Managing Your Social Media: Tips for Today and Other Increments of Time

The vast world of social media can seem intimidating at first, but that’s on you. You have a responsibility to update your social media, or else you’re clearly hiding something and you’re probably an awful person. A serial killer, even. There’s something going on beneath the surface.

Unsure of where to start, or how to stay engaged? Here’s a comprehensive checklist for managing your social media:

Daily Duties

o   Reply to incoming messages that are automated from the platform itself, because let’s be real, who would actually be messaging you?

o   Check alerts for brand mentions and respond to McDonald’s’ attempts at being relatable to Gen Z

o   Monitor for untagged mentions, related keywords, or anyone with a cute profile pic’

o   Check current trending topics for any events or language you can include as well as avoid coming anywhere near

o   Schedule your posts according to what will be the most impactful for your brand:

• 6-45 times daily for Twitter

• 1-2 times daily for Facebook

• 1-2 times daily for Google+, if that’s a thing

• 3 or more times daily for Instagram

• Update Instagram Story daily

• 1 time daily for LinkedIn, which they should be more than grateful for

o   Review products and services, but in a way that’s more fun and approachable than it is actually helpful

o   Work on original content: videos, podcasts, an in-depth analysis of every decision made on RuPaul’s Drag Race, etc.

o   Monitor competitor accounts for ideas you can steal, potential clap back opportunities, and any shifting goal posts in regards to being an acceptable person

o   Engage with active followers and fans, most of whom probably don’t have jobs

Weekly Checklist

o   Connect with influencers in the space to talk about where exactly things went wrong for you

o   Check analytics and adjust scheduling and topics to align with Elon Musk’s personal beliefs

o   Create and monitor weekly goals for engagement, even though divorce is inevitable when you only care about marrying for money

o   Strategize with colleagues on how to ensure that your business is brought up on The View ­– and it better be one of the days where Whoopi Goldberg is busy (I like Joy better, personally)

o   Check analytics for paid ads and sigh

Monthly Goals

o   Check analytics for all platforms and consider being less annoying when you speak

o   Go wild, trying at least one new strategy each month; flag down an intern who cannot afford to rent their own apartment for any follow-up analytics

o   Set goals and helpful reminders for the month ahead, assuming global warming hasn’t gotten us by then

Quarterly Adjustments

o   Review analytics quarterly and consider needed adjustment to scheduling, topics, your jawline

o   Consider strategy changes for both paid and environmentally-friendly, locally-sourced audiences

o   Review new strategies—integrate winning attempts at sarcasm, and discard those that didn’t get any attention from your crush

Annually/Eventually

o   Review analytics annually and really consider where your life is headed

o   Consider strategy changes for paid and organic audiences, such as making a TikTok lip-syncing to someone saying something in an unrelated context because you desperately need validation

o   Consider brand messaging and adjust yourself by haphazardly grabbing your crotch in public as needed

o   Research platform development, hair growth, hair losses 

Why My AirPods Deserve Their Own Amber Alert

No one wants to experience a bad dream, and for good reason, too. No one wants to be left shaken up by a particuarly sick, twisted nightmare. It can turn a good morning into a grotesque morning, putting a damper on one’s day. Imagine, then, how I felt recently to have woken up into a nightmare. That’s right, this is the story of how I lost my AirPods in my sleep. Picture it: you’re regaining consciousness slowly, luxuriating in the normalcy of morning, when suddenly you have the rug ripped out from under you. In this case, my AirPods had been ripped out from my unsuspecting, unassuming ear canals.

My AirPods are my children. I practically gave birth to them, and I have the hearing damage to prove it. Thus, having them taken away from me is nothing less than a life-altering event. During the day, everything’s fine. We share a mutually beneficial and tight-knit bond. We provide one another with each other’s missing puzzle piece, if that makes sense. Something about us just feels right.

