Hasta La Gadget!

By Amanda Russo

My grandpa used to say, “Whatever you do, don’t get old.”

I would roll my eyes and laugh because I was young, and young people have no way of realizing how fleeting their youth will truly be. But I figured I would take my grandfather’s advice. I just wouldn’t get old! I enjoyed my college years and partied with abandon in my 20s. Marriage and children were not on my list of things to do. Not even a little bit.

But something happens to us all in our late 20s. Everyone we know starts to couple off and move in together and get engaged and married and… I’m sure you know where this is going.

I resisted as long as I could and married a man who was just as committed to remaining in the Neverland of our youth. But try as we might to “not get old” birthdays came and went and BAM — we were in our 30s. Everyone in the bar was getting carded except us. Then we decided we were ready to have a family.

There are a plethora of things about parenthood that no one tells you (and even if they did, you’d have no way to prepare) but I’ll tell you this: I was not at all prepared for how exhausting it would all be. Sure, I knew the first year would be rough. I didn’t know it would continue for the next several years with no end in sight.

I was recently texting with a friend and she said “I haven’t slept past 10:00 a.m. since 2012.”

“Ditto.” I replied.

Sometimes I think this exhaustion may not have taken such a toll if my husband and I had started our family a bit sooner. The energy of youth may have made this whole raising a child thing a bit easier. We are, after all, approaching middle age.

Those two words make me throw up in my mouth a little bit, but alas, we are nearly middle aged parents to young children and our bodies are deteriorating a little bit each day. I find myself wondering: when did this happen? Was it a slow decent into middle age or did it happen all at once?

Here are 10 moments when I (sadly) realized I had become a middle-aged parent.

1. It took me a solid two minutes to get from sitting to standing.

2. I no longer possessed the youthful exuberance necessary to play tag.

3. The wrinkles in my forehead didn’t go away after I stopped laughing.

4. I began to empathize with the grandparent characters in movies.

5. I purchased (and am using) one of those day of the week pill dispensers for my supplements — which I take hoping they will give me the energy to play tag.

6. A young mom with a jogging stroller lapped me as I shuffled around the park in a failed attempt to exercise and I felt the impulse to flip her off.

7. I can’t stay up past 10:00 p.m.

8. I looked over my glasses at my cell phone screen and squinted.

9. I called my daughter three different names before I got it right the other day.

10. Instead of wearing cute sandals, I now have to wear those special shoes with arch support in order to chase after my preschooler.

I’m working to make the best of this new stage of life, but the other day my daughter outran me. She looked back at me and I heard myself say the words…”Whatever you do, don’t get old.”

Photo credit: Amanda Russo

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This piece was originally published by Amanda Russo on Mommy Nearest. Amanda Russo is a special education teacher who lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter. You can find her at The Authentic Mommy where she writes honestly about the struggles of parenthood.

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“When I was just a little girl,
I asked my mother, what will I be
Will I be pretty will I be rich….”

It was a very long time ago when I first heard Doris Day sing these words.

These were words I could never say out loud. I am pretty sure my mother never knew that I was once a little girl. Parts of me knew it, for sure. But that little girl stayed hidden for such a long time.

…

I am not a fan of labels. I recently saw a show here in Boston, written and directed by my friend Natsu Onoda Power, called The T Party, and loved one of the scenes where the cast sang that labels are for soup cans. Yes, they are indeed! But labels are always with us. I understand they have a purpose and they serve a purpose. So many of us need and want them to know where we fit, where we belong. They can help us articulate our identity, even if the words may not be totally accurate. They may get as close as we can without the ability for a Vulcan mind meld, which I am pretty sure few of us have mastered.

Most of you who are reading this now are probably aware that this is published under the section labeled “Queer Voices” on the Huffington Post. When I started writing here, it was called “Gay Voices.”

When the name – the label – was changed, I noticed that I had a strong negative feeling about it. I sat with it as I watched the emails back and forth; pro and con of the use of the word “queer” as the thematic label of the work in the LGBTQ…. Community. I had a part that wanted to fight it; argue against it; talk about the negative feelings it rose in me from growing up in the fifties and sixties, but I just sat with it instead. This was atypical for me, but I did it just the same. I tried to understand why I felt…felt, violated by this name, and where that energy was coming from, while there were people who felt ever so strongly that this was the right thing to do.

I have to admit, that whenever I hear the word…Queer…(there, I said it).. it is a word that drains my energy, not grows it. However, I also said I am not a fan of labels so I asked myself if I can learn to dampen the negative power of the word and learn how people are using it now.

I have learned that my response is perhaps a generational response. For the boomers like me, it was used in a negative and pejorative manner. It seems to be the term was then taken over by part of the community as a radical rebellious way to claim their power. I get it; I understood it; and yet my own personal response was still uncomforting. Today when I meet young people…the millennials, they seem to feel the word is unifying and community building. I hear this a lot.

I, as well as anyone, know that things and people change all the time. Words can change meanings, and this can happen quickly or over time as different groups make use of it. For me, the meanings internally that my body has taken on has been a bit harder to change when it hears some words. The labels and boxes in my brain that trigger my emotions have needed some significant reprogramming. I should not be surprised how challenging this is.

