The weekend before last I posted the following photo and description on my Instagram feed.

Halloween = my favorite time for over-saturating social media with photos of my kids. For this party Miss is a loose interpretation of a samurai, Mr is Buzz Lightyear.

If you visit my account you’ll see that my loose interpretation of a samurai costume hit some nerves, and cultural appropriation is something I’ve been thinking about ever since.

The podcast http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/category/stuff-mom-never-told-you/ just did an episode on this titled “What Not to Wear on Halloween” and I think it’s a great listen if you’d like to spend some time working through this issue.

This is the conclusion I have come to: It is never appropriate to represent or impersonate a negative or offensive stereotype of a currently-living group with a costume. Additionally, a privileged group should never dress as a member of a group they have oppressed, offended, or reside above in a given area (either presently or in the past). Be culturally sensitive about donning costume inspired by foreign cultures, particularly those your own culture has oppressed or attacked in some way.

If you have enough not to be homeless, you should not be dressing as a homeless person for Halloween. Living without a home is not a joke. If you are healthy, don’t dress up as a cancer patient. Having cancer is not a joke. (If you actually have cancer, feel free to dress up as someone with cancer. Maybe it can be a make lemonade from lemons kind of situation?) “White trash”, illegal alien, blackface. All are offensive. One of the Stuff Your Mom Never Told You hosts pointed out that at the end of the night the Halloween participant gets to go home and take their costume off. They may have been pretending to be a Black, mentally ill, incarcerated character, but after the party is over they get to go back to being a white, wealthy, TV personality. A better homage to Crazy Eyes would be donating some money to a cause that support similar women who need assistance getting back on their feet after incarceration.

I’ve cited some examples that I consider to be very obvious, but there are some I can’t decide on. What if I want to dress as a maid? Maybe the sexy French kind, maybe as someone in regular clothes who carries around a mop and set of rags all night. I think telling someone that they can’t dress as a maid somehow implies something negative about being a maid. But if I picture Paris Hilton dressing as a maid I get a bad taste in my mouth - it feels wrong. Same thing with dressing as an auto mechanic, or Walmart employee, or coal miner. Where is the line between personifying an idea and making a joke out of it?

I think the best approach to choosing a Halloween costume is to think about the person you are representing and decide how you are portraying their personhood. Most importantly, think about how they might feel if you were to encounter them in person. If there is any hesitation on your part, or any possibility of offense on theirs, choose something else. If you don’t know if something is offensive read about it on Wikipedia or ask someone who is well-read. If you’re reading this I’m going to assume you have the means at your disposal to create almost anything you can dream up; unique and creative costumes are the best kind anyway. Leave the flat jokes and hurtful stereotypes to the comedians who aren’t savvy enough to come up with sharp and innovative material.

I don’t bathe my kids every day (The Dirt on Clean is partially to blame for this, at least I’m not putting it off for years at a time like parents used to do with their children). Logistics are a bit tricky by myself, but I’ve figured out how to get them both in, bathe them at the same time with only minimal splashing into baby’s face, and back out again without anyone drowning. And even though I like simplifying the bedtime routine by leaving the bath for another day, the moment when I pull a clean child out of the tub is a highlight of parenting for me. They smell wonderful, their skin is soft, and no matter the age they cling to me tight and lean their head against my shoulder. I ask them “Who’s going to get out first, my first baby or my second baby?” I encourage independence and growth and have no desire to keep them as babies forever, but this is one of the things I’ll miss when they’re grown.

If you have a TWLC4 After picture, reply to my email and send it my way! (You should have received a reminder email from me last week if you sent me a Before picture in April.)

This is my current Facebook profile picture and I love it because every time I write something I think it adds some ooopmh and happiness to whatever I’m saying. The previous sentence was my somewhat-cheesy way of leading into this next one - that I want to have that same ooomph when it comes to this next round of TWLC! It’s going to be 3 months this round to see if that helps everyone stick with it a bit better (myself included).

How To Participate in TWLC5, November 1st-February 1st

Step 1:

Copy and paste the following sentence in the comment section below. PLEASE COPY THE SENTENCE EXACTLY AS SEEN BELOW.

I would like to participate in TWLC5.

Step 2:

1. Start drafting an email with the subject line “TWLC5 Before Picture – Insert Your Name Here”. THIS IS CRUCIAL! YOU WILL NOT BE ENTERED UNLESS YOU DO THIS EXACTLY AS DETAILED.

2. Email me a before picture of you from head to toe (or neck to toe if you prefer). I need a picture of your front, back, and sides if possible. I suggest *not* wearing black, wear light colors and tight fitting clothes so you can see a difference!

3. Include a picture of the scale while you are standing on it.

Emails should be sent to thatwife [at] gmail [dot] com.

Optional Step 3:

Click here to join the TWLC Facebook Group. I’ve added some co-admins to help me keep that group humming.

When I started my first blog, blogging was about journaling and connecting with other people. A few years into it I noticed that people were making money doing the same thing I was doing. I wanted that (who wouldn’t?). So far my charges to move into that space have not been what I needed them to be, and it’s time for me to pull back and strategize. I’m not there yet, but I’m approaching a fork in the road. I either need to throw myself into self-employment and make it succesful, or I need to scale those back to something I only do in my free time and start going out on job interviews.

I’m at BlogHerPro 2013 today and tomorrow, multi-tasking as I listen to the speakers. Pinterest Fail has seen incredible growth over the summer, and I think it might have the potential to launch a career for me. Whether I turn the blog itself into a career, or I develop something that I can use on my resume to show what I can contribute to the company I’d like to be employed with.

I’ve played with this idea, blogging as a career instead of a hobby, for a long time now. My sites (this one and Pinterest Fail) have the traffic and following that it should be a reality already, but my attempts to monetize have not been very successful. I think common wisdom says you aren’t supposed to admit something like that (what if I’m in the position in the future where I’m trying to market myself as just the opposite?), but the keynote speaker for today, Porter Gale, just advised us to admit what we don’t know. This conference is one of the ways I am trying to turn my monetization and marketing weaknesses into strengths. Is this one of your strengths? I would love to hear more about your strategy if you’re willing to share.

I think a first step would be deciding what my priorities are. Have you seen my Jenna Cole twitter bio? I want to do all the things. This is not sustainable. Do I want to be a photographer or a blogger? Young kids+blogging+photography+traveling husband is more than I can handle. Or maybe I need to develop a plan that limits my involvement in each, allowing me to split my time 30/30/30 (the extra 10% can go to rest and relaxation time, which I rarely allow myself to take guilt-free). It’s very easy for me to get caught up in a whirlwind of passion and excitement as I approach a project, and I want to avoid depleting myself so that I can’t manage any of it.

I haven’t been active in the comment section lately, but over the next day and a half I am kid-free with pockets of time to pop by and interact. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on my situation and how you have perceived my efforts over the years. I’d really like to hear how you have been able to monetize your own blogging efforts. Or you can just tell me what’s going on with your life (sometimes I think about the people I have interacted with over the years and I feel sad when I realize that I have no idea where they are at or what they are doing!).

T1 was sick this past week, and stayed home from school on Monday and Tuesday. Monday he was listless and refusing milk (this is the moment when I fully grasped how sick he was), but Tuesday was a day between sickness and health. Based on the preschool guidelines I could have sent him in, but I took advantage of my self-employed status and kept him home to play with us instead. We went to Happy Hollow with friends and picnicked and rode on Danny the Dragon. I was grateful for my privileged ability to be flexible, but after 48+ hours with both kids without a break I was very happy to slip back into our routine again on Wednesday.