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Word-Up

A great big thank you to all who helped out with our efforts to help Operation: Kid Equip and Postive Detroit raise funds to provide Ferndale third graders with dictionaries. Now we want to do the same for Hazel Park, so we’ve come up with a stunt to cover the tab.

On Saturday, February 27th, from 9-11PM, area bloggers and social media enthusiasts will step out from behind the safety of their monitors and iPhones to face off at Birmingham Racquet Club. For a group of Detroiters accustomed to scrapping out turf in the cyber world by skillfully lobbing poignant barbs, placing the perfect spin on headlines and relying on the fastest servers, the opportunity to see who rises to the top in a face-to-face battle of good ole’ fashion trash talk was too much to resist.

All proceeds from the event will go to Operation: Kid Equip to help complete their mission of arming Hazel Park third graders with dictionaries.

Sign up here to play, attend, support or sponsor Word-Up. You may as well, cuz if you don’t, we’ll just talk trash about you anyway.

All are welcome to join the trash talk on Twitter leading up to and during the event, use #Word-up, then brace yourself for the torrent of verbal abuse that makes me proud to be a Detroiter.

*Warning: Trash talk will be flying at this event and is more than likely to land out of bounds at times. All attendees, playing or not, should arrive with well-padded egos.

***Notice: We’ve encouraged a 70’s dress code for the event, so there’s no chance we’ll run out of reasons to mock you.

(Sweet 70’s logo compliments of Sean O’Brien)

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One Book; Endless Meaning

For those of you who have been following our efforts to raise money to buy dictionaries for all third graders in Detroit-area schools, you may have asked, Why dictionaries? Julie Mattera of The Oakland Press asked all the bloggers involved that very question while researching her article, and I think it’s a fair one.

Why dictionaries? What can one book mean in one child’s life? As you can see from the number of eager hands raised at John F. Kennedy Elementary in Ferndale, our first stop in handing them out, each child has an answer.

I was eight when I received the dictionary I still use today.

It’s the beginning of my fourth-grade year and I wander up to my new teacher’s desk, nose in an E.L. Konigsburg book about a young girl named Claudia who runs away from her home in a suburb, and into the excitement of the city. She is at the age of discovering and testing boundaries.

“What’s a suburb?” I ask.
“You’re standing in one,” my teacher says.
I stare at the carpet, my feet, and then my confused face looks up, and meets her raised eyebrows and constrained grin.
She hands me a dictionary. “Bring it back up when you’re finished,” she says.

But, like Claudia, I got lost in the adventure and forgot.

“I’ve never seen the city lines. Are they real?,” I ask. “Yes,” says one of the girls at my table. “No,” says another.

I discovered boundaries. Invisible lines drawn, defining difference between me and others. Between suburbs and cities. Between children and adults. Between following rules and breaking them. I discovered that learning about new things can make you more confused than when you knew less.

It’s the end of my junior year of high school and I’ve fallen in love for the first time. He plays baseball for Western University and reads Robert Frost to me, and as it turns out, sadly, to many others as well. In the margin of my (okay, so it’s really not mine, and is technically still on loan from my fourth-grade teacher) dictionary, next to the word “frostbitten,” I pencil in my own definition. “To be bitten by Frost. Apparently ‘the path less traveled’ is open to all varieties of riff raff these days.”

Writing my own meaning to that one word was the most defining moment of my young-adult life. I used to take the words that people spoke and stacked them as they fell, like bricks, around me. Suburb. City. Child. Adult. Can. Can’t. But with a pencil and a blank margin, bricks can become feathers, and float away, removing boundaries from our lives.

It’s the winter of my sophomore year of college. I’m looking up a word for a paper that’s due before we wrap for spring break. My finger moves down the page and lingers on a term I happen across. “Hebrides-Group of islands off the west coast of Scotland.” I hand in my paper the next day and board a plane for London. I travel by train with my journal, my toothbrush, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread and a portable CD player that plays the soundtrack of The Brothers McMullen as I cross yet another boundary, and enter Scotland. And though the music is Irish, it gets the job done in the mood-setting department far better than the only other option I’ve packed—which is—I believe—Beastie Boys.

I have learned that one word can inspire huge actions, and wherever your finger loiters, your train will head.

