mold, subsequently resulting in not being taken seriously enough.
Hopefully that made sense. I'm still a little hung over… :-/
It made sense and thank you for sharing this. And happy bday!
I just finished breakfast and sat down and read the “rest” of the story.. And I beleive the answer to your credential problem may in your first point (your website idea).
If you broadcast yourself from your own website, show.alisonrosen.com and then just have a few moderators behind on the ustream chat to direct users to your actual website (and use your OWN chat). – while it will be initially difficult to get people to engage and stay behind in youstream, once YOUR people have made the switch, You've separated the Wheat from teh Chaff and you're left with people who are really interested in your hair or your amazing pencil dancing. And of course, sprinkled about your new web page would be all sorts of neat stuff about who you are and where people can read your Brilliance…
Additionally you could use the ustream chat page much as you do on your http://alisonrosen.com/chat however, there are better chat programs out there..
There is something about women that I've always admired that men don't seem to do nearly as well. Women seem to know how to reinvent themselves. I'm not sure why this is the case. Maybe it's because there are so many different looks a woman can adopt to change how people perceive her. This was one reason why in the past I've suggested Alison take on a shorter haircut. Her hair is beautiful long, but I think society doesn't take young women with long hair nearly as seriously as a woman with shorter hair and something to say. It never bothered me that Alison was so negative to getting her haircut, because that type of change is so completely dramatic. It's the kind of change that many men are so adverse to making, or possibly incapable of making. There is some type of aversion to men changing his appearance too much or suffer some behind-the-back ridicule by the people close to him. But when a woman makes a dramatic change, it seems like it is mostly positively accepted with only a few exceptions to the rule (Felicity never should have cut her hair short).
Prove the ugly ducking story with pics Ro Ro! I don’t buy your story. Also, if the Continental Navy’s marketeer served under a “Don’t ask Don’t tell” policy than he probably would have used the slogan “My Ass is Revolting.” Timing and political correctness is everything when promoting Revolutionary Wars.
Oh and last time I checked Boink, I was the only one around here allowed to come and go as I please! I’m very dissapointed that you’ve abanonded me on twitter! Jerk! XOXOXOXO
Prove the ugly ducking story with pics Ro Ro! I don't buy your story. Also, if the Continental Navy's marketeer served under a “Don't ask Don't tell” policy than he probably would have used the slogan “My Ass is Revolting.” Timing and political correctness is everything when promoting Revolutionary Wars.
Ha… I haven’t left.. I just quit Twitter. Somehow some third party is able to send DMs from my account to people on my follow list. If I can’t have full control of my account, I feel it’s better to get rid of it. So, I left. Sorry if any of you reading this has gotten any spam from me on Twitter. Not sure how that came about.
OK, so I sent a few love notes from you to Ted, Joe, and Chi_Mike. Some people are so touchy! It’s disturbing to know that people do this shit.
Ha… I haven't left.. I just quit Twitter. Somehow some third party is able to send DMs from my account to people on my follow list. If I can't have full control of my account, I feel it's better to get rid of it. So, I left. Sorry if any of you reading this has gotten any spam from me on Twitter. Not sure how that came about.
OK, so I sent a few love notes from you to Ted, Joe, and Chi_Mike. Some people are so touchy! It's disturbing to know that people do this shit.
Can’t you just create a new account? I mean that just leaves me and T-Dog and I think he’s about to stalk me! Please return and protect me! If you do, T-Dog will write a song about your return and how you foiled his plan. It will be track 12 on the RosenFan CD.
Can't you just create a new account? I mean that just leaves me and T-Dog and I think he's about to stalk me! Please return and protect me! If you do, T-Dog will write a song about your return and how you foiled his plan. It will be track 12 on the RosenFan CD.
Yeah… but what would I call myself if I made a new account? Your_BFF_Boinkity?
Yeah… but what would I call myself if I made a new account? Your_BFF_Boinkity?
It only disturbs me that you’ve seen Alison Rosen’s bathroom, but won’t share your experience!
It only disturbs me that you've seen Alison Rosen's bathroom, but won't share your experience!
I never made it as far as the bathroom! And I asked, over and over! They wouldn’t let me use it! I finally had to knock on a neighbor’s door! She’s a slave driver, I tell you!
I never made it as far as the bathroom! And I asked, over and over! They wouldn't let me use it! I finally had to knock on a neighbor's door! She's a slave driver, I tell you!