As I read yet another article on the New York Times’ website, I count the days until I am required to pay for content.

Unlike many stompy people out there who will never, ever read the New York Times again because they’re charging for the content (and not just paper that it’s printed on), I am fine with a subscription-based model.

Subscriptions will once again make the news organization beholden to subscribers and not just advertisers. They’ll keep talented, hard-working journalists on the payroll for another day. They’ll keep those journalists working on watchdog stories and not just click-friendly puff pieces on the Gosselins and the local bar scene.

Subscriptions. Let’s do this.

Here’s what I DO NOT want to see:

I do not want to hassle with ANYTHING that keeps me from viewing the subscription on two or more computers.

I do not want to be pressured into any upsell/cross-sell “opportunities” as newspaper subscribers often are.

I do NOT want ANYONE calling my house asking me to sign up for the subscription, EVER. Another annoying thing newspapers do.

I do not want the New York Times to send me endless, ceaseless invoices after we’ve canceled our subscription. If we cancel, deal with it. In fact it would be great if they found someone else to be in charge of subscriptions before they extend their aggressive ineptitude to a savvy online customer base.

I DO NOT want to see bills at all. Just bill me until I tell you to stop.

I DO NOT WANT any marketing communications. Don’t subscribe me to 800 e-mails that I now have to opt-out of.

Will you subscribe?

2010 is an election year! Here’s some tips for online campaigning:

- Don’t expect your website to win the election for you. Less than 2% of people make a decision for a candidate based on a website. Nevertheless, have some strong talking points sitting on your website that cover the bases.

- If you had a million dollars for your election, you’d buy TV commercials, followed by direct mail, followed by signage. But you don’t have a million dollars. Sink what you do have into direct mail (postcards are OK) and signage (two-color is OK). Focus on frequency. Lots of mail pieces, lots of signs. Though video updates for your website are not a bad thing to have, especially if you’re telegenic or a good speaker.

- Focus your website on fundraising and friendraising. Fundraising will help you buy TV (if you get there), direct mail and signage. Friendraising will get your candidate on the ballot (you might need thousands of signatures on a petition), phone calls and door-knocking.

- If you have a password-protected, members-only portion of your site, you’d better vet everyone who has access. Campaigns have spies.

- 2010 is an in-between year, so skew older. Get your candidate in newspapers. Like, the ones printed on dead trees.

- If your audience is young and educated and monied, get on Facebook and Twitter. If they’re rural or inner-city and less well-off, focus on MySpace. Ideally you’re on all three, but you’ll find that certain social media channels work better than others.

- Email is more important than web. Send weekly updates noting impact (What were your candidate’s wins this week? New endorsements? A great write-up in a blog?) Always include a giant “CONTRIBUTE NOW” button pointing to a place that takes credit card donations, even if it’s PayPal.

- Piggybacking works. Is there anyone important or famous who you can get your candidate’s picture with? Who can write an email message for you that you can repurpose in blogs and newspapers? Our emails written by famous friends had the highest open rates of any that we sent.

- People first, technology last. There will be a lot of vendors trying to sell you technologies that you don’t need. Nothing is easy in politics. No computer program will make everyone know about and support your candidate.

- Having said that, a CRM (contact relationship management system) is nice to have. But a spreadsheet works just fine for that if you’re on a shoestring.

- Set realistic expectations. Campaigning is about relationship-building, and relationship-building takes a lot of time, even for the tireless. There really aren’t any shortcuts. Your website it not going to get a billion hits. That’s fine.

- Hire professionals to do your photos and videos. Get a really nice headshot. I’ve seen so many decent websites with terrible photos of the candidates. Image means a lot, even in the age where everyone’s a blogger.

- If people are engaging with you online, write them back ASAP. Have the candidate write them back whenever possible, though if you’re campaigning correctly there will barely be any time to sleep or eat, muchless jump online. But try. It means a TON to people to hear from a famous person.

- If you lose, lose gracefully. Have a tactful, tasteful statement drafted weeks in advance of the election. You do not want your candidate posting bitter scorched-earth remarks to the world the morning after. Bloggers live to make fun of that stuff.

Dear Bank of America,

Every other week, you send us a letter telling us about a great opportunity to re-fi our 30-year mortgage into a 15-year mortgage (for the low, low price of only 4 grand).