It’s the end of my first year as a copywriter. I spend many lunch hours in the office bathroom with my forehead pressed against the mirror, frustrated with the disparity between my private voice and my public writing. I’ve just learned about blogging and something called Twitter. I hesitate on the sign-up page and ask myself if I’m ready to put my real voice “out there,” as I know there’s no going back once I do. I scroll through the dictionary and stop on the word “Missive-a written message intended to be sent.” I smile, create @MissIve, and send out my first missive, “Have just thrown all my balls into the air.”

If you’re reading this today, if you’ve met me, the odds are good it’s because I found that word, on that day, in that one book, that was handed to me when I was eight.

Why dictionaries? What could one book mean to one child? Hand them one. Then ask them what it means.

Please join Operation: Kid Equip, Erin Rose, Becks Davis, Nikki Stephan, Lauren Weber, and me in putting dictionaries in all our students’ hands, by donating HERE.

All photos courtesy of Becks Davis.

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Positive Detroit, Local Female Bloggers, and Operation: Kid Equip Collaborating to Provide Dictionaries for Area 3rd Graders

Female bloggers from the local Detroit area are coming together this Winter Season, with PositiveDetroit.Net, in collaboration with Operation: Kid Equip, to provide at least 25% of Oakland County Schools with dictionaries for third graders.

Erin Rose of Positive Detroit, Becks Davis of Detroit Moxie, Nikki Stephan of Creativity, Love, Happiness & All That Falls Between , Jennifer Wright (that’s me) of Looking Glass Lane (that’s here), and Lauren Weber of Staircase to Earth’s Loveliness all spend much of their time writing for their respective blogs and want to help give the same opportunities to local students as they were given in their writing classes as children. They want to help our local students become better writers.

With the assistance of Operation: Kid Equip and its participation with The Dictionary Project, we will be distributing dictionaries specifically written for third graders who are at the dividing line between learning to read and reading to learn.

Now, through March 15, 2010, we are raising money to provide roughly 2,700 third graders in Oakland County with brand new dictionaries. To give you an idea of the impact you can make, for a $20 donation, you can supply at least 8 third graders with dictionaries.

An anonymous donor has graciously offered to match donations, dictionary-for-dictionary, up to the first 100 dictionaries. Can you just see the excitement on their faces and hear the kids when they receive these gifts? Just think, your donation today, can double the amount of children that are being served tomorrow.

As the founder of Positive Detroit, I feel very strongly about our local area children and their education, especially when it comes to the written word. The ability to write proficiently is a skill that enhances every aspect of one’s life, from writing a thank you note, putting the finishing touches on a resume, to having the ability to write an Oscar winning screen play. As a child, I remember a beautifully leather bound set consisting of a series of specialized dictionaries and a thesaurus that sat on a table in the family room of my parent’s house. These were my go-to books from the time I was in 4th grade until I graduated from high school. With those tools, I enjoyed writing and saw it as powerful channel of self expression.

Here is how you can help:

1. Click Here to make a PayPal donation for $100, $50, $20 or $10

2. Mail a check payable to:

Operation: Kid Equip
PO Box 364
Royal Oak, MI 48068-0364

Be sure to write Dictionary Project in the memo line.

3. Contact menachem@operationkidequip.org to make a credit card or
other form of payment outside of PayPal.

4. If you would like to join the female bloggers collaboration
with your blog, contact Erin Rose at positivedetroit@gmail.com.

About Operation: Kid Equip
As an all-volunteer 501(c)(3) nonprofit community benefit organization, we realize that to break the cycle of poverty and hopelessness, we have to meet some very basic, yet overlooked needs. Operation: Kid Equip acts as a conduit for collecting and distributing tangible educational and school supplies to school-aged children. Operation: Kid Equip effects long term improvement in the community by providing at-risk kids with the core necessities they need to prosper in school and in life. Visit our website at www.operationkidequip.org

About The Dictionary Project
The Dictionary Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The goal of this program is to assist all students in completing the school year as good writers, active readers and creative thinkers by providing students with their own personal dictionary. The dictionaries are a gift to each student to use at school and at home for years to come.

