Right on Schedule

What you are about to read is an excerpt from my very first blog post, written exactly one year ago to date and apparently before I knew what a tag or a decent title was.

Throwback

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Hello WordPress! 

This post will mark the beginning of an experiment for me.  Today will be spent exploring this place, and figuring out what it is all about. I have a specific job in mind for the future, in a place far from where I am now. Being efficient in WordPress is one of the skills I will need if I ever hope to get there. If my course changes between now and then, I can, at the very least, eliminate “Create a Blog” from my bucket list. […]

Basically, this will turn in to what it turns in to. It could very well just end up being a pile of laundry that never gets hung up.

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I remember where I was before I wrote this.

Why Business? (Bonus Vlog Inside)

A few ideas in question form were provided to me in the comments of last Friday’s post in attempt to give me blog fuel. A few of them got my engine revving.

Aneroidocean asked a particularly meaty question: Why did you decide to be a business student? What’s your ultimate goal? If you want to go normal “career” type thing and not start your own business eventually tell us that. If the career type job is just in order to get your loans paid off and then start your own business, tell us about that.

Well, I decided to enter the world of exciting business in mid 2007. I took the leap from Performing Arts to Marketing. I basically played pin the tail on the major. The only hole I had in my blindfold was the knowledge that my father had a business degree, and he seemed to have done just swell in his life.

Throughout college, I always had an idea fermenting in the back of my mind about opening my own business. As a teenager, and up until the day I quit dancing, I was sure and determined that I was going to open my own dance studio to teach, choreograph, and mold young dancers. I also wanted a big space in which to do cartwheels, but that’s beside the point. And cartwheels are gymnastics anyway, not dance. So, with my supreme logic, I concluded that I could converge the two schools of thought (performing arts and business) to open that studio.

Then reality decided to tap me on the left shoulder while standing on my right side so I wouldn’t see where it was coming from.

I went through the motions and graduated. I gave up on dance, because there wasn’t time for it all. I became complacent. My aspirations for opening my own studio had turned into aspirations for an easy job with sufficient pay. I somehow became content with the idea of being a suit. Or should I say a woman’s pantsuit. I also imagined I would find ample use for one of these in the near future (thanks for the idea Rich):

Now you can buy TWO items instead of just buying a higher cut shirt in the first place!

So there I was, all ready to do the normal job thing. I applied for Marketing jobs here and there and nothing was snagging. So, I went with the first job that gave me an interview even though it had nothing to do with Marketing. It didn’t matter. Firstly, I was still experiencing the no-more-school-for-me-ever-in-life-yay euphoria. Secondly, like I said, the vision of my own business let alone a dance studio was long gone from my head. Give me some pencil skirts and some data entry, and I was all good.

Until I wasn’t. Somewhere after that, I snapped out of it and into a drastically different mindset. I want to see my own ideas brought to fruition. I want to build something that is all mine. Sort of like this blog, but on a much bigger scale. Feel me?

So, to fully answer the latter part of Aneroidocean’s question, yes, I do hope to eventually have my own business. It may not be filled with ballet bars and stage moms, but it will be something of pride. Luckily for me, my college was paid for via scholarships and TOPS, so I don’t have to lug around the weight of student loan debt. I have nothing stopping me from choosing exactly what I want to do, and I am no longer scared of the waters. I’m next in line for the diver’s block.

Investors interested in funding my success can send money to 555 Thisisnotascam Ln. NY, NY 55555.

And now… a V-V-V-VLOG. Maddie Cochere asked what I keep in my closet last week. Let’s just say I found a few interesting things.

Related articles

• Interview Part II- Ronn’s Take on Marketing, Business and the Dance Community (2pointesocial.com)
• Dance Studios in the US Industry Market Research Report Now Available from IBISWorld (prweb.com)
• Newest Digital Marketer Blog Post Examines Latest Virality Case Study (prweb.com)

25toFly 2.0

Photo by Lane Pelissier

Hello and welcome to 25toFly version 2.0. It is finally 2013, which not only marks a new year for clean slates but also my second year in blogging. It also marks the year in which I originally planned to move away from Louisiana. Thinking back upon the birth of my blog, I started to realize how much it has evolved over my first year. What began as an inspirational blog about moving away, quickly became a humor blog on everything from travel and frogs to the sexual encounters of my dear friend Mr. OB.

How I have evolved has also changed over the course of that year. My goals are different. I am different. What I concluded from all of this was that writing this blog was what I needed more than a uHaul. I just didn’t know it at first. I don’t know where I will end up by this time next year. I haven’t ruled out a move, but the urgency for moving away that I felt at the beginning of 2012 has subsided. Just like the many blog posts here that began without the slightest idea or outline, I know I will figure it out. And it will be good. Just keep doing.