However it does provide me insight on how difficult it must be for some people to understand that people like me not only want to and need to and choose to change their outward expression of gender, when their built in programming has no branch to understand this. I am saddened when the people who do not understand us, choose to negate us, and fight us, and believe there is something wrong with us.

I wish that they would be able to do as I did, and just sit with the feelings they might have, and be open to looking at the world and people and labels in a different way.

I wish that they would be willing to reprogram their emotions and let love and understanding and acceptance choose the path of their reactions.

…

Times always change. What will be will be.
Labels can change. What will be will be.
Meanings can change. What will be will be.

I scratched out a few letters from the chorus, and it helped me dampen some of my emotional responses. I am surprised how this helped me…

“I asked my sweetheart
What lies ahead
Will we have rainbows day after day…”

Yes, I am glad that we do have rainbows in our community day after day.

What will be will be
Que sera sera

###

Grace Anne Stevens inspires people to find their truth and live their authentic life! She is an inspirational and motivational speaker specializing on intra and interpersonal relationships. She is the author of No! Maybe? Yes! Living My Truth, and Musings on Living Authentically. Grace is available for speaking to all groups who would like to learn the values of, and how to live authentically. Visit her website at: http://www.graceannestevens.com/. Follow Grace on Twitter: www.twitter.com/graceonboard .

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Marketing and branding are not always cheap for small businesses. While it is very essential given the very early stage of a business, branding and marketing a new business is an effort that has to compete with several other efforts in the startup. Nonetheless, there’s no other way around running an effective marketing strategy for your business.

Whatever says a new business cannot take advantage of the exceptional possibilities that effective branding and marketing can attract to business? While you do not have to go overboard with your spending like an already established business would, there are strategies that you can implement with effective results.

Let’s look at the top branding and marketing strategies you can use to stimulate the growth of your new business.

Design with Your Audience in Mind

Your first step in branding, and indeed marketing your business is to create a logo. This is where you have the first opportunity to captivate the minds of your audience and quickly win your way into their hearts. A good looking logo that is able to captivate your audience will earn the trust of your customers better.

While larger companies with bigger branding budgets can afford to create different reiterations of their logo and not worry about the cost, for a small business it’s very important that you get it right on the very first attempt.

A good way to make this happen without having to break the bank is to partner with a designer who has great work portfolio. Another alternative is to use cheap freelance service like Fiverr to outsource your design tasks to highly talented graphic designers who are ready to work on the cheap.
To highlight the methods that will be most effective in helping you get a well-branded company logo that won’t cost you a fortune, try the following:

• Partner with a designer: the idea is to offer them your services in exchange for theirs. And if the deal is huge such that it involves the total branding of your business, including your website design — then offering them part of your business in exchange might be considered.
• Run a Contest: Running a contest is still one of the most effective ways to attract high-quality talents without having to spend so much.

Win on Social Media

The ultimate aim of branding and marketing your business is to attract customers. With social media expanding every day and users increasingly interacting with businesses and brands via various social media channels, there’s never a better time to take advantage of this huge opportunity than now.
An effective social media strategy can help to optimize almost every other aspects of your marketing efforts. According to Jeff King, founder of a digital marketing company, having an effective social media strategy will bridge the successful customer acquisition barrier that many small businesses face. “Not only does the inclusiveness that social media cultivates encourage small business growth, it’s also very cost effective to acquire customers,” he says.
While social media may be cost effective, it may require some form of expertise which you can achieve through study and practice.

Own Your Online Presence

The power of using the internet to reach new customers cannot be overlooked.
Many business owners only consider an internet marketing strategy as an afterthought and do not put much consideration into developing their marketing skills. This is why so many small businesses begin and end their internet marketing strategy with owning a website.

The following strategies should be considered in owning your online presence:

• Get on Google places: Google places and local listings makes it easy for your business to be found on the internet through local listings. This is free advertisement for small business owners.
• Get a blog: Business blogging is now an effective customer retention and acquisition strategy. Does your new business have a blog? If not, you should reconsider your strategy.
• Search Engine Optimization: Ranking high on the top pages of Google for your best selling keywords can help you attract ready-to-buy customers for almost free. All that may be required is your effort. There are many ways to fail with a SEO campaign but with a consistent approach, your business can be wildly successful.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Even if you didn’t see Suicide Squad and somehow escaped the reviews of it and, like, also didn’t hear the horror stories about Jared Leto’s Joker, you’d already know that it would never have topped Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight anyway. Not only is Ledger’s Joker an iconic performance, his character was also the most perfect antagonist there’s ever been for Batman (or maybe, for any superhero). Lessons from the Screenplay analyzes what an antagonist should be and shows how The Dark Knight’s Joker nails it perfectly.

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Wilson has come out with a football that offers stats on your throw and composite scores similar to that used by the NFL’s passer rating statistic for quarterbacks. Find out how it works, what it measures and when you can get one.