Hellchick

Ladies, let's have a little girl talk. Just you, me, and the web browser. Come on, pull your chair closer -- that's good. Yes, you can have one of those cookies on the plate. I made them just for you.

Listen. No one else is going to tell you this because they don't want to make you feel uncomfortable or anything, because, you know, what if they run into you again and oh God, wouldn't that just be really awkward? So I'm going to say this to you not to hurt your feelings or anything, but to help you. We girls have to stick together.

It's the 80s fashion. You've really got to let it die. Unlike most of you I actually lived during the 80s. My formative years. The high school ones. Oh, it was a heady time -- New Order was the rage and everyone wanted to be a character in The Breakfast Club. So unlike all of you who are wearing the skinny jeans, the leg warmers, all that crap, I actually know how stupid it looks because, like Jesus dying on the cross for your sins, I've already worn the stupid for you.

Those black leggings under the skirt have to be the first to go. I know, I know -- it's painful to hear. But really, when was the last time you wore black leggings under a skirt? It was when you were eight years old and your mom made you wear dresses because it was what little girls were supposed to do but you wanted to climb the trees and play hockey in the street (even though Eddie Sabatini said that girls can't play hockey, but he was just a stupid boy so what did he know) and you couldn't just let everyone see your underwear so you compromised, and that's where the leggings came in. And that's exactly where they need to stay. You look like a goofy 20-something-year-old trying to look eight. And failing. Miserably.

Do I really even need to say anything about leg warmers? If you were drunk when I saw you wearing them at the mall today, or maybe your hot boyfriend had just broken up with you and you weren't thinking straight, you can tell me. I'll forgive you. It's the only explanation I can think of for anyone wearing them. Ever.

Come on, ladies. Don't let the fashion industry bully you around. You know what they're doing, don't you? They're sitting around dredging up the worst fashions of every decade, probably sharing some port or sherry and saying, "do think we can get them to wear that?!" "Oh, honey, they're wrapped around our delicate little pinkies! When we say 'jump', women of America say, 'what kind of mule or espadrille would you like us to jump in?'" And then they bend their hands, lean forward, and laugh with their mouths wide open, but it's that kind of fake laugh where you're pretty sure they think the other one is a total bitch.

Seriously. Say no to 80s fashion. Do you really want to end up with Flock of Seagulls hair? Think about it.

Hey, I said you could have one cookie, not the whole damn plate.

It occurs to me that while I've talked about this at length in piecemeal in some of my favorite forums, I've never actually told the whole story or the end result here. If you've arrived here because of a search about thyroid problems, Hashimoto's syndrome, or hypothyroidism and have encountered a line of doctors unwilling to listen to you, I think you'll find this story interesting.

Ever since adolescence I've been overweight. I can't remember a time in my adult life when I have, under normal healthy conditions, been less than 185 pounds. I'm tall at 5'9" and I come from both Finnish and Norwegian families, which means I have the body of a Scandinavian farm girl, but even 185 pounds is heavy on my frame. At some point in the last five years or so my weight hit a maximum of 197 pounds. Because I have a large frame, I'm curvy, and I'm tall, most people have underguessed my weight, but it was still 197 pounds up until a few months ago.

For most of my adult life I've also had very dry skin, brittle nails, dry and brittle hair, and flaky eyebrows. In fact, for years my husband would joke about my "rogue eyebrow" (my left one) as he brushed flakes away from the outer edge. We never thought anything of it -- we thought it was just me. My periods had also never been regular at all -- my average cycle was 52 days, and there were periods of time when I would go three months or so without getting my period at all, or I'd get it two weeks after I'd already gotten it. When I asked doctors about this I was told that every woman is different and it was nothing to be concerned about.