Nighttime, however, is when Airon and Airiel start to grow distant. They become uncomfortable in my ear as I’m laying on my side, waiting for slumber. To compensate, I remove one of them depending on the situation and tuck them into their charging/carrying case. One of them takes the night shift, and the other gets to replenish. That must be enough to appease them, right? Wrong. They always run away in the middle of the night, when I’m at my most vulnerable.

I know what you’re thinking, and yes, this is a problem that I have encountered many times and have chosen to actively ignore. It’s true, I could regroup. I could try to brainstorm a solution. I could try to install some fail-safe in order to evade any further trauma. But alas, that would require effort, and I’m extremely busy living, laughing, and loving. I’m a single mother of two AirPods, so having free time is a foreign concept to me.

That being said, my AirPods deserve their own Amber Alert. If we have to call it an Airon and Airiel Alert, The Delinquent AirPods Alert, anything at all – I don’t care. All I want is for my babies to actually stay with me throughout the night. I don’t think that’s too much to ask of Apple, do you? I know that they’re rich enough to fix this. They must be. Sound off in the comments below.

The Game of LIFE: High School Collector’s Edition

INSTRUCTIONS

1 Player, and that player is you. You are totally being played.

Ages 14 to Adult

NOTE: You will not actually feel like an adult. While this is around the age where you can legally star in a porno, you are absolutely forbidden to drink your parent’s leftover liquor in the privacy of their basement with your soon-to-be alcoholic frenemy named Caitlynn, except she spells it with an ‘8’ on all of her social media platforms.

OBJECT

Collect high school diploma so you can leave as quickly as possible from the unexciting, barren town that your parents thought would be a viable option for breeding and subsequently raising their offspring. Should’ve accepted that job offer on the Big Island, Dad. But no, you had to “stay near the family” all so Mom could continue her weekly Bingo Night with Nana and Aunt Jeanine. Where exactly is Nana right now, Mom? That’s right, she’s playing the slots with Jesus and the Holy Ghost. You people sicken me.

CONTENTS

• Spinner ring, spinner dial and spinner arm

• 25 LIFE tiles

• 4 Textbooks

• 5 Notebooks

• Overpriced binders of various girth

• Dividers

• Less than the recommended 8 hours of sleep

• Scoliosis

• Lean, picturesque lockers

• Advanced projector technology that your Calculus teacher will spend fifteen minutes trying to operate before realizing that she had previously unplugged it to make room for her “World’s Greatest Teacher” mug

• Food?

• Handouts

• Lots and lots of handouts

SETTING UP

Pick out a cute locker-mirror at Target so you can keep your lip gloss looking fresh and alluring throughout the day. Scratch that. Just buy one at the dollar store. It’s going to pretty much fall apart anyway after a few weeks of overly dramatic locker-door slamming. Can you believe Stacey said that? I actually can, if I’m being honest. I mean, you did sleep with her boyfriend of 3-and-a-half weeks. That’s almost a whole month of raw commitment that you single-handedly soiled in the back of a Ford Fiesta. I guess I can’t blame you. That sounds like a nice fiesta to me. 

What was I going to say? Oh, right. Before school starts, go to your local department store for a new backpack. Your current one smells like the middle school gymnasium, and no one wants to relive that. Get something that says, “I’m a good student when I need to be, but I also know how to let loose every once in a while. Call me.” The only reason I say to go to the department store is because the dollar store draws the line at backpacks, apparently, even though I’m pretty sure you can buy a bundle of lawn flamingoes there for an excellent bargain. Did I mention that you won’t have lots of money to throw around while you’re in high school? Because you won’t.

Next, you will need to get organized if you want to be ready to learn. Place the dividers in your binder in the intended order. You will probably end up using a couple of the tabs for, like, a month before giving up and stuffing everything between the pages of your Honors Physics textbook. Why did you decide to take Honors Physics again? To challenge yourself? Yeah, good luck with that.

GAMEPLAY

All players find the strength to climb out of bed in the morning. Those with their own transportation reap the benefits of said transportation. Everyone else dies a little inside. Youngest players cry first. Crying then continues clockwise.

