It’s Friday. TGIF time. Corporate drones are getting ready to kick back with margaritas, radio stations are queuing up “Bang the drum all day” for afternoon drive-time, and emails are getting signed with “have a great weekend!”
As for patently unemployable me, I’m battening down the hatches and planning survival strategies for the weekend.
I’ve long felt that I treat weekends and weekdays “backwards” from the way the rest of the world does it. Partly because I’m an introvert and HSP, partly because I run my own business, partly because I have kids.
Here’s what “backwards weekends” look like for me: My work time (weekdays while the kids are in school and the Professor is at his day job) is my creative time, my moneymaking time, my online-socializing time, my marketing time, MY time. I get to throw myself fully into my best work and my online world(s) while I have the house to myself. And I love it and need it.
Sure, sometimes I hate it too (when I’m overcommitted, or overwhelmed, or spinning my mental wheels…). But I get to create and work to my own rhythms (and in whatever clothes or lack thereof I feel like).
Then the kids come home and I want to be fully present for them, so MY time officially ends (even if I am still trying to finish stuff on my computer while they’re in the next room). And on the weekends, EVERYONE IS HOME ALL DAY. By Sunday evening, I am really really ready for everyone to be gone and leave me alone to do MY work again.
So sometimes I feel like a curmudgeon and a bad mother (long weekends, for example. And ohmygod it’s almost Christmas vacation and I’m frankly dreading it). But sometimes I don’t. And mostly it’s OK.
And then sometimes there are weeks like this one.
Monday night both kids were throwing up all night. Which meant the Professor and I were up too, soothing children and putting extra loads of laundry in.
Tuesday they stayed home from school and I spent the day monitoring input and output of a non-HTML variety, finishing up the extra laundry, and scrubbing the toilets. Brief escapes to Twitter and a generous post-shower slather of Aardvark Essentials Second Wind potion kept me sane.
Wednesday they went back to school, which was a relief because I was prepping for a Really Important Meeting and collecting beta-tester feedback for my next product (if your ears just pricked up, you may want to sign up for my Invitation List). But halfway through the day, the school called to tell me my son had broken out in hives, so I rushed to pick him up, get him home and into a baking-soda bath and dosed with Benadryl. I still don’t know what caused it (he’s never been allergic to anything as far as I can tell).
Thursday, shortly after they went to school, it became painfully clear that I was getting sick, so I dosed myself up with acetominophen and bismuth, took a nap, and was completely useless for the entire rest of the day, feebly sipping my Sprite and gingerly chewing my crackers.
And today, Friday, TGIF to the rest of the world, is a National Holiday. Both of my now-perfectly healthy kids are lounging around reading and playing computer games while I write this. I’m hoping I won’t get any sicker before I get weller, and oh joy, I just discovered the toilet in the hall bathroom is leaking.
So, yeah. This weekend is going to be one of the hard ones.
Would I rather be a corporate drone, though, looking forward to a work-free weekend? Don’t make me laugh too hard, please. If I had a “regular job,” I would have had to take at least two and a half days off this week, a week that only had four workdays to begin with. So I’d be just as behind, down three sick days, and hoping I’m not about to be downsized.
Nope, I’ll take the life I’ve chosen, backwards weekends and all. I’m allowed to be grumpy about it sometimes, because most of the time I love it to pieces.
What about you? If you’re running your own business (and that definitely includes part-time freelancing and other side-hustles), how do you treat your workdays and weekends?
Image by pvera on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License
Ever wish you could pick the brain of a graphic designer?
Comment moderation, censorship, and SOPA
And then I tweeted and Facebooked to ask people to sign up for my upcoming WordPress Swimming Lessons group coaching class (deadline to sign up is Friday, January 20, and I’m not accepting any new client work in February, so this is definitely a case of Legitimate Urgency).
A Facebook friend gently chided me for making it harder for people to sign up for my class.
She’s right. I did make it harder. Not on purpose; not to force people away from my site. There was, after all, a “continue to site” link right on the splash page (though I can see how it was easy to miss), and the splash page only showed up once for each visitor (and I know full well that “just once” may have turned people away).
But I didn’t shut down my business or my website. I continued to work, plan, and hang out online at the same time that I was protesting. And I responded, in part, “I know it might not seem sensible, but… neither does SOPA/PIPA.”
And I’ll do it again on Monday, January 23. Because as Allison Boyer noted over on BlogWorld’s blog, SOPA and PIPA matter more today than they did yesterday. It’s not just about defeating one or two particularly badly written bills; it’s about crafting laws that uphold everyone’s rights (and I say that as a business owner as well as a citizen).
Is moderating blog comments online censorship?
Anyway, I got to thinking about the phrases that get thrown around about “stopping censorship.” And I wondered if anyone (other than my Internal Voices Committee, which always has something to complain about) could legitimately accuse me of censorship because I moderate my blog’s comments.
According to my pals at Merriam-Webster, the transitive verb “censor” means “to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable.”
By that definition, yes, I am engaging in censorship merely by moderating comments, even if I approve all of them, simply because I am examining them in order to make a decision! Interesting, eh?
Now, the definition of “censorship” contains this, among other definitions: “censorial control exercised repressively.” Here I could go down the rabbit hole of looking up the definitions of “repress” and “control” and so on, but I’ll simply say this: Even if I exercise my censorial control repressively here on this one website (which I don’t believe is true in the first place), the Internet is far bigger than me and my one-person business site. There are so many other venues for online expression that to claim that I could be acting repressively is honestly kind of funny.
Further, I believe that every website owner has the same right — to delete content that doesn’t meet their standards. Whatever those standards might be. And I think this view is consistent with wanting to stop the government from stepping in and making those content-removal decisions without the benefit of due process.
I stand by my decision to moderate, and I’ll state for the record that yep, I will absolutely delete anything I consider objectionable. This is my blog, my website, and my online home. No one gets to enter without my permission. I am the sole and final judge of what counts as objectionable here.
That said, I can count on one hand (with a few fingers left over) the number of times I’ve manually deleted comments. Evidence shows that 99.6% of my real, human commenters are just fine, simply because they are real and human. And my moderation process reflects that — if a given user’s first-ever comment is approved, my site will automatically approve and post additional comments by that user.
(Manually deleting comments doesn’t include spam or robots, which are automagically filtered quite well by a combination of two plugins (Akismet and WP-Hashcash) and a comment blacklist that screens for certain non-Roman characters.)
What about you? Do you have a comment policy? Why or why not? How is it working out for you? Want to see how fast I approve comments?