When I was about 24 or 25, I wanted to join the National Guard. To do so, I had to be a certain weight or body fat percentage for my height and age. Their requirement was 169 pounds or 32% body fat. So I began working hard: I added more exercise and I ate better. I was 185 and I stayed that way for quite a while. At my weigh-ins at the Guard post, they were dismayed at my lack of progress and insisted that I really had to stick to a diet and exercise regimen. I was, but since I wasn't seeing results I increased my regimen of exercise and reduced my caloric intake even more. I only lost a few pounds and I remained heavy. I continued to push myself further and further, trying to lose more weight. At my lowest I was at 172 pounds, still considered heavy by any standard for my height. The weight wasn't even muscular weight -- it was pudgy fat. The only way I was able to get to this weight and maintain it was by exercising for two hours every single morning and reducing my food intake to a single salad per day and nothing more. I was exhausted, I was tense, and I was mystified at how two hours of weights and aerobics and practically no food could still result in me being pudgy and overweight. And most of all, tired. I was exhausted. I saw a doctor, and he said, "your body simply doesn't want to get any lower than 172 pounds. I don't know what to tell you." I gave up trying to get into the National Guard, and while I kept a normal exercise regimen and diet, my weight ballooned back up to about 190 pounds.

About five years ago I began asking my doctor in California about why I hadn't gotten pregnant yet. She ran a few blood tests that led to an MRI, and that MRI revealed that I had something called a pituitary adenoma, or a small, benign nodule on my pituitary gland. The adenoma was, supposedly, pressing on my pituitary gland slightly and causing my body to produce elevated levels of certain hormones that fooled my body into thinking it was pregnant all the time. (This actually explained a lot of things for me.)

She prescribed Dostinex for me and told me that I had to follow up with an endocrinologist. The Dostinex was going to help offset the extra hormones and I would see a major difference -- my periods would finally be regular. I followed up with an endocrinologist, as my GP had suggested.

He did blood work and found out that in addition to my pituitary issue, I had something called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, a not uncommon autoimmune disorder in which the body mistakes the thyroid gland for a foreign agent and produces specific antibodies to destroy it. From what he explained it was common to have a pituitary condition in addition to a thyroid problem as the two were closely related. When he asked me about previous doctors and the fact that my periods had always been irregular, he was appalled when I told him that no other doctor had been interested. He said that women's health care was in a terrible state and many women were never listened to when they brought up issues like that to their doctor. This made me feel that I'd found a good doctor.

Like anyone would do, I researched Hashimoto's Thyroiditis on the web. I read that some Hashimoto's patients can experience hypothyroidism, a condition in which the thyroid gland is underfunctioning. The symptoms included dry, brittle skin and hair, exhaustion, inability to concentrate, irregular periods, infertility, inability to lose weight or a weight gain, and -- oddly specific -- flakiness or balding on the outer edges of the eyebrows.

I was stunned. Could this have been causing all those problems for me? Could this by why I hadn't been able to get to a reasonable weight despite a good diet and exercise? At my next appointment I told this doctor that I'd read about it and how relieved I was to have found an explanation for these things. He gave me a patronizing smile and said, "you don't have those symptoms." I looked at him oddly. I wasn't making them up. I explained that I'd had them forever, especially the flaky eyebrows. He smiled again and waved his hand away. "No, you couldn't be experiencing those. You would be very far advanced in hypothyroidism."

So this doctor who'd just told me at my last appointment that female patients get short shrift was telling me I was lying, or that I was a hypochondriac. He said that my Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) level was within the normal range, and therefore I couldn't be experiencing symptoms of it being out of that range. There wasn't anything I could do, so I simply went on with life, continuing to experience these same symptoms and continuing to not get pregnant.

We moved to Wisconsin and I continued to take Dostinex. By the time we'd moved I'd been on it for three years. Most patients are supposed to have gotten pregnant in less than a year on the medication. My endocrinologist didn't seem fased by this and simply kept me on it.

By the time we'd moved to Wisconsin, I was the heaviest I'd ever been: 197 pounds. Just a couple of months after we moved, I noticed that I was feeling incredibly exhausted all the time. At 8 pm I'd be sitting on the couch, literally unable to stay awake. Sometimes I'd doze off while sitting at the dining room table in front of my laptop. I'd go to bed at 8 pm, get eight hours of sleep, and wake up exhausted again the next day. I had a workout regiment of 45 minutes of exercise four times a week in the mornings. I'd force myself to get through my workout, but as the months went on I found that instead of being able to increase the difficulty of my workout, I couldn't even make it through easier workouts than I'd done before. I was getting more and more exhausted. Doing ten minutes of light housework had me sititng on the couch trying to keep from passing out. To be honest, I felt like a cancer patient. I was exhausted and sick all the time.