At first glance, it does look like an amazing deal. Knock off 10 years of payments for just $100 a month extra? Five years ago, we would’ve jumped at that rate.

Not so much anymore. Here’s why: We don’t want to be paying off our house 15 years from now.

In fact, we plan to own our home in 10 by overpaying each month (for the low, low upfront fee of zero dollars. Savings: $4,000.)

We had planned to keep remodeling, upgrading, doing the suburban weekend DIY project thing indefinitely, making our home our little castle. But then Countrywide (where you got us from) did something really stupid: They axed our home equity loan for no reason.

We had our bathroom stripped to the beams and they wouldn’t loan us 5 grand to finish, despite that we had about 30% equity already in the house (with no added extra housing boom mystery money, I might add). Either a computer or an absolute genius employee noticed that we bought our house in 2004 and lived in Mesa, Arizona, and that was enough to shut our credit line down.

We were really upset at first — it’s hard to pay for a major home project check-by-check. But we finished. And then we decided to stop trusting you, and that extends to your spiffy re-fi offers.

Get as shmoopy-emotional as you want to get in your Hallmark-card commercials, we now view our house the way you view it — as a mere financial asset. The faster you pay off debt, the faster you win. We intend to pay it off as quickly as possible. All your re-fi does is raise the floor each month so you can repossess the house more easily if we fall behind.

We’re no longer buying into suburban consumerist house slavery. This is going to cost you.  But that’s the price of broken trust.

Thank Countrywide.

Young workers putting up Piñera stars

I love being in a foreign country during a major election. Every democratic country handles elections differently. On one island in the Carribean, each candidate had a number, and the signs said things like “Vote for 8!” with the candidate’s picture. In rural Peru, roadside houses were painted with pictures of brooms (for clean government) or pick-axes (to show support for labor).

Chile is currently spangled with multicolored stars promoting Sebastian Piñera, who on January 17th will likely become their next president. He is a center-right candidate who grew up in America and was educated at Harvard. He is a billionaire — made his fortune from introducing credit cards to Chile as well as buying large shares in LAN Airlines and other successful Chilean companies.

Walking around Santiago, you get a sense that you are in an earlier version of America, one that’s in ascent, full of opportunity. Piñera is the candidate of hope, change and opportunity — those are the words you see on his posters. His number one priority is educating and taking care of the children. One large Piñera banner in Viña del Mar says, “Professional children. Proud parents.”

I was gobsmacked — Republicans in Chile are owning domestic issues like the economy and education. Their current term-limited president is a leftist, and is popular, but Chileans apparently want more. More growth. More competition. They want their kids to go to universities and compete in the global economy. Everywhere you look in Chile, there are billboards and ads and TV commercials promoting university education. My impression is that, as in America of the past, Chileans see education (especially higher education) as the key to prosperity, not a socialist brainwashing scheme or a playground for the elite.

If the GOP wants to regain its footing in the US, it needs to let go of Reagan and his mentality of starving the beast and start re-investing in the domestic sector. And being damned unapologetic about it. Why not be the party that promises professional children and proud parents?

1. Learn to barbecue.

2. Not freelance.

3. Sell original paintings for extra money.

4. Finish my graphic novel.

5. Become fabulously well-nourished.

6. Not touch a single glass of bad wine, no matter what kind of day I’ve had.

7. Learn as much as possible about Margaret Mead.

8. Give Henry Miller another chance.

9. Study Susan Orlean.

10. Remove every bit of ticky-tack from my home.

11. Properly meditate.

12. Learn to play tangos on the piano.

13. Serve as an angel webmaster for a low-level political candidate.

14. Touch Plymouth Rock.

15. Fix the ugly crack in the ceiling that laughs at me every day.

16. Hold a workshop for young geek girls on how to get ahead in the workplace.

17. Hike somewhere amazing once a month.

18. Keep the dogs beautifully groomed and feed them better food.

19. Save $10,000.

20. Design a tattoo I’ll never get.

Hey, I have an idea… why not make a women-only Twitter? We’ll make it boring and lilac! Warning: If you don’t use it, people will leave your Meetup!

Reminds me of the time AzCentral made MySpace for Arizonans. (From the Shout Box: “I miss this site. It seems empty and dead now. Is anyone else out there?”)