Now that my blogging induced awakening has been shared, I can get back to what I have come to love to do here: write stuff that I think is funny and hope you think it is funny too. Here are some updates for the new year.

Back to The Basics

Good morning there puppets.

I simply wanted to write an update post today. I have been busily working on several projects for the up and coming year. One of them involves ventriloquism. One of them also involves a men’s urinal. What a combination, right? Those are the only hints I can give.

This weekend, be on the look out for the duo vlog from me and La La. There is something in it for you. We also think in the video, so you really don’t want to miss it.

On the morning of January 4th, my second article will go live on The Indie Chicks. It’s about that Color Run I didn’t actually run a while back, but it is also about expectations versus reality. I think we all can relate to that. Oh, and there is mention of slip-n-sliding so now you are required to read it.

There will be no fancy new blog theme for 2013. My blog avoids aesthetic improvements… much like your mom. Did you see that “your mom” joke that just happened?  Soak it up.

The end of this year has been really fun. Money was raised, there were shout outs galore, vlogs, blog parties, contests, special friendships, a few power couple formations, and I spontaneously combusted on ACOF.  

Hanging Up The Tutu

If you follow my blog regularly, you know I don’t get serious too often. Ever, really. A lot of bloggers are naturals at this stuff, but it is actually a real challenge for me to write about something serious, especially when it is about me. Humor is safe for me, while anything outside of that realm makes me feel extremely vulnerable. But, with everything going on during the week of a Becca on Fire, I not only have a little extra confidence in my fingertips, but I also feel that it is the perfect opportunity to open up a bit to my readers. So, here goes my attempt to inspire.

Before I began writing this post, I sat with a blinking cursor on the left side of my screen and the “about me” page of my blog on the right side of the screen.

I’m only good at funny. That’s what I do. It is easy to be funny. For me. Shit, this is going to be more of a challenge than I thought. I can’t even inspire Jack to poop inside the litter box, so what can I possibly have to write about inspiration? Oh well, just write.

After all of that staring, I noticed something about how I describe myself. Take a look at my “about me” page. I begin by proudly acknowledging a very important part of what makes me Becca. I was a dancer.

Before I was writing I was a confectionery delight in pointe shoes.

For seventeen years, I was first and foremost, a dancer. Make that a great dancer. A passion that consumes you for such a long period of time is hard to shake and even harder to accept that you must shake, which was apparent by the blurb I’d written. So, I guess I should more accurately say that what I was looking at was a statement about what used to make me Becca.

Before anyone ever put the notion in my head that making a profession of performing arts was “impractical,” I never thought twice about any other course for my life. I entered college as a dance major, was an important member of the college dance team, and had every intention of performing until my age got the best of me (at which point I planned to teach). Everyone knew me as the dancer even if they didn’t know me at all. That is how integral it was to my identity.

After about a year in college, I began to realize that the performing arts program I was in was not up to par with my experience level. This is not a case of my comedic ego either, the program was simply a joke. A cop-out for lazy freshmen who would rather mock an art form than write an essay. On top of that, my parents continually dropped not-so-subtle hints that I may want to consider a different calling. Something more lucrative.

It infuriated me that they didn’t get it. Get me. It infuriated me even more that I pretty much had no other option but to drop the program because of its lack in advancement. It was holding me back as a dancer. It infuriated me, because everyone would think I gave up on my passion to become an office drone (at the thought of which nauseated me).

Street art doesn’t lie.

Before I knew it, I was a performing arts drop-out and a month from being another indifferent graduate of the school of business. What happened? I over analyzed every incoming external influence telling me to cash out before I lost big, that’s what happened. That, stirred together with my own doubts and insecurities as a dancer. I didn’t want to start over at a new university, but I also couldn’t stay enrolled in the Ballet 101 classes that I took when I was three years old.

I had  become the one thing that I had almost forgotten I’d sworn not to be, Miss play-it-safe.  Sure, I’d find a job. That job would pay well enough for me to live as comfortably as I always have. People would see me as “successful”, but I wouldn’t stop thinking, “Is this it?”. I would eventually become that forty-year-old woman still bragging about how many pirouettes she could do twenty years ago while shamefully dodging conversation about her soul draining day job.

So, back to my “about me” page. Obviously, even five years since I have laced a pointe shoe, I am still coming to terms with “dancer” no longer being my main identifier. While I still have strong emotions associated with that time in my life, l do not regret the way everything panned out. I’ll tell you why. Then you can forget that I ever wrote anything so comically disappointing and go back to envisioning me in my underwear.

You see, had I not experienced this loss, I wouldn’t be here writing this. That’s right, I am tying this into writing, because that wasn’t predictable at all. The fact of it all, is that I could have made a career out of dance, but then I would have never known the dispassionate alternative that I experienced for several years after stepping out of that studio for the last time.

