Yesterday, I took a call for questions on my blog and I got a question that I felt should really be a post unto itself.

Stephen asked:

“As a male, I sometimes experience hesitation in commenting on you gal’s blogs. You, Sandi, Tanis, Suzanne, Ree, Katie, etc. The hesitation stems in large part from being perceived as some kind of weirdo, stalker/loser. Have you ever felt that way about guys commenting, and also, how does Jonathan feel about it?  My rule of thumb is to try and always be a gentleman, and make sure that I frequently make note of being happily married, but still, it feels like a sensitive subject and MANY times I don’t jump in for that very reason.”

Good question. And I have heard it from a lot of men in my years online.

I cannot profess to speak for all women.

Lord, no.

I would not only never presume to do that, I imagine that many a female may read my opinions and utterly disagree. (This is the Internet after all.)

I can only speak for myself.

As for me and my opinion about male commenters on my blog?

BRING ON THE DUDES, YO.

THE MORE THE MERRIER.

[Read more...]

It’s rather narcissistic to post an article about yourself on your blog but this is SO well done that I had to spread the word about LP Creative Humans Magazine and the talent of the author and photographer of this article because they are both amazing.

Nine to Seven With Loralee

A day in the life of blogger, mother, singer and all-a-round nutter, Loralee Choate.

Written and Photographed for LP Creative Humans Magazine by Jasmine Bailey-Barfuss, author of www.glooart.com

Perhaps the author who penned the words, “You can only complain of a hurt so many times, then you have to be better, whether you are better or not.” is right. Perhaps it’s cultural expectation. It’s how we are trained from birth. I mean, who of us actually answers truthfully when asked, “How are you today?”  We are a culture of plastic facades; of pain-killers and anti-depressants; of appearing to be strong on the outside while melting down on the inside.  My mother said to me today that if everyone stopped lying, our whole society would crumble.  And perhaps she is right.  But there is one voice out there that dares speak it – the truth that is – and it is like a breath of fresh air to hear:  Her name is Loralee Choate.

And I got to follow her around for a day.

Having the opportunity to be a fly on her wall (with my camera in hand) presented me with a unique opportunity to see what life was really like behind her popular blog ‘Loralee’s Looney Tunes’.

And what I saw was just like her blog: pretty darn real, and pretty darn not-ordinary. She’s also just…darn pretty, but not in a Barbie way. She is uniquely Loralee; an original unlike any other.  She is very down-to-earth and can wear pajama pants to shop at WalMart, yet also remains a diva through and through.  When she needs to pop out to get her morning wake-up Diet Coke from the local gas station, she simply pulls her hair back, whacks on some lippie and voila! In two seconds she is transformed from bed-head-stay-at-home-mom to hot babe with no effort at all.

As I walked into her cluttered but pretty kitchen, a lone vase of flowers sat in the center of her empty stainless steel table – a reminder of her difficult and emotional anniversary the day before my visit.  It marked the sixth anniversary of the death of Loralee’s four-month-old son, Matthew to SIDS.

But today her face is brave.

She’s survived, “barely…it was really touch and go there for a long, long time”, and with each day her newborn son, Aaron, grows older and stronger. Loving eyes watch him day and night. When I arrived at 9am, a bleary-eyed Loralee was saying goodbye to her mother. Loralee watches over Aaron every night until 3 or 4 am. Then her husband, Jonathan takes over until her mother comes so she can help with the children and Jonathan can get ready for work. It is a family tag-team event each day to help prevent the pain of their past tragic loss from ever happening again. “I know it may be futile and that we can’t keep up watching him around the clock forever, but Aaron is just the age Matthew was when he died and well…it’s what we have to do right now so that we can all keep breathing through the anxiety and fear.”

I find myself thinking that I would do the exact same thing in her position.

Many of her blog followers know the pain of losing a child or, as in my case having sick children, and in a strengthening kind of way, we band together in fellow bloghood; our shared pain and creativity being the bond that brings us together – hoping to rub off a little joy and gladness into each others sometimes dark lives along the way.

