This one went much smoother than the last video of me speaking.

BIG thanks to Claire and Pete for inviting me to present.  And special thanks to Dietz Media for making a video of me speaking that I finally love.

If you are looking for a speaker for your event, talk to me.

The night after we pulled his tooth out I heard him crying in his bed. When I asked him what was wrong his tears turned into a full on sob.

“I just want my tooth back in my mouth. I just want everything to go back to normal.”

It took all the strength in the world not to say “me too” and curl up with him and cry.

Things move too fast.

I have been thinking about going back to school. Actually, I have never stopped thinking about going back to school but I think I found a program I might actually want to do. A program that would work with my current life schedule. I am not ready to tell you what the program is but I can tell that if you thought I was crazy for getting a Philosophy degree? You are going to totally lose your mind on this one.

Last weekend I started working on my entrance essay and found myself pouring on to the page words that I didn’t know I had in me. What came out of it was a twenty-page memoir type essay about a story that I have spent the past five years trying to figure out how to tell.

I want to tell more stories.

Wednesday I wore a dress and tights and was probably over-dressed but I really didn’t care. I took the day off and instead of sitting in my office, building beautiful things and talking to myself, I went to see people! People! I decided that  people seeing required tights and a dress. Because sometimes that is just the way it is.

I really want to re-invent this blog, or maybe delete and start a new blog from scratch. Sometimes I imagine that I could be a food blogger, or a craft blogger or maybe a humor blogger. But then I realize that I would have to learn to cook, or sew, or craft. These feelings aren’t just applicable to this blog, its how I think about my life sometimes too. Maybe I can erase and start anew as a baker, or a musician that travels the country, or maybe even a celebrity. Perhaps, I could be more Paris Hilton like?

It’s not that I don’t enjoy my life, I really do. I just wish there was more consistency in being me. I wish I had a specific talent or hobby or personality trait that perfectly described me. I try to imagine if I were a character in a book who I would be, but I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t fit into a book because my character would be too messy and all over the place. A good friend of mine describes me as “un-categorically strange,” because I can’t even fit into the traditional definitions of strange. I am my own kind of weird, my own kind character and sometimes that is completely annoying.

Today I am linking up with Just Write.

On a completely unrelated note you can find me over here this week talking about what trends we are going to see in the next year. I am also over here talking about How-To get press for your blog. 

Last winter I wrote my senior thesis on how Facebook changes your identity. Needless to say I spent weeks trying to define what identity was. (Oh, Philosophy majors) I ended up making up my own definition of identity (which no one ever proved to be wrong but everyone kept asking me to cite the source) I was so excited when I found these images on The Curious Brain today. It basically took my definition of identity and added a layer.

If you are looking for me tonight I will be editing the paper I wrote a year ago.

Don’t forget to enter my giveaway. It’s up all week!

But here’s the thing…

SO much has happened and is happening in the next week that I am embarrassed that it has been so quiet over here. I mean at least I could throw up a what I did this weekend post as a marker for me to look back on one day.

First off: Happy Mothers Day!

Last night I went to the Listen to Your Mother Show in Valpo, Indiana. The opera house that the show was hosted in was this magnificent little theatre. I just wanted to move in there. Stephanie Precourt put together the most amazing show. The stories filled your heart up, made you cry and laugh so hard you thought you were going to fall over.

Before the show I had the chance to meet my new friend Erin for dinner. You know when you meet up with a friend and you walk away feeling like you could go out and take over the world?  Dear world, I am ready.

Tomorrow I am heading up to Iowa bright and early  for the first ever 140 Conference in Des Moines. Not only will I be attending but I will be speaking! Iowa is filled with so many small businesses that wanted to speak to business owners and entrepreneurs on social media and how they can be using it. So. Darn. Excited. (and nervous; oh my!)

Last week I won an award from my college for being an outstanding Philosophy major. I got to bring my family to hear the leaders of the school talk about how smart and wonderful all of the people winning awards were and was handed a large plaque for my wall. This was super exciting because I don’t normally win awards. I was awful at sports and singing and art and well…yeah…pretty much everything you can win awards for doing. So I will take my Philosophy award and stick it directly between my Avon award (for recruiting the most Avon reps during a campaign) and my softball trophy (everyone got for participating). I kind of feel like that is the perfect place for a Philosophy award. On a shelf between the most random un-appreciated awards ever. Socrates would totally see the irony in it.

Also? I am coaching T-ball this summer. More on that later.

Last week I also found out that I will be speaking on a panel at Tech Week in Chicago (SQUEEEE) with some amazing amazing ladies. (did I say amazing?) AMAZING.

AND I was nominated as one of the top 25 blogs on single parenting! You can vote here once a day until May 26th. Or just once whichever works. I appreciate all of the support and love! (I am writing a longer post about this whole single parenting blogging thing but its taking me a little longer than I thought it would)

As you can see life is going really well.

Really spectacularly busy. but well.

How are YOU?

I like to take that a step further. When we are listening we are not only watching and listening but we are looking at the place and time we find ourselves in for clues on what they are really saying. We pay attention to the social context and the other people we are surrounded by. We listen to the cracks in their voice or the changes of their tone. We can read awkwardness, nervousness, anger, subtle excitement. I pay such close attention to the way that people talk and the social rules in which they are speaking and the expectations that hang on their words that it leaves me responding in an awkward ways that often kills  conversations.

This video made me feel a tad less crazy.

Now if only they would make one talking about the way that we communicate online. Haven’t you ever sat their pondering if you should put a . or a ! or a …. when typing up an email? How about if you are IMing someone and you have to choose between lol or LOL or hahaha or ha! or heh? Ok….maybe I am a little crazy.

