Tag Archives: facebook

Phoniness and facades: the wave of personal branding

6 Dec

For whatever reason this week, I’ve noticed the term “personal branding” while browsing the web. My mind immediately flooded with images of a red-hot poker sizzling some buffed prisoner’s, or better yet, frat boy’s flexed bicep. I don’t like burning flesh, but I do love big muscles in any form.  So, I clicked the link. Instead of being transported to my usual web haunt of bemyprisonmama.com, I was magically taken to a land far away, one I do not know well. All over the page, men wore crisp suits with striped ties and ladies had on heels. Not any cute heel, but closed toe black pumps. Shivers ran down my spine.

Holy mother of Lehman Brothers! This is one of those self-help for business majors websites. Damn you, English language and all your double entendres.

Since I already wasted my time by slapping the enter button, I reluctantly read on. According to some authority figure at fastmoney.com, I’m now the CEO of Me Inc. And it’s important that I have a brand, otherwise known as self-packaging. I always thought wearing an underwire bra was enough packaging of myself, but obviously I was mistaken. Anyway, everything I write, wear, say and think reflects who I am. The theory goes that basically people form impressions and labels of you based on these things. Thus, if you play your cards right, you can determine your own “brand” and choose how you present yourself to the world.

Ok, I do find this interesting. I mean, by writing this blog I am projecting a certain image to all my readers. I chose the photo on my home page to demonstrate a subtle whimsy from my mid-western upbringing. I purposefully compose only humorous pieces so others perceive that I’m fun to be around. I use fairly colloquial language so I don’t come across as being highbrow and snotty. And I labeled my blog HoosierMandy so people associate me with Indiana and ditsy girls who giggle a lot. (We all know gals with the name Mandy generally fit a certain stereotype. How many Congresswomen are named Mandy? Now count the number of Playboy playmates with the moniker. Exactly.)

In other words, I’m totally contrived. Phooey. I’ve branded myself without even knowing.

Despair descends upon my engineered little life upon this realization. I pride myself on being unique and real. But instead I’m fake and manufactured, like Pillow Pets or Pamela Anderson’s breasts. As Holden Caulfield asks in “The Catcher in the Rye,” “How would you know that you weren’t being phony? The trouble is you wouldn’t.”

Thanks, great literary masterpiece, for reinforcing the point.

Unlike others who turn to food, alcohol or small furry animals for solace, I turn to Facebook stalking. Nothing cheers me up more than learning random things about my old classmates and neighbors that I can bring up at odd times during boring conversations. As I’m browsing the profiles, something starts to happen. An awareness builds in my simulated soul. Wait a second. I’m not the only person doing a little personal branding nowadays. Almost every Facebook profile paints a clear story of industrial self-invention.

From our photos to our status updates, we are constantly manufacturing our identities. Be it as a good mother or persistent partier, a dutiful husband or a mistreated employee, most people present a definitive representation to the world. Why read an article on how to brand when you can experience the phenomenon first hand? The self-help gurus have it wrong. Whether conscious or not, we already know how to promote our persona to the world. How that image is received is an entirely different matter. The bigger question is do we like what we have created?

The answer is yes, but only if your identity includes bulging biceps.

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30 Seconds of Thankfulness

22 Nov

“God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say “thank you?” — William Arthur Ward

Everyone seems to be thankful recently. Daily, I see posts from people participating in 30 Days of Thankfulness, an undertaking where participants display one thing they are grateful for each day throughout the month of November. I like to call it Occupy Facebook. Friends have been appreciating everything from blades of grass to Aunt Milly’s callouses. I declined to join the movement. My sarcasm does not bold well around ladies that are trying to be solemn and endearing.

But low and behold, the thankfulness movement has infiltrated news organizations as well. On Monday, Carolyn Butler authored an article on The Washington Post website about appreciation entitled “Teaching kids to be grateful may have long-term benefits even though it’s not easy.” Butler reported on research by Hofstra University Professor Jeffrey Froh.  Froh states in the article that grateful children are generally happier and  “report better relationships with friends and family, higher GPAs, less materialism, less envy and less depression, along with a desire to connect to their community and to want to give back.”

You had me at GPA.

And, how do kids become more appreciative? According to Froh, they write about it. Kiddos who record their gratitude in a journal every few days report being more optimistic and plain out happier with their lives. Here’s the kicker, this thankfulness project benefits adults as well. The best part of the piece is the hint that we grown-ups tend to lead more contented, even healthier lives the more appreciation that we give.

Crap. I guess I should have taken this 30 Days of Thankfulness challenge more seriously. I didn’t know I could actually get something out of it. Who couldn’t use some health benefits that didn’t involve a long plastic tube and laying face down on a medical table? And everyone needs a little more happiness. Except maybe clowns. I already want to smack them in their cheery red, round noses, but I bet the spongy material would absorb the impact. That’s obviously why they wear them instead of big foam lips.

Anyway, now I must play catch-up. Oh hell, I’ll just go ahead a list all 30 of the damn things. I don’t commit well. Surely this works likes a bank; a storehouse of karma, if you will. And so it begins:

 

30 Days, ok… well, Seconds of Thankfulness

I’m thankful for:

1) Friends that would go to bat for me any day of the week. Except Saturdays. And maybe not when you have a carcass smelling rug rolled up in the car trunk. But otherwise, they’re great.

2) A song so pure and beautiful that it makes you shiver. And maybe leak a little urine too.

3) Great teachers. And aides.

4) Tongue cleaners.

5) Clean public restrooms. Or dirty ones with no visible brown streaks on the seats.

6) An education. So I can recognize stupidity in it’s most basic form. Male.

7) Staplers. Or as I like to call them, an emergency sewing kit.

8) Ritalin. Or Benadryl. For me, not the kids.

9) Kids that are cute, but not annoyingly so. McCauley Culkin’s adorable kid act made me nauseated. Thank goodness we made our kids watch 300 at a young age and warned them that their half Spartan dad would likely throw them off a cliff if they dared to try that routine.

10) The plastic ends of shoe strings.

11) Indiana University basketball and their undefeated season. It might not last too long. Must get this one in early.

12) The word “slurp”.

13) Hot Serbian male tennis players who grunt.

14) Old flames who dumped you for your body type only to look like the love child of  Mr. Clean and the Michelin Man by the time they’re 40.

15) Coke. The non-sniffing kind.

16) Brunettes who have more fun.

17) Snow. On the television. While I lay in the hot sun in Bermuda.

18) Our Congress. Wait. The “super committee” for debt talks produced nothing? Correction. I’m thankful for elections to vote these jokesters out.

19) Spam. The canned food.

20) A husband who doesn’t let me walk all over him. Trust me, I’m good at it. And, to be honest, he normally just likes to feel the piercing heels on his back and upper thighs.

21) Taco Bell at midnight.

22) The transformative sounds of crickets dying from the chomping jaws of our tree frog.

23) My daughter’s feet. But not her toes. Her second really shouldn’t be longer than the first.

24) Travelling around the world and actually making it back without being on the Interpol Most Wanted List.

25) Know-it Alls. They help to practice patience and assist me in writing new villains. Why, yes, you do resemble that serial killer in my book.

26) The inevitable collapse of the glass ceiling. While it falls, may it give every chauvinist a mile around tiny little cuts.

27) The Canadian Ryans. Oh, Mr. Gosling and Mr. Reynolds, you can raise my diphthong any day.

28) The intoxicating smell of a thick Sharpie.

29) Not having to write this journal every day for the greater part of this month. Haha! Suckers!

And last but not least…

30) Kind friends who read my mad ravings on this blog.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

 

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