More troubling than this was a change in my period. During the first two days I began to cramp so painfully that I'd feel nauseous and nearly throw up. Until a year ago I'd normally just have to take a couple of Advil for normal cramps. I had to increase that to three Advil, and then finally four, with four pills still not doing the trick. At random times of the month I would get stabbing pain in my abdomen and cramps so bad that I had to lie down and take more Advil.

All of this continued to get worse over the course of our first year in Wisconsin. I asked my GP about the exhaustion; his explanation was that I had just moved from California and simply wasn't used to the seasonal differences here. I asked him about the abdominal cramping; he did all the gynecological tests and found nothing. I asked him about my inability to lose weight despite eating right and exercising regularly; his explanation was that he didn't have an explanation. Work out more, eat less. At this time I was already down to about 1000 calories a day -- even working out I was simply never hungry. I could eat one small meal a day and not be hungry until the next day. It was as if my metabolism simply was not burning very well. I even tried eating more food in case I wasn't getting enough and my body was going into starvation mode. It didn't work -- I experienced the same results and no change in weight.

He recommended that I follow up with a new endocrinologist here since I was still taking Dostinex and I needed to follow up on the thyroid issue anyway. (My previous endo had told me that Hashimoto's patients had to get regular check ups on their thyroid antibody count to find out if they'd gone hypothyroid -- the condition that that doctor had told me I couldn't have been experiencing -- so they can begin taking thyroid medication.)

I found the only endo available on my new insurance plan. I showed up and, because the medical establishment here is heavily involved in the UW medical school, spoke with the endo's medical intern (or whatever you call them). I spoke with her for 20 minutes and went through everything I'd been experiencing: the increasing abdominal pain, the increasing exhaustion, the weight gain and inability to lose weight, and the general feel of unwellness. She wrote some things down, explained that she'd speak to the endo, and would return with him for the actual exam.

The old doctor walked in and looked at her notes. He immediately dismissed everything that she'd suggested following up on. He then asked my why iIwas still taking Dostinex, as if it was my fault for some reason. I explained that my previous endo had continued to prescribe it. He said that it was unusual for doctors to prescribe Dostinex for longer than one year because they "don't know what kind of effects it will have." Oh, great.

It should be noted that this doctor stared at my chest during the whole five minutes he saw me.

He then palpated my thyroid -- a common thing to do with thyroid problem patients -- so roughly that he was choking me. He grunted and said it felt fine. He said that he was going to prescribe bromocryptine for the infertility. He kept focusing on fixing the infertility, which by now was pretty low on my list of health priorities.

I asked him about the abdominal pain, the lack of weight loss and the exhaustion. He literally waved his hand dismissively and his exact words were, "I don't know. We can check your bloodwork, but we won't find anything." He then proceeded to write out the infertility medication prescription and sent me on my way. The visit took five minutes.

I left the office thinking that I was a hypochondriac and that it was all in my head. For a couple of months I continued to feel abdominal pain, continued to be frustrated with my ill health, and just assumed that I was going to feel like this for the rest of my life and that I'd better get used to it.

Then I snapped out of it and figured I'd better find yet another doctor, someone willing to listen to me. I did some thyroid-related research and found a doctor in Milwaukee, an hour and a half away, who apparently was very interested in patients who'd been told the same thing I'd been told. His name is Dr. Burton Waisbren and I made an appointment.

His office is somewhat retro and he's very old-fashioned. This almost put me off but at this point I was willing to try anything. He sat down and talked to me about everything I'd been through medically up to this point. He said that he'd heard my story many times before and that doctors used to do a certain kind of test for hypothyroidism called the T3 and free T4 test. This measured certain compounds that your pituitary and thyroid both dealt with. At some point in the recent past, he explained, doctors switched to measuring only TSH. He believes that the older tests were more accurate and he's found that people with normal TSH levels will show abnormal T3 and free T4 levels and have all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, which he said it sounded like I had.