“I prefer to understand the rare human being of an age as suddenly emerging late ghosts of past cultures and their powers – as atavisms of people and its mores: that way one really can understand a little about them. Now they seem strange, rare, extraordinary; and whoever feels these powers in himself must nurse, defend, honor, and cultivate them against another world that resists them, until he becomes either a great human being or a mad and eccentric one – or perishes early.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

Tell me…have you read Nietzsche? Thoughts? Comments? Share something with me.

I rarely actually read them later. And if I do? They still live in that bookmark bar.

In attempts to be more organized I am going to put them all in this post. To share with you and save them for me.

Yay for you!

Brands Learn Visual Storytelling

Reddit: Philosophy

10 Awesome Safe For Work Websites to Over come Lunch Hour Boredom [aka how to waste 10 hours of your life]

Video: Where good Ideas Come From

How to Start a Successful Ad Agency

Connecting All of the Dots

How to Be a Better Blogger [Seriously, amazing read]

A Theory of Consciousness

Video: A Darwinian Theory of Beauty

Video: The Difference Between Complex and Complicated

Facebook Understands More than You Know

Gen Y in the Workplace Digital Media Tech Needs are Changing Companies Forever

Am I Better Than Facebook?

Dancing, Ecstasy, and Vitality [I have been meaning to buy this]

Our Digital Crisis [Obsessed with the work of this man]

Millennial Magazine

How to Write a Book

Blogging While Untenured And Other Extreme Sports [FASCINATING]

Bloggers as Public Figures

10 Reasons to Stop Apologizing for Your Online Life

Ten Ingredient Project

Letter to Me.

Wall Hangings How-To Guide

DIY a Faux Fireplace

DIY Bubble Chandelier

View From Madison Avenue [amazing blog]

Who Said That?

279 Days to Overnight Success

Apparently I wanted this…Dang!

Video: Visualizing Drive

Summer Reading List

Enjoy!

Think back to the confusion, the cliques, and the hormones everyone was trying to control.

There were always questions you wished you could ask people. Rumors that you were dying to know the truth about. Relationships you wanted the scoop on and simple things you wondered like what kind of shampoo does she use? What kind of cologne is he wearing? (so I can buy it and spray it on my pillow each night)

Or maybe that was just me…

These are all of the reasons that I was totally fascinated with Formspring. The majority of their users appear to be in the high-school through college demographic. Users can submit questions to their friends, mentors, and favorite bloggers. Anonymously. I can only imagine the questions I would have asked. The trouble I would have gotten in…

Recently, I caught wind of another website with a purpose similarly intriguing. Like A Little allows users to describe someone that they saw on campus (or elsewhere) and profess their undying love for said person. Anonymously. College students are flocking to this website sifting through the descriptions and attempting to guess who likes whom.

For decades parents have been proclaiming that life as a child/teenager/college student is the same today as it was back then. This has remained essentially true in that adolescent life generally consists of experiences, emotions, and problems regardless of the time you are living in. I am not sure how much longer we are going to be able to say that with confidence.

All of this new technology popping up attempting to solve the struggles of adolescence leave me wondering how this might change adolescence.

What are your thoughts? Share them with me!

But here is the tricky part.

When you sit down to write twenty pages about anything you end up asking yourself a lot of questions. Going down many different paths and ending up at some sorted conclusions.

So I am trying to get a sense of what an identity is. What your identity is. What my identity is. Is it something that just exists or something that we create? It is something inside of us or something that we foster inside of us.

Most people acknowledge two parts of themselves. The body and the soul. Let me clarify, I know that not everyone believes that they have  a soul. But even if you don’t have a soul and it is simply your brain creating reactions and actions and emotions and personhood that creates the illusion of a soul. Or the illusion of something that is not purely physical. (like your body) So therefore, everyone has a body and a soul (or the illusion of a soul).

So what is your identity?

What is it that makes you who you are? This brings me to the idea that your identity only exists within a society. Your identity is how other people identify yourself and how you identify yourself to other people.

Which would mean that your identity is something that humans created to make sense of the world in a social context. We need things to fit into categories. We need to place ideas and terms and people into a place in our minds that makes sense. (Kant: Categorial Imperative) The problem is that people are complex. You can’t actually fit a person into a category and organize them by type to make it all straight and narrow. However, you can do this with their identity. This is who they identify themselves as. This is how they identify themselves so they fit in this category of my mind.

I have spent the past few months contemplating personal branding. Mostly because I am twenty three and not completely sure that I want a personal brand. A label. An outline of the person that I am. I want the freedom to be risky or conservative. I want the ability to change my views as I see fit. I want to dress according to how I feel that day and not in a way that matches the brand I represent. I want to be an ever changing, growing, loving, human.

Personal branding is a very hot topic right now. I think it will continue to grow.

I don’t think that this is a bad thing. Simply an evolution into the way that we deal with identity. In ancient times your identity was simply your family name and class. In modern times it was your job, your wife, your role. In post modern times it was something that you found by following your own path and seeing what came to be.

But what is it now?

This identity that we seek. Find. Create.

This post was inspired by my senior thesis and this amazing post by Her Bad Mother.

I would love your thoughts and feedback.

Aiden: I don’t think heaven is really in the sky.

Me: Well, where do you think heaven is? It might not be in the sky.

Aiden: I think it’s on the ground. I think…I think heaven is right there. {{pointing to his right}}

Me: The dollar store…?

And this is where he bursts into giggles and I sit and wonder how his mind will work in ten years. *sigh*