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Man on the Side

Today’s post follows up Mr. Chris Reed’s first (and widely read) LookingGlass appearance, The Attraction Serenade. By day, Chris is a brand catalyst and writer for Talent Revolution, but like many of us, as you’ll see below, he writes differently by night. As you can see by the self-portrait, he’s not too shabby as a photog, either.

Watching a life play out from afar, a life you dream of making a party of two, is everything you think it would be. Watching that life play out from afar, with you not in it, covers all the adjectives.

It’s easy to feel sorry for the man on the side, easy to offer him comfort and reassurance with a phrase like, “She doesn’t deserve you.” In fact, it’s a miracle that the man on the side doesn’t feel sorry for himself.

Except, he doesn’t have time to feel that way.

He’s too busy writing the next love letter, making the next mix tape, searching for the map that shows the path to your heart. The thing is, that path always seems crowded with runners much more interesting than the man on the side.

Before I go any further let me just say, I have been the man on the side. But, if you’re reading this, you already deciphered that part.

Up until a certain point in my life, there was a part of me that believed I could write my way into the life of another. My belief was flawed. That life I was trying to write my way into would always be out of reach. Never enough ink. Never enough paper.

No matter what I wrote, no matter how many times I wrote it, no matter how many different words I used, it was never enough.

Things you should know about the man on the side:
1. He respects women. Very much so.
2. He has, at one point in the distant past, physically expressed his displeasure at a public display of disrespect towards a woman.
3. He will never approach you with a worn out pick-up line unless, of course, he knows you very well and knows you’ll take it as the joke it is.
4. Because of his quiet nature, he is often considered to be shy, sometimes even a prude. I assure you, neither is the case.
5. He lives life to a soundtrack.
6. When he falls, he falls hard.
7. He’s equipped to handle the heartache, and kinda likes it.
8. He’s also an ass. In many different ways.

You might be asking, “Why is he an ass?” The answer, primarily, is that he is selfish. Selfish not only to the object of his affection, but also selfish to himself. That combination never opens the locker. It’s the expectation of the whole thing. It’s the expectation of receiving something in return that is unfair to place on the shoulders of two people who, in the end, are just looking for happiness.

I’d like to think that we’ve all been in that situation at some point. Wishing, and maybe even attempting to write, ourselves into the life of another. Hoping that fate would somehow, some way, make our scribbled words become that late night walk on the beach. That somehow, that person would finally realize the incredible lyrics waiting to be written.

Fortunately (that’s right…fortunately), it doesn’t seem to work that way. And that’s okay. Eventually, we learn to be content. We learn to not be quite so selfish, especially to ourselves. We learn that some things are simply not meant to be. We learn to pay attention to the signs and that when things are meant to be, we don’t have to try so damn hard.

Being the man on the side taught me to just give. To simply do what I do. To simply be what I am. The man on the side is now a memory, a glimpse in the mirror of what once was. However, if I wrote him a letter today, I couldn’t help but say…

“Thanks for the soundtrack.”

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Show Me; Don’t Sell Me

If you read my About a Brand post, you know how successful I think posturing is for any brand. You also know how big of a fan I am of action-based marketing. It’s a win-win-win. If you’re a company who wants to tell the world you’re ’something,’ just go do that ’something.’ It’s good for you. It’s good for the recipient of your ’something’ (think cause marketing). And it’s good for your media budget, ‘cuz you won’t have to pay people to talk about you—they just will.

Companies who get this are jumping in with both feet. They’re building iPhone apps, they’re producing ARG’s (alternate reality games), and, in short, they’re doing anything that allows people to interact with them, off the page.

I couldn’t be happier to be working in this industry at time when taking creative risks is an imperative for survival.

I recently found these guys who are creating film content for companies that people actually want to watch. It’s real. It’s funny. It’s compelling.

Six Minutes from Six Minute Men on Vimeo.

Follow Matt and Justin on Twitter and check out their other videos.

If you believe that good branding is good storytelling, which I absolutely do, you’ll begin to see why you have to step out of the board room to tell it.

Any favorite brands taking creative risks?

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Boundaries

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#TEDxDetroit

Highlights by RangerDavie

The TEDxDetroit moment that really brought everything together—D. Blair performing his poem, Detroit (While I Was Away).

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Sex and Shopping…

By: Suzanne Tucker aka Zen Mommy

Sex and Shopping. This is my life. I know, I got it rough. HA! But as everyone in the clubhouse is blogging about what they are up to lately, I thought I’d do the same.