He did the requisite bloodwork and then I saw him for a follow up. He said that I was definitely hypothyroid -- my T3 and free T4 tests had come back showing it, and what was more, my Hashimoto's antibodies were incredibly high. He'd also done a few other tests that show I have a predilection towards autoimmunity (where my own body wants to attack itself) and he wanted to begin a regimen. He explained that we would try a few things and see what worked for me, but that we wouldn't stop until we found something that worked. He said that he wanted to make sure that I felt better first before we became concerned with any infertility issues.

One of the things he had me do was get a thyroid uptake scan and have another MRI to check on the pituitary adenoma. I went to the radiology department of the UW clinic and had the scan done. The radiologist said that everything looked normal and my uptake was smack in the middle of the normal range. So he scoffed when I told him that I was having another doctor take a look at this. He insisted I was wasting my time and that what I was looking for would not be found in my thyroid condition.

My doctor got the results and started my regimen. What worked was the first thing he tried: Armour Thyroid medication. He started me on a low dose and then followed up with me a month later, where he increased it from three pills a day to four. And let me tell you, I've never felt better. My exhaustion is gone, my skin isn't so dry anymore, and the weight is dropping off. This morning I weighed in at 176 pounds. I've lost 21 pounds so far since I've started taking Thyroid. I no longer fall asleep at 8 pm -- the other night I did yoga at 9 o'clock. I don't feel sick all the time, and I'm less prone to getting sick (it seemed that in the first year of being in Wisconsin I came down with colds and even walking pneumonia all the time). I started taking tae kwon do again, and instead of feeling like I'm going to die after a strenuous workout, I feel toughened up and exhausted in the right kind of way. I finally feel normal!

I'm happy that I pressed on and found a doctor who will listen to me. If you've been told this kind of stuff is in your head, don't listen to them. Keep looking and find a doctor who will actually listen to your symptoms. It's your body, and you're the only one who knows for sure when something's wrong.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a documentary on PBS about the Beslan school hostage crisis near the border of Chechnya where hundreds of children and parents were killed. I also started reading a book yesterday called Kremlin Rising: Putin's Russia and the End of the Revolution. The book opens with a detailed account by the two authors, who were both at the school during the entire crisis. For those that aren't familiar with it, a group of Muslim terrorists seized an elementary school in Russia near Chechnya and held hundreds of children and parents hostage, demanding that Putin withdraw all troops from Chechnya and allow Chechnya to become a sovereign state. The end result was the death of hundreds of children and their parents and teachers, many of them blown up by terrorist explosives and many others simply gunned down in the ensuing chaos.

Both the documentary and the account in the book are riveting, horrifying, and deeply saddening. The documentary showed video footage taken from inside the gymnasium where hundreds of frightened children were ordered to their knees with their hands over their heads, sitting inches from terrorists in checked headscarves with their feet on dead man switches linked to explosives that they made the children themselves string around the gym. When the children wouldn't calm down and were ordered to, the terrorists shot a father in the head in front of his two boys sitting next to him. The body was left there in the room in the middle of all of the hostages for days as a reminder.

One particular account in the book is what prompted me to write this:

After several days in the standoff -- by this point the children had stripped to their underwear because of the heat, several had died in their parents' arms from heart attacks because the terrorists had stopped giving them water, and many were drinking their own urine in order to stay alive -- something had detonated somewhere in the school. Chaos broke out and the shooting began on both sides, between the terrorists, the Russian special forces, and the armed civilians of Beslan whose children were inside. The terrorists were screaming into their phone to their contacts in the Russian government that they had not detonated anything on purpose; no one could hear them. The situation was completely out of control. Hostages took advantage of the chaos and began to flee out of the gym windows; some of them were gunned down in the crossfire between the terrorists and the Russian forces and civilians.

