Spotify's Thoughts on the Class of 2013

I’m a recent convert to Spotify and I’ve recently given in and starting paying the ~$10 a month to get unlimited streaming everywhere and anywhere. I love building and following my friends’ playlists and it really cuts down on my need to download music all the time. (You can follow me here!)

In lieu of graduations happening everywhere, Spotify has created a playlist called “You Made It – Class of 2013” in honor of graduates of the class of 2013. From reading the title, you’d expect a musical mix of inspirational songs like Vitamin C’s “Graduation” and R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly.” Instead, you get a strange mix of songs including but not limited to: “Good Riddance,” “Closing Time,” “Gold Digger,” and “Boyfriend.” (I just looked again and it also has the Glee version of Santa Baby. I mean, what is going on? What are the criteria for making this list?) It’s certainly an eclectic mix of present and past Top 40 songs but I’m not sure it embodies the spirit of graduation and a future of possibility. I mean, what exactly am I supposed to take away from the song “Gold Digger” in light of my recent graduation? It doesn’t send the most encouraging message…

To remedy this problem, I think I’m going to make a new grad playlist of my own. You can follow it here and I’ll take suggestions, but the requirement to make this playlist is that the title or content of the song must be relatable to graduation in a non-metaphorical, obvious sort of way. Examples: Vitamin C’s “Graduation,” pretty much any song from High School Musical (but I promise to limit these), Destiny’s Child’s 90’s hit “Bills, Bills, Bills” (I think this is very applicable to our life after graduation) [also, that was a lot of apostrophes to describe possession]. Feel free to leave me suggestions here or on the Tumblr version of this site: afterthediploma.tumblr.com!

Not the most original image but it'll do.

On Posting Everyday

I’ve been updating and posting here twice a day but I’m wondering if that might be too much. The reasoning is twofold: 1) While I might be able to keep up with it for now, once I start work, I don’t think it’ll be that plausible to keep posting twice a day. I mean there is queuing but I don’t know how much writing I’ll be able to get in with a heavy work schedule and I want to make sure my posts are timely and relevant. Queuing sometimes makes posts obsolete by the time they get posted. Though I’d like to be able to keep writing as much as I can, it’ll be tough to keep up twice a day. 2) I’ve been noticing that my posts that get posted later in the day (usually after 4:00PM) are getting more views, so it might just be worth posting once a day, later in the day.

I found this quote while looking for "writing" quotes. I think it's quite appropriate considering my goals for this blog!

What do you think? Do you like having more reading material from me per day or is just one post fine and dandy?

The Lululemon Controversy

I’m a self-declared Lululemon addict and I spend weeks saving up to buy a pair of Wunder Unders or new tank top. Considering that Lululemon is in my blog description, it was only a time before I found something Lulu related to write about! I found this article while going through some tracked tags on Tumblr and I think it’s definitely and interesting read. While this definitely isn’t the first defaming article I’ve read about Lululemon, I can never stop myself from ogling their new line of pants and summer patterns. What I want to do, however, is draw attention to some of the points that Tech Mommy brought up in her blog:

His (Chip Wilson – founder of Lululemon) comments bring up some questions:

1. If plus sized women would need to spend more money for extra fabric in their clothing, would you give extra small women a discount? 

2. Why does Lululemon sell “plus sized” mens wear? Their sizing goes up to 40″. This would be a size 18-20 for women. 

3. Why did the XL sizing of Lululemon move from a size 14 to a size 12 in 2009? 

4. Now that Lululemon has moved their manufacturing to China from Canada, wouldn’t the cost of making bigger clothes be even less of an issue?5. If this is how the founder of the company feels towards plus sized women, how is message being presented to their staff members?

I don’t think these questions are limited to just Lululemon, but they’re definitely questions to think about for all brands. You don’t see brands like Nike showing plus size models in their advertisements and while I can respect plus-size as being a healthy figure, there is such thing as people who use the term “plus-size” to justify obesity. NOTE: I’m not saying EVERYONE who is plus-size is obese, I’m just saying that I’ve heard people incorrectly label overweight as plus-size. They’re not equivalents. It’s the same stereotype people use for skinny people. Skinny does not equal anorexic.

I can already tell that this post is going to be offensive to some people but isn’t that good writing’s all about? Controversy?

The end result, for me at least, is that we live in an imperfect world. Lululemon is part of that imperfection, I mean take a look at this article. If we want something to be affordable/cheap, it comes at the cost of somewhere else, whether it is the outsourcing of labor or quality of the fabric. It’s not so much individual brands so much as our entire commodity system. If we want something that’s American manufactured, it’ll take a chunk out of our wallets. I’m not sure the boycotting of brands will help the situation but I don’t have any solutions to offer either. It’s definitely a lot of food for thought.

Night Owl vs. Day Lark

You know how some people get more done in the early hours of the morning? That’s not me. I’m a night owl and I’ve always been one for as long as I remember. It used to make my dad mad because I like staying up late at night and then as a result, I’d sleep in on the weekend till 11 or 12. He told me it was a waste of natural daylight and electricity. But there’s something about the quiet of the night and everyone else sleeping that helps me get all my thoughts in order.

Thank goodness for queuing. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t ever be able to post anything before 1AM. I’ve found that regardless of much or how little I sleep, once it gets past the midnight hour, I can stay up hours after that. I usually end up writing most of my posts at that point. I’m guessing this might change once I start my new job. Most jobs don’t run on my strange sleep schedule.

I call myself a night owl and I assigned the term “day lark” to my opposite. I got the idea from that one scene in Romeo and Juliet where they try and convince each other that the bird that’s singing is the late night bird and not the lark that sings in the early morning. I guess that AP English pays off. I know there’s an Emily Dickinson poem about the early morning birds singing but I can’t for the life of me remember what it’s called. Anyone know what it’s called?

What do you classify yourself as? A night owl or a day lark?

RIP Google Reader

Google announced a few months ago that they would be shutting down Google Reader because of a declining user base and I was crushed. I’ve only been using Google Reader for a little more than a year because an internship had used it to track certain blogs. I’ve been reading blogs but I was often getting behind because I didn’t have a blog aggregator. Enter Google Reader: the hero that saved me from having twenty different bookmarks in my Chrome browser.

The thing I liked about Google Reader was that it let me read full posts without having to actually visit the site. There were a few blogs that had that “more after the jump” that would make me click through to the site if I wanted to read more, but they had a brief intro so I could decide whether I wanted to read more or not. Since starting my blog here on Blogger, I’ve been able to migrate my blogs but it doesn’t give me the option of reading them all; instead, I have to individually click through to each site and read the full post. I’m guessing it has something to do with driving more traffic to those blogs since I’d want the same thing for my blog – more actual page views.

RIP Google Reader. I'm going to miss you dearly.

D-Day is July 1^st for Google Reader so I have about a month and a half to find an alternative. I found this article on LifeHacker with some alternatives as well as their Top 5 picks but I thought I’d get some peer advice. What do you use to track all your blogs?