On Monday through Friday, appear at the bus stop around 7 in the morning, give or take a few precious minutes. Your bus driver will either arrive too early or too late. Either way, you are screwed. You will suffer at the hands of a vicious, unforgiving winter, OR your heartbroken mother, who can’t believe she is going to be late for work again. She doesn’t ask that much of you, you know. She wants you to start listening again. You used to be such a good little kid who ate all of his vegetables and liked to scrapbook on Sundays with Mommy. Now you spend all day in your bedroom doing God knows what. How can you even think with that music playing so loud? Anyway, if you do end up driving in with your mom, she will ask when you intend to start acting like a real family again. Then it is your turn to spin the wheel. The number the spinner lands on is the number of months it will take to get her to stop bringing you up to her coworkers.

HOW TO WIN

After all players have graduated, all players will go to college, or the military or whatever, or delude themselves into thinking that they will make it into professional hockey. You know the odds of that are very slim, right? Okay, just checking.

Then, after x years apart (you have to spin the wheel to find out the exact number), some players return for your high school reunion. All players in attendance turn their LIFE tiles message-side up and add up the dollar amounts shown on their tiles. You can judge the winner based on highest dollar amount, but as long as your nemesis since freshman year has become somewhat more fat, poor, or ugly…

YOU WIN!

Everyday Physics Applications

SATIRE

1. A dog searching for a bone walks 3.50 m south, then 8.20 m at an angle of 30.0° north of east, and finally 15.0 m west. He begins chasing his tail for about an hour-and-a-half before realizing that the appendage is in fact attached to his own rear, and therefore cannot be caught. He then realizes that life is pointless, so there’s no use burying a bone in the first place. Enjoy the bone right now, goddamnit, while you still have it. Life is fleeting; tomorrow is never guaranteed. Use graphical techniques to find if “he” is the correct pronoun for the dog in this scenario, or if I’m just a lunatic who thinks all life has inherent value.

2. A young man – let’s call him Albert – is lost in a maze. He makes three consecutive displacements so that at the end of the walk he is completely lost and likely to die a sad, overweight virgin. The first displacement is 8.00 m westward, and the second is 13.0 m northward. Albert’s path vaguely resembles a triangle, which sort of reminds him of a misshapen donut, which in turn makes him hungry for a Boston Kreme. He’s also turned on somehow. Use the graphical method to sort out Albert’s priorities.

3. A rock is dropped, I guess, at the same instant that a used condom at the same elevation is thrown horizontally from a seedy hotel window during an overzealous housekeeper’s Christmas shift. Which will have the greater speed when it lands on a drunk mall Santa in a nearby alley? How long will it take for the group of children walking by to realize that their innocence is newly deceased, along with Mall Santa’s dreams? Merry Christmas. And no, I don’t care about the other holidays. Get over yourselves.

4. The staples inside a stapler are kept in place by a spring with a relaxed length of 0.115 m. If the spring constant is 51 N/m, how much elastic potential energy is stored in the spring when its length is 1.150 m? These are the important things in life, kids. You’re just gonna have to trust me.

5. A 40.0 kg child is in a swing that is attached to ropes 2.00 m long. I just realized that you probably don’t know how long that is, considering we use feet and inches in America, but it’s whatever. Also, how heavy is 40.0 kg? I guess you can call me Alicia Silverstone, because I’m totally clueless. Let’s just humor me and find the gravitational potential energy associated with the child relative to the child’s lowest position under the following conditions:

a)     when I decide to put my foot in front of the child’s face mid-swing

b)     at the bottom of the well that I will undoubtedly end up throwing the child into, like the girl from The Ring

c)     Seven days

6.     How long does it take a 19 kW steam engine to make a delicious pot roast, an estimated 6.8 × 107 J of work? Disregard that it’s gluten-free and smells like pig’s feet, which means that, yet again, all of that hard work will go unappreciated. I’m sick of being the family punching bag.

