Sorry to have been away from this blog for a while. I finally found someone who can deal with the various glitches here and make the whole site (not just the blog) work more efficiently. That’s what’s been happening in my absence. I hope you enjoy the new experience.
I have a nephew (on the other side of the country, unfortunately) who is a whiz at computer stuff. Pose a problem – any problem – and he’ll fiddle around a bit then get it just right. He has that tech intuition that I don’t have. It is probably a matter of both native talent (he has it, I don’t) and generational differences. My college papers were banged out on a typewriter; I didn’t grow up with computers.
Over at Single with Attitude, I thought the feeds were loading too slowly. That’s now fixed. So if you tried it once and got frustrated, please give it another chance. Something else is new, too: Now, the most recent feed from each of the contributing blogs appears on the first page, in alphabetical order according to the name of the blog. (One still appears out of order, but that should be fixed soon.)
The way I originally had it set up was that the most recent posts from any of the blogs appeared on top. The problem with that was that bloggers who posted at very high rates had lots of feeds on the home page, and those who post less frequently didn’t appear there very often. So let’s try this new way. As always, send me feedback on what you do and do not like.
With all of this technical stuff finally getting addressed, I’ll be back to contributing more substantive posts soon. I may have some guest posts to add, too. For now, I’ll just tell you about my recent radio interview, because it was so different from all the ones I’ve done before.
I got a phone call from a producer who described herself as from a Latin American radio station. She woke me up (I’m a late-night person and she called me in the morning) so I asked if we could do the interview later. She said it would only take 5 minutes so I just went ahead and did it. (It took 20.)
The interview was in Spanish, with a translator helping me, so that was a first. More interesting, though, were the questions. Every question posed by the host was personal. I have done dozens of interviews – maybe hundreds if you count print media as well as radio, TV, and blogs. Never before have I been asked absolutely nothing about research on singles or even about demographic trends.
Instead, most questions were some variation of “you are just kidding yourself about liking your single life, right?” Maybe I’m just saying I like my life to make myself feel better about not finding anyone to marry, he suggested. Did I have some terrible experience in the past? Wouldn’t I marry if I found The One? How do I know I don’t want to be married if I haven’t tried it? And on and on and on.
It was an interesting experience. I was on the verge of feeling frustrated several times. As I think back on it, though, if those were the questions he really wanted to ask, I’m glad he asked them. If he is tuned into his audience, maybe his questions reflect what other people also want to know.
Usually, people set up interviews with me by emailing me first. I like that because I then have information on the specifics of the media outlet. In this case, I didn’t have that because I was cold-called. Considering the questions, I was curious about the name of the radio show and where it was located. I asked but could not make out the answer.
Of course, I also have no idea how my answers were translated. Maybe what listeners heard in Spanish was an interview with a single person who was all sad and lonely about not being married!
