I'm reading FB posts and chatting with teacher friends all of whom have bid (or are about to bid) a fond farewell to a brief summer. Yesterday, I saw approximately half-a-gazillion "First day of school" pics, and I'm sure next week's feed will feature the other half-a-gazillion pics. Interesting how many districts return pre-Labor vs. post-Labor Day...

This is my first year in 14 years where I'm not standing in front of a classroom every day. Feels weird. Freeing, a bit, but also mildly nerve-wracking. I'm only teaching one night class at Cedar Crest College each semester this year, and striking out as a freelance writer. Fortunately, I've a good, long 5-month contract that starts the end of September, but oy - what to do until then... or after?!

I've hooked up with a resume-writing company. The pay's not bad when the workload's decent - they're still "easing me in," and I'm hoping to get hit with more orders soon. 

Yesterday, a good friend told me that her husband - a jewelry designer by trade-turned-construction-worker - was just offered a position designing a line of 25+ engagement rings for the Astor diamond clan. Epic. Another friend started her dream job as director of multimedia/ content at Whole Foods. A former student landed a great position at an elementary school a few months after moving to Arizona.

Hearing these great stories gives me hope that, as I continue my search for writing gigs, I'll find one (or several) that brings me joy, intellectual challenge, financial stability, and satisfaction knowing it's something I can do - and do well!

I love most of what PKD has written, but  a few things stick out. Once I discovered Confessions of a Crap Artist I always felt it was my favorite.  His only "mainstream fiction", but still written in his style; I felt it was like a pocketknife. The ideas I discovered in it were everyday useful, and changed my life in a small but important way.

But I just restarted rereading the Valis trilogy: Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Now I remember that compared to that little pocketknife of pratical wisdom it's a thermonuclear chainsaw capable of opening The Universe up and showing its guts.

As you might expect, they both get my highest recommendation.

Mine was on sale.

I always make fun of my husband for putting on a movie he's already seen 500 times.  It usually involves hunting for Russians in an adrenaline filled submarine, or some catastrophic weather event. I rarely repeatedly watch a movie if I can still remember the plot.  The exception to that is two John Hughes movies.  16 Candles and Pretty in Pink.  Ridiculous.  I know. 

What is it about Molly Ringwald that made her such an appealing adolescent "every woman"?  She didn't fit the 80s blond bombshell mold, the characters she played were always vulnerable but principled, and at the end of the story she always got the boy and he was a better man for it.

I was realizing that when my students see Molly Ringwald it may well be the equivalent of seeing "Gidget" when I was a kid.  What?  That middle aged lady was a teen surfer dreamgirl?  What?

This got me thinking about the 80s and the pop culture I consumed in the 80s. I can remember how important the word "individuality" was to me then.  Self expression was a crucial concept to 16 year old me, who had little else to really concern myself with. Looking back, I realize that I had a limited context within which to understand the idea of being an individual.  To me it was rebellious. It was punk rock. I had no idea how well it fit in with what it means to be an American and that long history that can easily take people down the path to libertarianism.  Punk rock.  That transition point where Anarchy and Libertarianism still coincide.

Back to John Hughes.  His movies were always set in mansions and on "the other side of the tracks".  Class was upfront and center in most of his romantic storylines. It was the barrier to true love in place of the grudges of feuding lineages. The feuds were between the popular kids and the outcasts- the kids with money whose parents appeared to be chronically out of town versus the kids whose dad was Harry Dean Stanton. And the subtheme of "being yourself" was always part of that plot line (and everybody was white too). His movies may have also paved the way for series like My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks, which I also consumed hungrily and with a sense of identification. Some of the resonances I see are an uncertainty about what will happen in the future, unrequited adolescent desire that seems like it will end the world, parents that don't understand, and life in the shark tank of high school.  Class issues creep in to the extent that teenagers ever really have an awareness of class at all beyond "my family doesn't have the same things that their family has".