7. Derek leaves his physics book on top of a drafting table that is inclined at a 35° angle because he is a forgetful douche. Seriously. He’s completely insufferable. I heard that he has gingivitis and bad credit. The fact that he happens to be my ex is simply coincidental. Find the net force acting on his stupid book, and while you’re at it, remind him that today was supposed to be our anniversary, not that he even knows what that means anymore. He was too old for me, anyway, considering that anyone still using a drafting table must have some years on them.

8. Jamie Lynn, who happens to be the namesake of Britney Spears’ younger sibling, is a museum curator moving artifacts into place on various different display surfaces. I’m just kidding. She works at McDonald’s. You should’ve seen your face.

9. A zookeeper named Annabeth is recently and inexplicably broken-up with by her boyfriend of 5.2 years. She feels like crying, but her body has been unable to produce tears since the operation. To make matters worse, she finds an escaped monkey hanging from a light pole at her dead-end job. After shouting, “Not today, Satan!” she aims her tranquilizer gun at the deranged ape, assuming that “monkey” and “ape” are terms that can be used interchangeably. No? Well, then… I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t ask you. She kneels 10.0 m from the light pole, which is 5.00 m high. The tip of her gun is 1.00 m above the feces-ridden ground. At the same moment that the monkey/ape drops a banana, Annabeth shoots. If the dart travels at 50.0 m/s, will the dart hit the monkey, the banana, or will it somehow bounce off of something and put Annabeth out of her misery? Keep in mind that she has a wooden leg. I don’t exactly know how that would have an impact on anything; I just thought I should let you know. 

10. Something something rollercoaster. Isn’t learning fun?

How Did You Even Manage?

SATIRE

Do you ever ask yourself how you would react when it matters the most? How you’d respond during unspeakable circumstances? How you would find the strength to endure during the most staggering of situations? I Made It Through... is a documentary television series, now airing on Wifetime. In a sophisticated interview setting, I Made It Through… gives survivors the chance to share their incredible true stories, and reveal what it really took for them to make it through.

INTERVIEWER: Hi, Mabel? Thank you soooo! much! for coming in today. My name’s Jenny; I’ll be interviewing you for the show. Have you done anything like this before even?

MARJORIE: So nice to meet you. My name’s actually Marjorie… but no, I’ve never done anything for TV or anything before. It’s so crazy. And nerve-wracking. But it’s cool!

INTERVIEWER: Don’t worry, Mary J. I’ll be here for you every step of the way to walk you through it. By the way, I really want to commend you for sharing your story. I mean, I can’t imagine leaving my house after going through your experience, let alone talking about it on national television. In. Graphic. Detail. Like, there are gonna be soooo many people watching. All eyes on us. You. All eyes on you. Any-who, how are things? You feeling better?

MARJORIE: Yeah… I mean, yeah, I’m doing better. Thank you.

INTERVIEWER: You’re totally welcome, missy. You’re just so fabulous. I can’t even. How did you even manage? I could not deal. At all. If it was me who went through that crazy stuff, I would definitely become a hermit. Not even the cute kind, with a little seashell and those pinchy little claws. You know what I mean.  

MARJORIE: Hermit crabs?

INTERVIEWER: I’m a modest, completely foreseeable hermit. Some fates you just can’t escape, am I right? I can see it now… nothing to my name – it’s Julie, by the way.

MARJORIE: Julie? I thought you said-

INTERVIEWER: Except an edgy haircut and a smile! The pixie cut is very in right now. I’ll definitely want to look good while I’m foraging for leftovers on the beach. I can’t wait.

MARJORIE: I don’t mean to be short, but aren’t you going to start asking me questions? I’ve got-

INTERVIEWER: Mabel, I’m gonna have to stop you right there, diva. We’re on a very. Tight. Schedule today, mama. Now… it’s time to have a seat. This is going to be really powerful. Before we get started, I want you to do some breathing exercises. Inhale the millions, and exhale the failure. Inhale the Beyoncé, and exhale the Kelly Rowland. Deep breaths. Go on. That’s it… Atta girl. Don’t forget to exhale the Michelle.