Inside the gym, a father was grabbing children and nearly throwing them out of the window to apparent safety. Some of the terrorists were mere feet from him, some trying to regain control of the situation, some trying to save their own lives or just escape being captured.

At one point, Tsagolov, the man helping children out of the window, grabbed a ten year old boy in his dirty underwear and helped him to the window ledge. The boy stood up to jump. Tsagolov turned and saw the ringleader of the hostage takers turn, aim his rifle, and shoot the child. The bullets pierced the boy's heart and blood spurted out of his chest. He fell to the ground, dead.

Here is what I want to know: how does one begin a task from a place of apparent high morality -- in this case, ending the war in Chechnya and stopping the apparent Russian slaughter of hundreds of Chechen men, women, and children -- and end in a place where, after you've lost all of your bargaining chips, after you've lost any control over a situation and likely realize that the only thing left for you to do is to try and save your hide and flee to safety, you can deliberately take aim at a child who is no longer of any use to you and kill them?

In a hypothetical world with no emotional attachments and the non-existent ability to look at everything in a detached and clinical manner, you can almost see why a group like this would take civilian children and parents hostage for use as bargaining chips -- a few of the hostage takers were women strapped with explosives, women whose husbands and children had been killed in the war and had absolutely nothing to lose and no hope to keep them from killing themselves to stop what they felt was an unjust war. It's even nearly understandable in such a frame of reference that they might even go so far as to actually blow up the hostages in order to make a grand point and say, "we are prepared to make good on our threat to show you how serious we are."

It's entirely another thing to imagine someone killing a fleeing child after the situation has gone out of control and after they've more than obviously lost the use of live children as bargaining chips and likely recognize that dead children are certainly not going to be useful as bargaining chips either.

These people aren't insane, at least not in the way a serial killer or anyone who would kill for pleasure is insane. They have a cause; they are people who were so profoundly affected by what happened to their own family that they're willing to kill themselves for what they perceive is a greater good. There is some shred of humanity in that even if we don't want to recognize it. So how do they lose that humanity enough to simply kill a frightened, fleeing child in cold blood? What's more, how are we supposed to understand the anger, frustration, and pain that drives a man to the extreme measures he goes to for his cause when he can, when his own life is in danger, lift his rifle, take aim, and murder that child who's simply running for his life?

I'm frustrated, I'm sad, and I don't understand why this happens.

Yesterday while plying up some yarn on the spinning wheel I turned on TLC and watched a show called "Diets From Hell". It was clearly a British show imported and voiced over with an American actor since all the stories except one featured British citizens. The one story at the end that did not featured an American man. The subject of this story was competitive eating. The man featured had won many competitive eating competitions and called himself an athlete while evangelizing the reasons why one who participates in these can legitimately call himself an athlete. I suspect that the reason why this one person featured on the show was American and not British is because competitive eating is a uniquely American thing.

The existence of competitive eating -- beyond the small pie-eating contests at local fairs that have been going on for ages -- actually angers me. I completely lose the non-judgemental, calm, and composed nature that regular yoga practice instills in someone. Competitive eating is representative of everything that's wrong with American society: excess, sometimes harmful, for the sake of excess.

People who participate in competitive eating should be ashamed of themselves, and while I know how morally high-horse this all sounds, I don't care. These people aren't athletes -- they're pigs. Plain and simple. Competitive eating is disgusting on multiple levels. First, it's disgusting that there are people stressing their bodies to extreme levels, gorging themselves and harming their digestive systems in this way, purposefully. This isn't like body building; there's no muscle gain or endurance gain, things that actually help the human body function better. This is slovenly shoving tens of hot dogs into your gorging, stressing stomach.

Second, and more importantly, it's disgusting because we have people starving in our own country, probably even down the street from these competitions, and these people are shoving this food into their faces for the sake of a competition. When I see something like this featured, I can't begin to fathom how these people don't realize how disgusting they appear, both physically doing this and because of the sheer appalling waste of food being gorged.

