This month is the Employee Charitable Contribution Campaign period, and I was delighted to see the HSSV, my local (and most amazing!) animal shelter as one of the California agencies on the donation options list. I just donated from my paycheck for the first time ever, ever, ever.

I feel like such an adult!

(Now, who can tell me what I have to do differently with my taxes, as if consultant taxes weren’t already a labyrinthine task)

Humane Society of  Silicon Valley

I came across this post as I come across many posts– hopping from one link on a favorite blog to another…this is from a feminist blog collective I have never heard of, but the article is well written and definitely strikes a cord for me. This woman is definitely from NYC (as evidenced by the subway comments?) and I feel what she is writing here, despite the fact that I now live in Silicon Valley and have a wonderful relationship with a beautiful man who is not, in fact, Shrodinger’s Rapist.

Leo often asks me, however, why I react so strongly to men on the street, or even the thought of men on the street, and why they scare me so, and the article explains perfectly the answer I would give if I were more eloquent on my feet.

Guest Blogger Starling: Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced « Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose.

I have never liked the FML meme. Neither do I like statements made that proclaim, verbally or in a written manner, that “my life is awesome.” I think both of those extremes are unpleasant, and inappropriate for passive blasting, a la the social media obsession of the week.

I have certain friends/acquaintances/people I follow that like to employ these types of dramatic, exclamatory statements all about how awesome life is right now, how much they love their lives, and similar raves. Others LOVE to rag on how awful everything else is and leave off with a FML hash or even the words fully written out. I think this use of social media is kinda silly.

Its obnoxious in the first example, and annoying in the second. I am more a fan of status updates in the truest sense: “Dude! I just saw Steve Jobs ride by on his bike!” or “Best.Pie.Evar” accompanied by pictorial evidence. I try to stay away from hyperbolic exclamations of grandeur/horror. (I try!) Even when things ARE getting me down, and it leaks into my status updates, I try to put a funny spin on things, because I believe that makes Twitter worth it for OTHER people.

If everyone thinks you’re a self-important douche on Twitter/Facebook, it just makes the services look bad too. And that, for me, is where some of the misunderstood stigma behind Twitter stems from– people like to say “Nobody gives a shit what time you had breakfast or that it was pancakes.” In reality, I bet people would be kind of amused if you had pancakes at 3 in the morning and they had sprinkles AND bacon in them (picture included).

However, they would be less so (amused) if this all occurred because your life was SO AWESOME right now.