Promises

Thousands of Michigan college students, my daughter among them, are asking how they can call it a Promise ... and then take it away. (I tried, really tried, to find unbiased news reports/web content/editorial. Yikes. You try to Google Michigan Promise Scholarship.)

In any event, it’s this loss of critical funding that’s in part responsible for me signing up for AdSense and enabling ads here ... to attempt to generate additional revenue to help my college student. Since she’s brilliant and had some good scholarships, I’ve been way too complacent about helping her fund college. Also feeling guilty that I’m still paying off my own student loans from my second time through the university. Yes, that time I thought I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up. A topic for another day.

When I first set up Something Shiny and Tuna on Wheatley earlier this year, I was brand new to the blogosphere. I was dabbling. Looking for a creative outlet. Exploring social media. Doing “research.” Now, I have dozens of favorite bloggers I regularly follow. And I’ve seen that ads can be placed tastefully and add value to the experience. I’m kind of intrigued by the “magic” of it all also – to see how ad content is based on key words or phrases in my posts.

In my contract I promised not to click on the ads because that messes up the tracking. I’m still playing with the placement and content. I don’t want them to be extra intrusive and obnoxious. Those are just pesky details. Mostly, I know that if I want this to work, I need to make this an interesting, perhaps helpful, destination. Perhaps we should call it the Something Shiny Café ... bring your cup of java and come hang out with me for a little bit every day. We can chat about lots of lovely shiny things. I’m open to suggestions.

I changed majors about as often as I changed jobs in college. I’m so glad I didn’t stick with the major in political science (which lasted about 2.3 seconds). Because I never could get the hang of Econ ... or things like why politicians can fund wars and give giant tax breaks (and bailout money) to big corporations ... but funding basics like food, health care, housing ... and education is just so very very difficult.

I know all of that is very complex. So I’m doing something simple. I promise to be here every day. I hope you’ll join me.