I thought that the International Federation of Competitive Eating was a joke when I first saw it. I don't think it is. The best part is the list of eating competitions. Notice the sponsorships? The Entenmanns' Pie Invitational. Harrah's World Toasted Ravioli Eating Championship. Krystal Square Off World Hamburger-Eating Championship. They may as well be named "The Artery-Clogging Mostly-Artificial-Ingredients High-Cholesterol High-Fat And-Do-You-Even-Know-What's-In-This-Crap? Gorging Competition". The winners should have their resulting future hospital bills paid by Entenmann's and Krystals.

If I were a millionaire, I would set up and heavily promote an eating competition. I'd prepare the competition by laying out all the hot dogs, hamburgers, or whatever the food of choice is on the table in enormous quantities, a place setting for each competitor. I'd get all the media attention I could possibly buy. I'd invite all the top eaters to come. And then, just as they're seated and ready to go, I'd announce that the competition isn't going to happen. And then I'd tell them that they're each going to march the plates of food in front of them down to the local food bank while the cameras roll, and they're each going to serve what they would have eaten to the local homeless and poor, and they're going to serve it with a smile and an apology.

Hey, you. Yeah, you, the one holding that bright yellow Nextel walkie talkie phone. Oh, I'm sorry, can you not hear me over the ear-splitting beeps of your walkie talkie that ring through the coffee shop approximately every 0.13 seconds? Or is it because you can't hear me over the snorts of laughter your friend sends you over the walkie talkie over and over as you stand in line for your coffee at Starbucks? Yes, you, the person who feels the need to scream into a walkie talkie phone - BIDDLE BEEP - so the entire coffee shop - BIDDLE BEEP - can enjoy the sordid details - BIDDLE BEEP - of the party you two went to last night where that guy was just so oh my GOD can you believe it - BIDDLE BEEP - you know?

Close your goddamn phone. Yes, that's it. Ah ah ah - close it. I mean it. Put it in your pocket, your purse, the garbage, I don't care. Just close it. Because it's bad enough hearing one side of a conversation when someone is rude enough to carry one on in a public setting. It's infinitely worse that we're all now forced to endure both sides of a conversation - BIDDLE BEEP - pockmarked with that stupid - BIDDLE BEEP - goddamn - BIDDLE BEEP - beep. Because I think that, really, someone, somewhere will live and can endure that extra 0.2 seconds it takes for "so did he really say that? Oh my GOD!" to get to their cell phone and will not die if it doesn't get there 0.2 seconds sooner through the magic of walkie talkie Nextel-tacular technology. Really, they will live. And so will we, and we will in fact live a better life having not been forced to listen to, "she totally did that! I'm telling you, she did!" BIDDLE BEEP.

That's right. Close your phone and have a non-ADD-addled moment of silence and clarity so that the rest of us can enjoy a moment like that, too.

And now that you've closed your phone, give it to me. Because I'm going to need it when I schedule a meeting with the yahoo at Nextel that came up with the idea of marketing the walkie talkie function to the general public and I'm going to - BIDDLE BEEP - beat him with it until - BIDDLE BEEP - the yellow from that phone - BIDDLE BEEP - is a nice bright red.

BIDDLE BEEP.

Anyone seen those H2 commercials? The one with the kid building a soapbox racer that looks like an H2, and then when he's on the track he cheats by going off-track to cut in front and win the race? (Though I suppose the H2 brand managers probably believe that he's "using the off-road capabilities to his advantage.")

The slogan at the end of the ad should read, "buy an H2 and you too earn the right to be an asshole."

I suppose you can't say they don't know their audience.

I still have to fight the physical urge to key every Hummer I go past.

I was quoted in Seth Godin's blog today.

Among a certain group of people I like to talk with, reading marketing books is made fun of. But Godin's books should be essential reading for anyone who wants to sell something online (even offline, but for my line of work his books are especially useful when it comes to the subject of marketing and the net).

I recently finished Unleashing the Ideavirus and I had a realization while reading it. It wasn't, "man, I should do some of the things he outlines here." It was, "I've been trying to do this! I'm on the right path after all!" The book is a bit jargony, which would normally turn me off and smack of marketingspeak, but the terms he uses, like "sneezer" and "hive" really do do a great job of defining and describing exactly who you're trying to sell to and how to do it.

