Schadenfreudish

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.

Not for myself, as I will be on a beach for two weeks, but for everyone else back home. And the whiter the better, really - a blizzard would be ideal. Get a week or so of -30C temps in while we're away; ratchet the relative humidity down to sinus-scorching lows; remind Calgarians how to drive in snow so there's no annual (or would it be perennial?) confusion on this topic still lingering upon our return. No offense or ill wishes intended, it's just that it genuinely helps DH enjoy vacation more when the home weather is lousy: he feels he's really getting his money's worth that way, and we all know how he likes to get his money's worth on vacation.

DH is like the keystone species in the emotional ecosystem of our family: the happier DH is, the less work I have to do to keep the family afloat on a sea of holiday endorphins, and the less bickering goes on amongst the rank and file. (Or maybe I just don't notice it as much if I'm not already irritated by having to be Mary Fucking Poppins all the time? Possible.) Either way, the happier DH is, the more vacation-y everyone else's vacation seems to become. Which is good, because I want my money's worth as well, and if I don't get a goodly helping of peacefully sipping rum-based beverages while my family bloody well shuts up and gets along, I am going to go all keystone species on everyone's ass.

(Can there be two keystones...? Or like, one keystone that is sortof baseline grumpy all the time and another one that will only burn it all down if it is provoked while on vacation? I don't remember this part from ecology class.)

I'm not sure if DH's wanting the weather to be poor at home while he's away on vacation really counts as schadenfreude because I don't think he cares at all whether anyone else is suffering through the weather - I just think he wants to be extra not-suffering. In fact, the pleasure he takes in poor home weather is so independent of the suffering of others that I think it might be a little-known subspecies of hedonism that is unusually weather-dependent.

Either way, a massive dump of winter weather at home will directly improve - without actually affecting in any way - the "climate" my family is experiencing in the Caribbean. So please take one for the team and have yourselves a really, really white Christmas, eh? It's the least you guys could do to help us out on our vacation.

BrandStand

A good friend of mine was telling me about her (and by association, her family's) personal brand recently. I paid close attention because personal branding is apparently a Thing these days, and I guess in this brave new world of personalizing your professional life (and/or vice versa?) I should, as a businessperson, at least consider what kind of brand I am presenting.

Hers an appealing brand that I fully admire, yet am unable to subscribe to personally as it seems to involve more photographs than I am comfortable with taking/sharing. I accidentally signed up for Instagram a little while ago and developed an immediate, visceral hatred of it. I also despise Facebook and LinkedIn, but it took me slightly longer to cultivate my hatred of them so I'm guessing that photos are just really not my thing. For the record, I also hate Pinterest (on principle: it pisses me off to no end that you have to sign up to even peek at a recipe that's posted on their site) and Reddit (HOW does it eat up so much of my life... oooh, r/teefies!), and I have abstained from all other social media sites because my track record suggests that I would probably both hate them and waste my life on them if I did sign up.

So, aside from hating social media, what is my "brand"? Setting aside the question of whether a non-photogenic person can even have a brand - and if so, whether anyone would be interested in it - I have developed a few ideas about what my brand might entail:

First of all, my brand is obviously word-based and not photo-based, because here we are on my blog and emphatically not on my ill-fated Instagram account. It's also very family-oriented (although not necessarily family-friendly, due largely to certain frequently occurring words), and although it loves its line of work, it works to live rather than living to work - for example, my out-of-office reply will be happy to take your inquiry while I'm away on Christmas vacation.

My brand is organized A.F. and enjoys cooking. It used to also enjoy baking until its significant other stopped eating gluten, The Magic Ingredient (turns out it wasn't love that made everything good after all). My brand likes taking frequent, measured risks to keep life interesting, such as "I don't need directions"; "I'm just gonna wing this"; "Welp, let's see what my hair gets up to today"; and "People are coming over for dinner, I think I'll try a bunch of new recipes!"

My brand has its own laugh track, which is just me laughing at things all the time, so don't worry about whether you like my brand or not because it is having enough fun without you.

My brand will not be doing any public speaking, ever, so don't even ask.       

Finally, my brand has a small oversharing problem. However, this might be a positive thing if I understand this personal branding thing correctly - one might even call me a pioneer in the field of personal-professional partitional porosity. I'm so putting that on my resume...