this woman’s work

Hurricane Ike knocked out Columbus. Like many of my neighbors, we’re without power and have been since Sunday when gale-force winds (gusting up to 65 mph) came through and threw down trees and powerlines. We sat on the front porch and watched the trees in the field behind the houses across the street whip up then slow as the trees closer in whipped up and slowed until finally our own trees were whipped into the wild frenzy. We watched it over and over and Madison, caught up in the energy of the storm, danced and sang and spun.

I’m at my mom’s trying to catch up on work on her computer. She doesn’t have wifi so my laptop (with all my needed passwords) is useless. I’m trying not to panic about all I have to do and can’t do. I’m trying (and not succeeding) in being zen. I mean, there’s not much I can do about it right?

Even though I’m frustrated, I’m grateful, too. Grateful that the weather is cool and sunny. That our water is clean. That reports say we’ll have power back by midnight Sunday at the latest. That my mom has power, a full ‘fridge and an open door policy for her kids. We’re luckier than most people in Ike’s (or Gustav’s) path and don’t I know it!! (Pennie hasn’t heard from her mom yet — she got her own power back last night.)

The kids think it’s a madcap adventure with M&Ms (Grandma has a full bubblegum machine and a tin of pennies at the ready) and unlimited wii. They’ll remember it fondly just like they remember the blizzard that took our electricity and sent us to spend Madison’s first Christmas at Brett’s parents and the way Noah remembers the ice storm a couple years back because we toasted marshmallows in the fireplace.

And the work, lord knows, will still be there when the power comes back. A week late maybe but folks understand especially the folks here in central Ohio with me.

Life happens. What can you do?

I mean, look at this site: Brilliant!

Unless you’ve been lurking on the edges of Chamber of Commerce meetings you don’t know what a typical insurance agent looks like. Me, I know not only from those Chamber meetings but also all those years I spent hanging out at my dad’s insurance conventions. I’m used to a big slab of cheese on top of my insurance sales pitch. I’m talking guys who call women “little lady” and are used to throwing their weight around.

I’m scared of most insurance guys. Did I say scared? I meant hostile towards.

So this guy? I met him at a meeting today and he introduced himself as “a not entirely for profit insurance agent.” And that, of course, got my attention. Plus Brett and I were just whining about insurance (again) because that’s what freelancers are prone to do so my ears perk up any old way when I hear the word. Plus he has a kick-ass business card, which he handed to me along with a sticker that says BUY LOCAL COLUMBUS like on the front of his web site. Hey, he had me at “not entirely for profit” but the sticker and stellar biz card put me over the top.

I don’t know if his insurance will work for us (I’ll let the insurance expert aka Brett figure that out) but his heady dose of “be who you are and the work will follow” was a soothing balm to my troubled soul. Because if an insurance guy can head off cheesy and make a living, there is hope for the rest of us.

(By the way, the only thing more cheesy than an insurance guy is a financial planning guy. Which, by the way, is what my dad does now only he works with clients whose financial hem I cannot touch so it’s a special brand of cheese now. A unpasteurized triple cream, if you will, served in Provence by alabaster virgins.)

Interracial Families in Friendship (IFIF) is a group of mostly white parents who have adopted kids of color, usually African American kids. It’s open to anyone who wants to come and we went before Madison showed up and found everyone lovely and welcoming and nice but somehow we never went back. Part of it was the way meetings would sneak up on me and part of it was that Saturdays are so often busy anyway so I lurked on the email list, commenting every now and then and promised myself that we’d get back eventually.

Well, today was that day and we had a grand time. My friend Terreece got me an assignment with Columbus Parent for their annual National Adoption Month issue and so I needed to try to interview folks. I decided to hit up the good folks at IFIF at their August meeting at the bunny park out near Dublin and then my editor asked if I could get pics so I got Kristen to go along with me and Abby came to keep an eye on Madison (Brett had stuff to do). I didn’t end up getting any interviews (I’m going to try email later) but I met some fun people.

But this is why I’m really writing this entry: I want to show you what a small town Columbus really is.

1. I met this one mom, Marie, and as we talked she realized she already knew Madison. We figured out that one of her kids was in the same lacrosse camp Noah was in and that her daughters played with Madison while they all waited for their big siblings to be done with camp. Brett was the one who took the kids so that’s why it took her a minute to figure it out.

2. Turns out she knows one of the other moms whose son was also in the camp and is a good friend of ours. Marie (or Ann, her parter, I can’t remember) said, “I volunteer at Girl Scout camp with her” and I said, “We watch her son for the week she volunteers.”

3. Then we figured out that Marie and Ann bought this house that Kristen tried to buy a few years ago. When Kristen and her husband went to put a bid on it, it was already in contract much to her sorrow (don’t worry — she got a very nice house, too). So the two of them chatted about the house and what Ann and Marie have done to it since and they invited Kristen over to see it.

4. We also talked about where their kids go to school and one of them was in the same class as one of Noah’s best friends. Noah’s best friend’s mother? She and good friend mentioned in #2 were college roommates. They lost touch but Columbus is a small town — mutual friends brought them back together again. (That’s confusing, right? I’ll explain it again. Mom that Marie volunteers with at Girl Scout Camp is G. Marie’s daughter is in a class with J’s son. J and G were college roommates.)

5. Wait. There’s more. So then Ann is talking about her oldest son and where he’s worked and where he works now. He works with Lisa the Waitress. Abby got her kitten from Lisa the Waitress. And the mom’s son goes to school with Pennie but we haven’t figured out if they know each other yet. (It’s a small program so they might.)

We found this many common friends/acquaintances without much effort. Imagine what we could do if we really tried!!