The book resonated with me because it reinforced my belief that many companies just don't know how to sell products online. Again, the book isn't limited to that description, but it's the focus of my job, and I experienced this problem first hand last year in a situation I won't detail here. The problem reinforced to me that many companies expect to be able to apply brick-and-mortar marketing techniques or print marketing techniques to the online world, and they're shocked when it either doesn't work or it backfires on them.

Unlike most of the population, I live in the online world and make occasional forays into the real world. This is especially true of the audience that I'm hired to speak to. My belief for a while now, bolstered by my own experience, has been that you have to talk to them and sell to them in entirely different ways than you would expect to.

And yet, whenever I discuss this with my peers I'm met with resistance, especially from those people whose livelihoods are in jeopardy if they don't find a way to monetize the exchange of information on the net, and fast.

For a while now I've wanted to write up a short book or manifesto on how to talk to the online audience, or at least the specific segment I work with, but Godin's book does this already in a more general sense. Still, there are specific points I want to talk about, phrased a bit more specifically for my line of work.

The Internet is nothing like the real world.

Seems obvious, right? You'd be surprised at how many people expect the net to be a reflection of every day real life. But it's not. The net, or at least my neighborhood within it, is a place that thrives on things like the goatse.cx link (if you don't know what that is, consider yourself lucky) or Viking Kittens. the net is black to the real world's white -- the voices on the net that are the loudest are those of the weirdos, the geeks, the nerds, and freaks that in the real world you'd actively avoid. The net's predominant voice is that of that homeless guy on the street corner that you pass going to work, the one wearing bizarre clothes who stands there talking to no one and geticulating wildly. The net is a weird, fetish-driven land of Oz.

Just take a look at the current crop of Quizno's ads for a prime example of this. How many of you reading this burst out in laughter the moment you saw those freaky little things singing, "THEY'VE GOT A PEPPER BAR"? If you're one of them, and I was, you laughed probably in amazement that you were seeing a bizarre meme that had passed around the Internet suddenly coming to life in mainstream television ads. And I'll bet money that if you were in a room of other people, you were the only one laughing, and that everyone else was staring with amazement at the screen, partially disgusted at what they were seeing. These ads came up in a discussion at work, and I work with people who are somewhat net-savvy. None of these guys had seen this before, and it was a hugely popular net meme for a while.

The spongemonkey ads are indicative of just how utterly weird the Internet really is, and how it just doesn't translate into reality very well, even if a lot of people might have seen it before.

(And actually, I think it's a neat ad campaign. Most of the people I've talked to were actually disgusted at the ads -- face it, the spongemonkeys don't exactly stimulate the appetite -- but the ads are so weird that people mention them, and someone in the group has likely seen the Internet meme. So they explain it, maybe even link to RatherGood.com, and the ad gets remembered really strongly. They're using the hardcore Internet audience to spread awareness of the ad's roots to the mainstream audience watching the ads. I think it's kind of risky, though, because the spongemonkey are just so out there that it may be a little too weird to work. We'll see.)

You cannot expect to shoehorn the Internet into your business model. You have to conform your model to the way the Internet works.

Case in point: MP3s. The recording industry can try as hard as they want to force people to stop file sharing music, but they're going to fail, and we all know it. They're stubborn, and worse, they don't seem to understand that they're trying to take a giant rabid lion and stuff it into a tiny kitty carrier (do you like my analogies? I'm really going out on a limb with that one). The only result is that they're going to fail, and there's going to be a lot of hurt and pain in the process.

They're trying to force their online audience and the Internet as a whole to conform to their business model instead of looking at the net and saying, "people want to share our product with each other, and it's extremely easy to do. How can we use these two key things to (a) get our products out to more people and (b) make money off of that?"

They're viewing online file sharing as something that has to make money rather than as a path to making more money, and if they can't do the former they'll try and squash it right out of the gate. It's not going to work.