MARJORIE: I’m-

INTERVIEWER: Not now, Marlena. Alright, shall we get started? Now take me back to the moment you woke up. Did you sense that anything out of the norm was going to happen that day?

MARJORIE: No, actually. It started out as a pretty normal Sunday for me.

INTERVIEWER: Manuela, sweetie, I’m gonna need you to elaborate on that.

MARJORIE: I just told you – you know what? Never mind. What was I saying?

INTERVIEWER: Listen. This is only going to work if you’re completely honest with me, okay, Mariah? Relax. Take a breath. Whenever you’re ready, we can continue.

MARJORIE: Fine. Sure. Okay, then. Well, I woke up and ate breakfast as usual. Chocolate chip pancakes with powdered sugar. Light syrup. I was cleaning up my mess in the kitchen when I heard the dog barking at the door. Scamp is usually very zen, you could say. He takes after me in that way. I remember thinking that it was Sunday, so there shouldn’t have been any packages for me. I went to the door anyway. I was unaware at the time that it would be the last time I would see my door, or my dog, intact.

INTERVIEWER: Holy. Mackerel.

MARJORIE: Wait. Sorry, um, but what are you doing? Where did you get that popcorn?

INTERVIEWER: Oh, this? Did you wanna buy some? It’s my own special brand. Low-fat. Totally eco-friendly. Great for kids. I just like a lil’ something to nibble on while I work… but if it’s distracting to you, I can quickly dispose of it. I’m, like, the consummate professional. I don’t mind denying myself some food. I’ll need to practice for the hermit days ahead, right?

MARJORIE: I don’t even… never mind. So, anyway, like I was saying, I went to the door without a care in the world. I feel so stupid, looking back. Scamp was all riled-up, barking and jumping around and what-not. I just thought he was being cranky because I had just switched out his dog food for a cheaper brand. Little did I know, he was only trying to warn me.

INTERVIEWER: Oh. My. God. I totally forgot to ask what kind of dog you have.

MARJORIE: You mean had.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean, I “mean had”?

MARJORIE: The men at the door, they killed my dog and tied me up.

INTERVIEWER: Right. Of course. I was just testing you. I had to verify that you knew your own story. You never know what kind of freaks would show up here and start making stuff up just to get their fifteen minutes of fame. The lengths some people will go to get some attention is unreal, am I right?

MARJORIE: Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s funny, I was just talking about the Kardashians with someone. They will just not go away, will they?

INTERVIEWER: What did you say?

MARJORIE: The Kardashians. They just won’t go away. Everywhere you look… there they are, just itching to sell you something. Usually their ass on the corner. It’s funny, you kind of remind me of one of them.

INTERVIEWER: Excuse me?

MARJORIE: Your voice, I mean. It reminds me of the mom. No offense, heh. Hey, what’s her name? Christine? Kirstie? She’s my least favorite. God. Just… awful. And what’s really sad is how she thinks she’s one of the daughters. Isn’t she more of a manager than a real mother anyway? I pity her in a way. Like, I can’t imagine that being my child. Though I suppose it takes a certain level of evil genius to manage a trio of gold diggers, and Scott Disick.

INTERVIEWER: It’s such a shame.

MARJORIE: Right? Then there’s Kylie, with the duck lips. She’s the new cash cow. You know, the one that Kylie Minogue tried to sue? That was really funny, actually.

INTERVIEWER: I really wanted this to go well.

MARJORIE: Wha'd'ya mean?

INTERVIEWER: Not. Good.

MARJORIE: Are you sick or something? You seem shaky.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, Maria, honey. If only you had kept your abysmally-thin lips shut. Your gaping face wound is about to get another wound.

MARJORIE: What the hell are you doing? Oh, my… GOD! What’s happening? What are you doing? Don’t come any closer to me! What the-

INTERVIEWER / KRIS JENNER: Say good night, Mary Kate.

MARJORIE: You! Help! Someone hel-

End of video footage.