Playing The Game

In order to be successful, I need to network.  In order to network, I need to be social.  In order to be social, I need to be motivated.  In order to be motivated, I need to have confidence.  In order to have confidence, I need to gain skills.

I'm not the most social person.   Growing up, I never had more than five or six close friends at one time.  Sure, I had classroom friends, school bus friends, summer friends, and family friend friends.  But, when it came to sleepover friends, the lower my number, the lesser my anxiety.

BEST BUDS

I had a few close friends who I considered worthy of sleepover invites.  They were the lucky ones who were first on the guest list for my annual Birthday Slumber Party (limit two)!

One year, I decided to go over my self-imposed limit by inviting several girls I knew.  It was the first time I heard the key question that some people will forever ask before they can RSVP -- who else is going to be there?  I remember juggling phone calls for several days between two girls who were only coming if the other was too. When only one showed up and the other was pissed the entire day, I mentally called bullshit! and decided no more inviting dumb girls.  "Dumb girls" is how I referred to the girly-girls who did all the things that confused me (i.e., went to the bathroom together, shared clothes, held hands) and did none of the things I did (i.e., navigated the woods, climbed trees, wet the bed) you know, normal stuff.


I mainly socialized with my older brothers or my mom and her friends.  No one asked me to, but everyone knew I was a third wheel.  During the day, I would relentlessly follow the boys hoping to cash in on whatever fun they discovered.  They would often try to ditch me, but that didn't matter; trying to find them would also occupy my boredom.  In the evening, I would sit at the kitchen table in my bathrobe with my mom and her friends eating cheesecake and listening to them discuss why Blanche wouldn't reconcile with her estranged daughter...wait, that's an episode of Golden Girls.  Well, you get the idea.

 SOCIALITES

When it comes to being social, I don't feel as though I have the greatest skills.  My lack of social esteem  causes anxiety. The degree of my discomfort when forming friendships is akin to how you might feel when you crap your pants in line at the grocery store and you desperately hope no one can smell it.  (We've all been there).

Now that I am an adult, I realize the importance of networking skills and know it's time to get past my ridiculous anxiety and just go for it.  It's time to inspire and motivate.  Yeah!  I'm pumped!  Let's do this!

Wait, really?  I don't think I'm ready.

Since I last wrote about joining the Yahoo! Contributor Network (YCN), I had a mere 20 page views.  Now, I have almost 600.  That seems pretty cool, but in the scheme of things it amounts to nothing until I get one million page views in order to get top assignments and therefore three-figure paychecks (cha-ching!). That's where networking comes in to play. In order to cash in and finally get a chance to wear a monocle, I have to "connect with others". 

One networking idea YCN recommends is that I meet other contributors to get "fans".  I checked out about ten contributor profiles before it became really easy to stop caring.

YCN also recommends using networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Plurk, Fark and the rest of the 373 ridiculously named sites designed to make you feel like somebody or nobody. The problem is that I'm just not motivated to tell strangers, "Look at me! Read my uninformed opinions."  I'll do it with my friends (hence this site and my facebook page), but even on Twitter I will ultimately delete my article links after several hours because it's too embarrassing.  My facebook page gets cleared every month for essentially the same reason.

It just isn't in me to advertise my dumb articles to strangers.

I came to this realization with my last assignment which was to write an op/ed for Yahoo! News.  I recently read the story of military atheists coming out of the closet.  My angle had nothing to do with whether or not those men and women are right to be without religion, but rather that they courageously go into battle without a spiritual safety net.  I consider them to be hardcore American soldiers.  Of course, all soldiers are hardcore Americans, but these people deliberately head into the war zone with a sense of certainty that no one is watching over them but themselves and their fellow troops.  They aren't looking up to the heavens from their foxholes and feeling (somewhat) secure in that idea that they are already destined to be saved, mangled, or killed.  And, yet they go.  They sign up, they train, and they go.   Amazing.  So that was my thought on the matter.

When I began to write the article, I thought about anyone and everyone reading it.  I thought about how religious soldiers might misunderstand my referring to atheist soldiers as more hardcore and how that would be an injustice to every soldier who ever fought for anyone and anything.  When I thought about having to share my inexperienced opinions with the interworld, I couldn't imagine trying to network such an idea.  I like to think that while I have opinions on everything, I keep the ignorant ones to myself.   Unfortunately, the very definition of ignorant suggests I couldn't.

So now, I have to think of another story idea in the next few days before I lose my $8 assignment.  I really need the money, because I've been eyeballing some rad one-size-fits-all shoelaces at Target.   It has to be a topic that I wouldn't mind sharing with anyone bored enough to read it.  Then, I have to pretend there's not crap in my pants (or hope that you can't smell).

I hate playing the game.