Instead, they need to realize that file sharing is an absolutely fundamental aspect of the online world. People will file share, they want to file share, and it's as inherent to being online as breathing is to living in the real world. They can fight it all they want, but ultimately they're going to spend far more money doing so with dismal results than they would if they'd just accept it like they would accept that the sky is blue and then use it as a tool in their marketing arsenal.

The game industry has tried similar tactics with game demos, and this is where it relates to my line of work. You cannot cannot CANNOT CANNOT sacrifice someone playing your demo for a bunch of online ads. I don't care how many online ads you get for sacrificing X number of people playing your demo. Whatever the number is, it's not enough. No one cares about ads, they don't build brand awareness anymore because no one looks at them. People online beg to share your online demo with their friends. Use that, don't fight it. And if you're a web site that needs to monetize the transfer of that demo to a bunch of people in order to pay your employees, you're going to have to find a model that doesn't sacrifice the publisher's need and ability to get that demo into as many hands as possible as soon as it's released. I don't know what that model is, but anything that limits the distribution of a game demo online, for any length of time, is marketing against a title, not for it.

And finally...

You cannot use your audience as a marketing partner and then be surprised when they turn on you for doing something they don't like.

This is close to but not quite the same as what I sent Seth Godin that was quoted in his blog. He labels his blog entry where he quotes me as "Audiences are not a tool", and of course he's right. So when I rewrote this point here, I felt that "partner" was a more accurate representation of what I'm thinking. For the music industry, they should be viewing online file sharers as a kind of marketing partner (albeit one that may or may not realize that they're a partner). In the game industry, the hundreds of web sites that cover our games, distribute our demos, write about our games and provide forums for our fans to talk about our games are all our marketing partners, whether they realize it or not or whether we come out and say that or not. If they weren't, I wouldn't have the job I have now.

What's more, in my industry these sites are savvy enough to understand that they are on some level a partner. As such, we've established a certain relationship with them that's been built on a foundation of mutual work. It's been that way for a long time, for years.

The worst thing you can do is try something new without the involvement of this marketing partner, and then call them selfish, ignorant, or wrong when they turn on you. You cannot use them as a tool for years and then claim they're not part of the marketing equation when they turn on you. They're either important to you as a marketing partner or they're not. They are not a marketing partner only when it's convenient for you. Why? Because as Godin said in his blog, "You're not in charge of the conversations any more. Of course that's true, but a lot of people don't WANT it to be true, so they act like it's not."

For instance, when web sites rise up and boycott a company for doing something like an online exclusive demo release, the common reaction among both the company and the people who are releasing the demo (because they have to monetize this, so they're defending it) is, "they're just being selfish. They live off our demos so they can get more ad revenue and visitors, so we shouldn't have to indulge them just because they're being cut out of the equation."

Wrong. They're being selfish because their selfishness has served our purpose so well for so long, and we've indulged it. Not even indulged it, we've encouraged it actively. Is it any wonder, then, that the audience would turn on a company for suddenly claiming that it's the audience that's selfish and wrong?

I actually have more, such as a discussion on short attention spans and the overlap between the print world and the online world. But I'm going to save those. So pick up Unleashing the Ideavirus. You'll learn something.

So I got this strange piece of mail the other day from PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Now, I'm all about animals. Animals are some of my best friends.

What struck me as odd about the mail was that it had a nickel attached and under the nickel a caption read, "You may keep this nickel as a reminder that animals need our help everyday."

I imagined going through my wallet one day, taking out change to give to the Starbucks' cashier, and being moved to say as I opened my change purse, "oh, I can't give you this nickel, this nickel right here that looks exactly like every other nickel in my wallet, because this is the nickel that reminds me not to beat my cat."

Were they just not trying? What was the conversation at the PETA marketing division? "You know, we could make little tokens that people can carry around with them, something with a cute animal on it and the PETA logo so that it reminds them every time they look at it that animals are living creatures that need respect and love, just like humans. Or we could, you know, just stick a nickel in there, because that's about how much it'll cost to make those anyway."

I'm thinking of sending a note to PETA: "Thanks! Now I have something small and metallic to throw at my cat when she pisses me off."