“The lamest ‘Made-For-TV-Movie’, EVER!“, Loralee jokes and rolls her eyes over her crazy life.  Blissfully white trash one moment, then singing Handel’s Messiah in front of an orchestra in an evening gown the next is normal for Loralee.  There are many facets to this woman – hilarity to be sure, but it is mingled with a serious side that runs painfully deep. One moment you are crying like a baby as she intimately shares some of the darkest moments in her life and in the blink of an eye she can get you laughing until your old caesarean scar pops (I swear I had to check mine after spending the day with her).  You never know what you are going to get with Loralee, but you know it is never going to be dull.

When she spoke about what made her successful and a stand out from so many hundreds of thousands of bloggers out there, she chalked it up to luck, perseverance, and most important – the way she views things. “I have such a wild imagination. Being in my head can be like constant partying like it’s 1999 or like the darkest chapters of Grapes of Wrath with a Dante’s Inferno chaser.  Most people could write adequately about the bigger issues in my life, it’s the little day-to-day stuff that will bite you.  For example: say that I overcooked the carrots for dinner.  If my Vulcan-like husband wrote about it, it would be rather prosaic and short and boring (sorry, honey). “Loralee cooked carrots that were soggy and bland…” he would say, whereas I would make it a PARTY OF WHEEE!!!! and write, “My carrots turned out like flaccid Oompa-Loompa penises that are in desperate need of some produce Viagra so their Willy’s can get Wonking!“ It is still the same conversation, still about carrots, but TOTALLY different. If you can’t make the mundane interesting and put your own personality on it, you probably won’t last long as a personal blogger.”

Her personality is a reason so many follow her blog; why so many want to be a part of her existence: some of us just like the odd laugh, others love the drama-slash-train-wreck that is her life, but for most of us - we can relate to her.  We can relate to her joy and her pain on some level, and we find ourselves cheering for her from the sidelines and biting our nails as she allows us to follow her on a life that often reads like a novel with the kind of twists and turns that are usually reserved for a world outside of the real one in which we live.

As the day went on and we had to take breaks for a radio interview and conference calls, I thought on several occasions that her life was just begging to be made into a book. “I hear that all the time. The thing is, I feel like that is exactly what I am doing with my blog. It’s the way I write the book of my life. I can do things in segmented blog posts that most accurately portray what and who I am that wouldn’t necessarily work in book form. And since I am hugely fond of the word “rad”, exclamation points, and emoticons, I am perfectly fine with it staying that way.”

More than once I found my jaw dangling down around my chest just listening to her speak and I wasn’t sure that I agreed that she was not cut out to be the star in her own novel. Don’t get me wrong, her days are filled with a lot of what may look like your life and mine, like boredom and tiredness, pajamas and Diet Coke, mothering and being a wife, grocery shopping and sleep deprivation.  But there are also large amounts of passion and intrigue, success and failure, love and loss, guest lecturing for college classes, evening gowns and solo performances, radio interviews, news clips and blogging to a large audience, attending and speaking at conferences and meeting with The White House.

A good girlfriend that Loralee met through her blog came over to lunch with her kids. She and Loralee have bonded with each other over the mutual loss of their children to SIDS and they have become incredibly close, sharing stories, pain, joy and doing kind things for one another. “Kim made me this gorgeous sling just to be kind and help the process of having another baby. She is rad like that.”

Over a delicious lunch (she can cook, too!) we discussed how Loralee’s recent high-risk pregnancy was deemed a pre-existing condition by her insurance, how huge medical bills are, and how utterly broken the current healthcare system is.  Having two children with Muscular Dystrophy myself, I know all too well how dark and dirty the battle for health coverage in America is – a struggle that Loralee bravely talked about on her blog one day.  “I am never political on my blog, but I grew a spine and finally talked about it.”

The discussion sparked the interest of The White House and eventually lead to an invitation for Choate and her husband to visit there with Valerie Jarett, Senior Advisor to the President, just in time for Loralee’s 35th birthday. “It definitely made the horrifyingly large number of candles on the cake MUCH easier to cope with.”

Humbled by her experience, Loralee confessed, “Who would have thought that an often silly, looney, little blog that I started as a promise to a friend in a desperate attempt to keep myself sane after the death of my son could open so many doors?”

I believe her to be beautifully imperfect and perfectly beautiful and it was a pleasure having the opportunity recently to catch a glimpse into her amazingly ‘ordinary’ life.

It made me smile.

Visit the AMAZING, TALENTED AND GORGEOUS Jasmine at her blog.

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