Look, dammit. I’m only going to say this once, all right? “A social media platform for X” is a bad business model when the current social media platforms already serve X just fine. If you must develop a new social media platform, make it do something that the Twitter or the Facebook just can’t do. (I know, haaaard! Frowny face!)

Broad-brush demographics are so 1990s.

Today I parted with one of my favorite possessions in the whole entire world, my purple backpack.

It was a piece.

I got it at some warehouse out in the middle of the desert that sold past-their-prime Revlon cosmetics, sometime in the early nineties. It was $15.

It became my ASU backpack. It went to Australia, England, Sweden, Peru, Japan, Greece, China and Washington D.C. with me. It came to my wedding. It handled god knows how many ski trips and weekend getaways. It’s what I used to stash my lunch and my Ladyshoes when I started taking public transportation to work.

It was badly made. It was shredding, and the shreds would stick in the zipper. It was hard to open and close.

My husband surprised me with a very fancy REI backpack for my birthday. It is brown. It has padding. It has fancy pockets and netty nooks to stick stuff.

So I hauled my purple backpack to Goodwill today.

Good-bye, backpack. Hope you continue to see the world, or end up on a little girl.

Havi made a Dammit List (read the incomplete version here). I love this. Love love love. I want a manifesto, too. Here it is, proclaimed on this cool gray December afternoon:

• I want to be Gilda Radner when I grow up, dammit
• I’m not going to live in a country that champions freedom of speech only to sharply curtail it in the name of Acting Like a Grown-Up, dammit
• My art will match my soul and not my couch, dammit
• My hair color is subject to not be blonde or brown, dammit
• I don’t need to sell anything to be an artist, dammit
• I don’t need a political party, dammit
• I am allowed to spend a lot of time online reading and interacting and learning, dammit
• I’m not on LinkedIn, dammit
• I’m proud that Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at ASU, dammit
• I don’t go to malls and nobody can make me, dammit
• I believe that communities are built by similarish people having a good time together, dammit
• When I’m finished living here I’m going to live out in the middle of nowhere, dammit
• Dogs are hairy and needy and expensive and the best thing on Earth, dammit

What’s yours?

Usually, we get a Christmas Tree tag, which entitles us to drive several hours, chop down a tree from a protected forest and bring it home to decorate. We place the tree in water. Add lights. Add decorations.

My home-sewed mantle scarf goes up. So do various house decorations. A Martha Stewart wreath. A snow globe or two. A scented candle. A large snowflake doodad.

Last year, we didn’t get a tree tag. We didn’t feel like shelling out $40 for an Oregon tree, either. So we just didn’t decorate, save for some evergreen branches purchased at Trader Joe’s that failed to fill the house with the aroma of fir. Oh well.

Surprisingly — it wasn’t depressing at all. It was actually pretty nice to not have the stress of keeping a tree watered and happy, keeping the dog from drinking the Christmas tree water, remembering to plug in the lights every night, figuring out where to put all the decorations…

So we’re not decorating this year, either. Some year, when we feel like it, we might trot out all the glitter and doohickeys again. Until then, we’ll just enjoy the things we love about the season — the cold, dark, hibernation-friendly nights; the smell of smoke in the crisp outdoor air; snugglier dogs; wearing socks and sweaters and blankets; baking bread…

I grew up in the West Valley. Let’s call everything west of the I-17 the West Valley.

It’s a nice shiny happy place to grow up, if you’re in the better-off parts. There are bike paths and parks and churches and malls and libraries.

I also spent a good chunk of my twenties there. Dating was excruciating, because you know what? There are no single men.

I’m not kidding. They all live central and east, where the good jobs are.

You go out to a TGIFriday’s or Starbucks and it’s all Nice Single Women. The level of desperation is rather like going to the Humane Society. So you tend to date guys online or long-distance, which is an entire level of suck in and of itself.

The West Valley is a great place to raise a Nice Family and go to a variety of churches. It is a terrible place to work in technology or have a liking for light rail, independent bookstores, good coffee, arthouse films and decent Chinese food. (No, West side, you do not have decent Chinese food. Don’t EVEN say P.F. Chang’s.)

Just had to get that off my chest. Agree or disagree?