Given the way the 2000s have gone, I'm surprised there isn't a revival of the working-class, oppressed teen, struggling against conformity theme in pop culture. I don't feel like I'm seeing it.  I wonder why that is. It strikes me that the 18-21+ year olds that I teach have a vastly different perspective on the world. The ones I interact with as a professor tend to be "joiners", but the ones that identify with me most tend to be the "change the world joiners" who participate in creating on campus recycling campaigns and who want to go on to study public health.  They are much more realistic about the world than I was at that age, but also frequently much more privileged in terms of what they feel entitled to.  They seem less alienated in the middle class way that I felt alienated as a kid.

I don't really know how all of this fits together, but I guess my question is- Is there contemporary pop culture that's as teen-angsty as those 80s movies?  The Perks of Being a Wallflower might come close. In 2014 what drives teen angst and what are contemporary teenagers rebelling against?

As you've noticed by now, One Post Wonder got a major facelift today. Sean Puckett has done a sweet job, removing clutter and improving the user experience while respecting and enhancing the best of what was already there. I'm stoked to have a collaborator who grasps where I'm trying to go.

A few changes may take a moment to get used to. There is only one button to change your userpic now; it's on the "Me" page, where people had the most luck finding it. And the buttons to move text blocks, video blocks, and photo blocks appear only when necessary. The buttons to add new blocks appear only at the end of the article– but you can then use the arrows to rearrange the blocks. We both feel this is a good compromise to make things less confusing overall.

With a second contributor joining the project, now is a good time to review the core values of OPW:

No more than one post per day! That's the point. This rule may be bent but not broken. For instance we may introduce "indulgences" which recharge slowly, but you won't be able to post twice times a day, every day. Not even for money.

No big-brother filtering. The "one post per day" rule allows you to filter posts yourself. If you're not riveted, just don't click the arrow to keep reading.

This is a business, but you can opt not to be the product. We may profit from its operation, so long as we are able to focus on the best interests of our users as well as the bottom line. We will eventually explore operating OPW as a "B corporation" to help lock this core value in place. We may display advertising, but you will have the option of paying a membership fee to see no ads.

You own your posts. You grant us a license to show them to people by posting them here. Duh.

Thanks again for believing in what we're doing. More improvements are coming down the pike.

Octopus, Snake, Bee.

Free to good home.

In my continuing effort for completism, despite having finished watching Series Two of Doctor Who on DVD, I'm not letting myself start Series Three (which I also have on DVD) until I've finished watching the contents of the last disc of the set, "Doctor Who Confidential".  Because apparently they had a show which was talking about Doctor Who stuff related to each episode.  Even cut down (the original 45-minute format was apparently edited down to closer to 15 minutes for the DVD release), it's taken me three separate sessions to get through them.  And then there's another item in there, David Tennant's Video Diary, which I started on before noticing how slowly I was progressing; apparently it's closer to 90 minutes long.  Not enough time for that tonight, though what I watched did seem interesting.

After I finish with that, I suppose it's on to Babylon 5 Season 2 rewatch Disc 1.  I already watched the special feature disc for B5S1, you betcha.  I feel less self-conscious going through the Special Features like that when it's just me watching on my computer, which may be why I've been doing it perhaps more than I usually would.

So apparently kickstarter is not the right way to fund scaling up your social network.

Their guidelines prohibit campaigns "to fund websites or apps focused on e-commerce, business, and social networking."

Interesting. But there are lots of ways to go about scaling the site, and the work before us right now doesn't require more money. It requires solving the riddle of building interest and bringing intact networks of friends aboard.

I stumbled across this discovery while hoping to answer an unrelated question: how to fund adding certain features to the Apostrophe open source CMS. That, my employer could do on kickstarter, but it sounds out of their usual line.

Today I changed logins so that your login should "stick" for a long time, rather than just the current browser session. And I added a little nudge to invite a friend if you haven't done so yet (or more accurately, not since today, since I just started keeping track).

Also, Sean Puckett shared a post about his work toward improving the look and feel of the site. Can't wait!