This happens with Pennie, too. Like Pennie’s Nate’s band used to play at Ruby Tuesdays. My good friend’s ex-husband does the sound there (or did — I don’t know if he does now). Before Pennie ever met my good friend, she knew her ex and used to hang out with him while she waited for Nate’s set to be over. When Pennie met my good friend, they talked about the ex.

I love this about Columbus. Sometimes it can be weird and sometimes it can be awkward but usually it’s fine and funny. Like the time I sat next to my friend Lis (the one with the ex-husband who does sound) at LLL and she said, “Hey, are you related to Justin Friedman?” and I said, “Yeah, he’s my brother.” Or how the little kid Justin used to run around with when HE was a little kid is now the homeschool gym instructor and lacrosse camp leader. The lacrosse camp that led to meeting this new family that I then met at IFIF.

And I think about this a lot in relation to our open adoption; Pennie and I would have brushed up against each other even if the adoption would have been closed. Would we have ever figured it out? (I sometimes think yes because Madison looks so much like Pennie and sometimes think no because we wouldn’t be looking. In any case, I’m glad it’s not something I really have to think about.)

Columbus isn’t so small (it’s the largest city in Ohio and two years ago was ranked the 16th largest city in the country although I have a hard time buying that) but if you’re of a certain age or have kids of a certain age and have lived here for more than five years, you can usually find some friendship in common. The more I get out, the more I’m reminded of this and it always makes me laugh.

You may not know this but Columbus is a major blogging city. It’s true — according to Scarborough Research, we’re number eight on the list (a list topped by not-surprising entrants like Austin, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle) sharing with those cities a tech-friendly environment and lots of internet access. Likely we skew higher, too, because OSU is the largest university in the country, which means we have lots of young adults with the blogging and the twittering and the myspace-ing around here.

The local marketing world has been paying attention (as have I, note: Open Book Strategies) and the other night the good folks at Experience Columbus invited the central Ohio blogosphere to check out their new ad campaign.

Now just like you probably didn’t know that Columbus is so bloggy, there’s probably a whole lot of other stuff you don’t know about us like we’re artsy as hell and incredibly gay-friendly (I’ve been told we’re the San Fransisco of the midwest) and pretty darn diverse. We’re a nice city (minus the humidity) — affordable, great housing, low traffic — and lately lots of different powerful folks have been wrestling around trying to figure out how to make sure you all know that. I’ve been in on a number of different talks about it lately and everyone has their own take. It’ll be very interesting to see where we are in ten years.

(Mind you, I’ve lived here for 25 years (moved here when I was eight, five years in Portland, OR — a city that really knows how to work their brand) and I’ve heard this noise before. I think sometimes the newcomers with the unbridled enthusiasm about our fair city don’t know the fatigue of living through the AmeriFlora debacle or being the subject of a critical documentary on gentrification. Sometimes the recently relocated aren’t so patient with us but they gotta appreciate our caution.)

There is much to love here but sometimes it seems like the powers that be are the last to know it. No wonder Columbus Ohio ends up being an insider joke on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (One of the writers hailing from Columbus brings his folks in for a tour. When they meet D. L. Hughley the mother stumbles, “We love Sidney Poitier.” Because we don’t have black people in Columbus. Right.)

So the Experience Columbus planners have their work cut out for them. How to get past our mundane, farm-centric, cowpoke reputation? Especially when what’s unique about us somehow doesn’t seem bold enough to grab attention? (We do have some great attention-grabbing stuff though, most notably the Short North, one of our few attractions that isn’t beholden to a big corporation. And we’re also well known in the gay community as a terrific city having been touted in gay magazines since at least the early eighties.)

Their answer was to start a campaign about what we don’t have. Like we don’t have the Eiffel Tower or mermaids or mountains. There’s a really terrible youtube channel — the vidoes will evoke snickers in those of us who live in Columbus and get the joke but aren’t funny enough to forward (and also don’t tell us what is here, which is the flip side the campaign needs to emphasize). And a myspace, which weirdly is run by an imaginary 22-year old male although the target audience of this campaign is ostensibly conference planners. Ok, maybe it’s a real 22-year old intern. Happily the campaign does boast some pretty awesome t-shirts.

So I’m not crazy about the campaign although I think it could grow legs with a little tweaking (I do love the t-shirts — full disclosure, they gave us coupons to get one free) only I’m confused about why they brought the bloggers along.

It makes sense for them to get us to blog the campaign because it’ll likely be controversial to the folks who love Columbus and are already pretty dang defensive what with the Aaron Sorkin types who dismiss us. Maybe those people won’t get the joke so good thing to bring on the bloggers, ply us with the goodness that is Jeni’s ice cream (seriously, that salty caramel? If you haven’t had it, you haven’t lived) and then set us loose in a sugar-infused haze to blog it.

But then what? The campaign doesn’t have a lot of social media around it. They haven’t really come up with many ways to let people grab it and run. Jennifer Laycock has given ‘em a ton of free ideas that could help things along a lot but there we all were, sitting with our twitter accounts and blogs and they didn’t really figure out a good way to use us.

We’re talking about the campaign but we’re not really a part of it. If they grab Jennifer Laycock’s list, they could bring us on board a little more. There’s a lot of central Ohio pride among Columbus bloggers and some of us walk around with our cameras around our necks all the time (Kristen!) and our iPods ready to twitter (umm, me) and a bunch of us have tons of readers NOT in Columbus. You know, that target market of people not here who maybe want to come here. People like Kristen (just check out her gorgeous ComFest pictures), who genuinely love and celebrate Columbus can do a lot to change people’s mindset about it. Rather than invite her to a campaign about NOT in Columbus, I’d invite her to one to give her insider view about what IS Columbus. And then ask her to share.

In short (ha!) lots of bloggers already are changing people’s point of view about what’s here — use us for good instead of snark.