These videos Ria and I created this week, the first on talking to your kids about sex and the second about shopping for maternity jeans, are just two of a ga-zillion reasons why I love my life. As co-creator of My Mommy Manual, I get to be all about the single most important thing to me in this world: c-o-n-n-e-c-t-i-o-n.

“Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.”
-Ryunosuke Satoro

I hope you are following your bliss this week, this month… this YEAR, and that life is a get-to for you on a daily basis. What is the single most important thing in the world to you in a single word? How much time have you gotten to be all about that word this week? Hope lots. That’s why you are here… why you were created. At least that’s my feeling on it. What’s yours?
—-
VIDEO WARNING: they are each over 7 min long. We NEVER go this long… but hey, it’s sex and shopping we’re talking about here. *wink*

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“I’ve never done this before BUT…”

Considering the number of times I’ve said that in the past year, it’s apparent that it’s a part of my personal brand! My latest FIRST is planning a virtual baby shower for my friend and partner in all things mommy, Suzanne a.k.a. Zen Mommy. And yet again, it seems nobody’s done this before. Fortunately, I have some assistance. Kolcraft is co-hosting the event and donating an amazing amount of baby gear to the silent auction to benefit the Parents As Teachers Prenatal Program. And, my dear friend Kim Gellman, an often visitor at the Lane is actually hosting this fine event in the real world at her house!

It’s amazing what we are capable of doing when we collaborate. And, one of the things I love about social media is its facilitation of collaboration. Reflecting on Jen’s post earlier this week on branding…

People must be tired of hearing this from me but… here’s my strategy for personal branding: JUST SHOW UP! Be your best Self. Quite naturally and organically, the people who want to come and work/play/collaborate with you will come (see collaborators above). Of course, that requires being authentic because if you pretend to be someone/something else, other kinds of people will show up and since you were pretending in the first place, you may find that you don’t like working/playing/collaborating with them and get tired of pretending you are something you’re not.

I know, not quite so brilliantly penned as my dear friend, Jen. But it’s past my bedtime!

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Leather + Lace [Branding?]

[photos  by Morgan Day Photography]

My new project is strictly photographic, but it’s gotten me thinking about Jen’s [amazing] post About a Brand. As part of a series I’m beginning in my photography called ‘The Intimacy of Alone,” I’ve begun shooting portraits of my journals and lingerie. I’m thinking of calling the collection Leather + Lace. Too strong?

Anyways, in digging up dusty leather-bound journals and recalling the racy life of lacy lingerie, I think about the meaning of authenticity and transparency, about social media and personal branding.

It dawns on me that the real test of authenticity in social media  might be measured by a personal journal and an underwear drawer.

How well do you think a person’s tweets reflects the character/tone/subject matter of their private diary? How well do yours?

Do you think you could guess what kind of undergarments your fave tweeter wears based solely on the transparency of their personal brand? How about yourself? Does it match up or are you a romance expert who secretly wears gray Jockey granny panties?

Personal branding is not a must for those just on facebook to connect with real friends (novel idea!) or those on twitter to get the first scoop of trends and news. It is a must, however, for those who want something from us (buy from me! friend me! hire me! read me!). When it is done right, the masses (me included) are happy to oblige.

I do get that it’s a buzz worthy marketing term right now and my husband owns a marketing agency, so I’m all for it! But like Jen (and many of you?) I’m also pretty annoyed by it. Maybe not so much it, but by the fact that it is such a conundrum.

People, at least the ones I’ve met, are pretty complicated- or at least multifaceted, and many times multi-talented. To be authentic, in the true sense of the word seems to me, would be to reveal this. However, that is not what you want to reveal at all (too much information definitely slows the click-through and generally bores people. Too much variety or change in focus can/will confuse people).

We are told to think about the face we want to show. But is calculated authenticity really worth the same as good ‘ole messy authenticity?

Hmmmm, I know what I feel in my gut, but I don’t know the right answer (there is good reason why I’m not the marketer in the family). Here’s my thinking: Let’s go back to our underwear drawers and sift through our own diaries.

Keep it simple: if the crux of authenticity is the lack of constructing a facade of self, your lacy and leather things better not surprise anybody.