It is my strong belief that I would have eventually become complacent and dropped my dancing career out of pure inability to truly appreciate my love for it. I have been writing again for almost a year now, and because of this, I have the appreciation for writing that I never knew how to have for dance. And now I know what it is like to lose it.

So, while I no longer see dance in my future, what I do see in my future is a passion that is equally as important to me in a different way. Think of it in terms of relationships. You love and you lose. Those losses teach you to appreciate love for what it is. You then find love again in places that you never expected. You become enthralled again when you thought you never would. This time, you know to hold on to it. You know not to abandon it or take it for granted. And you won’t.

Related articles

• A Red-Headed Woman (clownonfire.wordpress.com)

Beauty and The Becca

See what I did there? Did you see? Did you?

I saved this picture as “matted baby”. I feel uneasy about that.

Let me preface this by saying I was inspired to write this post after reading Melanie Crutchfield’s How to Be Beautiful. If girls pooped I probably would have shat myself laughing when I read it. I’d award her with free underwear if that wasn’t a weird thing to do. If I hadn’t given up Photoshop so quickly because I sucked at it  my free Photoshop trial hadn’t expired, I too would use it to make my own funny image additions here on my blog.

My mother is and always was into fashion, beauty products, make-up, and stuff of similar categories. This is why I do not understand how I was so beauticiously challenged growing up. I don’t remember her ever teaching me how to do things like put on my make-up, shave my legs, or pluck my eyebrows. I don’t think this is because she didn’t want to or try to, I was just too stubborn to wait for her to decide that I was old enough. I can’t blame her. I know she just wanted to see me as young and innocent forever, but come on, I was walking around with so much blonde hair on my middle school gams that it looked like Cousin It was humping my leg.

Because of my impatience, and therefore, lack of instruction and proper guidance, I had one too many beauty fails as an awkward 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16-year-old girl.

For starters, I was initially too afraid to shave using an actual razor, so I resorted to Nair. If you like to bathe in acid you should try it. Nair should be illegal.

Once I conquered my fear of the razor, I became adversely razor-happy and went on a razor binge. It started out innocently enough. You see, my hair is naturally curly (had you fooled didn’t I?). This means I had what I call whispies (also known as fly-aways) framing my face. I had a ton of them, and I wanted them gone. So, what did I do? I shaved my fucking hair-line. When that worked out dreadfully, of course I didn’t hesitate to moved on to my eyebrows. I am still trying to grow them back to their full volume to this day.

Marriage and Babies and Love Oh My!

Look at that thing. What an eyesore.

I have determined that I am missing the get-married-and-have-babies gene. While other girls were fantasizing about veils and vows, I was seeing how many objects I could sling from my ceiling fan. Or, I was possibly making my stuffed animals bungee jump from the stairwell balcony. I was creative like that. Here are some other conclusions that lead me to this revelation about myself:

– When someone tries to pass me a baby, I lose all knowledge of how to use my arms.

– I usually don’t know what to say around babies so I just keep repeating, “Aw” and “He’s adorable”. That’s usually when they tell  me it is a girl.

– Veil? More like fail.

– I think wedding dresses are ugly. I’m a monster, I know.

– When they showed us a video of a human giving birth in Biology 101, I burned down the entire building. So much for becoming a doctor.

– I’d rather buy myself a diamond ring and call it a day.

– I get self-conscious simply walking down the grocery store aisle with no one even around. Me? In a wedding? Talk about Run Away Bride part two.

– I got talked into baby sitting one time. Somehow the kid ended up playing with a knife. I think that speaks for itself.

– I threw a baby bird egg on the cement once just to see what would happen. Not a good sign.

– If I marry some dude I think I run the risk of him stealing my long johns. That’s not happening.

– Don’t cats try to kill babies? I have two cats. Do the math.

– If I marry I will surely divorce. That means someone gets half of my stuff. This blog is part of that stuff. My blog would then turn into 25T or oFly. That’s just ridiculous.

Related articles

• 7 Reasons Why I’m Ill Equipped to Have a Baby (brunchforeverymeal.com)
• Then Came The Baby In The Baby Carriage (andyblumenthal.wordpress.com)
• When We Has Our Babies (marriageconfessions.com)

 

Pimp My Blog

Buttons be hydraulics for yo blog, and yo header be the spinnin’ rims.

So, have you noticed it looks a little less Raggedy Ann and a little more Audrey Hepburn in here? Actually, my blog probably has more in common with radioactive ladybugs than it does with Audrey Hepburn, but you get my point. Because we just get each other, right?

After becoming an official member of #BloggerIdolRejects (hash tag credit to Mr. ElGuapo) and pondering what absurd reasons the judging panel came up with to exclude me from the top thirteen, I began to think of ways that I could improve my blog. I came up with three conclusions that may help my case in the future: