12-second video posts. I started trying to use Seesmic but I like this a lot more. I can’t wait for them to make video commenting plug-ins… no one should talk for more than 12 seconds, pretty much ever.

First up, Wenda Harris Millard, co-CEO at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and the Chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) - no Wikipedia entry, which is a total shame but she seems like an un-fameball so I guess it makes sense. Millard used to work at Yahoo , and my favorite thing about her is that she really understands that the Internet rocks so hard that we should (paraphrased) "not commoditize Internet advertising before figuring out its ‘value proposition’" (i.e., stop selling shiz for so cheap, you dumbasses). Except the way she said it was, "We must not trade our advertising inventory like pork bellies." Here she is, saying very smart things in an interview with Kara Swisher:

Disclosure: I used to work at an online ad agency and MSLO was one of my clients (well, a client of the team I was on - I wasn’t in charge or anything and though I worked closely with the contact at MSLO, I never got to talk to WHM, but I am probably more cognizant of her coolness because of where I worked).

1. Marriage makes all your fights seem like nothing. We don’t fight a lot anyway, but our few fights in the last three weeks have been so chill. Mostly, fights are my fault. I am the full-Iranian one, so the hot head is mine. Plus I get really mean when I’m PMS-y. But now that this relationship thing is all locked and loaded, I lose my steam during fights right away, because there’s no real point. Storming off in a huff has no real impact when you are just going to run into him in the kitchen and probably he’ll be washing the dishes.

2. Calling your dude “husband” is a lot less lame than “fiance.” Ugh, what a horrible word “fiance” is. I felt like a real jerk every time I uttered that word, so I am relieved for the upgrade to “husband.” I still prefer using his name, though.

3. No more Persian-store weirdness. I always felt kinda bad doing our Persian shopping together before we got married, because I felt like all the old people of my parents’ land were judging me for hanging out with a man that I wasn’t married to. Probably they couldn’t have cared less and hardly noticed such a generically white-looking couple anyway, but now we are married, so what a relief that is in case they did notice and were judging me! Now I can buy my lavash and bamieh with peace of mind. I definitely flash my left hand around as much as possible, though, because the best defense is a good offense.

4. Compromising on a wedding is stupid. We wanted to elope, and our parents wanted a wedding. So we did this kinda in-between deal that involved just them. Obvs it had its good parts, but my recommendation for people who are the elopey types? Just elope. Then you aren’t stuck wearing fake eyelashes for 12 hours and having to make conversation over dinner when you are already so tired and just want to go to bed already.

5. This is closely related to #4, but dieting for your wedding day and freaking out about all the stuff like the dress and the shoes and whatev? I bought my dress the week before the wedding and I was fat on my wedding day. I was freaking out about it for a while because I am, right now (and was then), the fattest I’ve ever been. But who cares. I finally realized the wedding day is one day out of the jillion of a marriage and yes the pictures are forever but I just bought a cool dress that fit and got a pro hair-and-makeup job and I got over myself. I keep getting annoying comments from people who were projecting their own wedding fantasies on my life but I don’t like most of their marriages (or divorces, ahem) so why should I listen, right??

6. Getting married at a young age = awesome (if you are ready, which I was/am). I think a lot of people are confused about why I decided to get married at 24 and my answer is too long to put in one bullet point but it is mostly comprised of the words love, teamwork, and awesomeness.

So I am setting myself up for possible rejection. All rejection is awkward and totally uncomfortable, and anyone who says different is lying or a masochist, but if I don’t gun for this, I will have wasted a big chance. And by writing about this here, I’m holding myself accountable to actually going for it.

I am also thinking about this as setting myself up for the opposite of rejection. Which is acceptance? Or opportunity? Whatever you want to call it. I am trying to visualize that, to make it more possible.

I think more than all that, it is exciting to have identified what I see as a possible path, because even if this chance doesn’t pan out, I know what I need to do to prepare myself for future chances. To make it happen for myself, eventually.

Besides, what is more awkward and uncomfortable than getting rejected is spending the rest of your entire professional life wishing you had tried something (or in this case, asked to be allowed to try) when you were young and didn’t have much to lose. That is a regret I’m not prepared to face when I am an old lady.

Also, I do firmly believe I will rock at this thing I want to try. So there.

But applying that respect and logic to myself has been very hard. And I have struggled for a long time with my own varied and shifting multicultural and socioeconomic background. I won’t get into specifics in this post but suffice to say that I am still very confused about my cultural identity because, I think, I am so intent on pinning myself down as one thing. Iranian. American. Iranian-American.

But if you want the real story about a person, there’s so much more. Like, for me, it would be: Born to Iranian parents in Germany, I came to America at age seven and have never been to Iran and grew up with a single mom that raised me Pentecostal but I’m not any longer and we didn’t have a lot of money and in fact it was so little that I still feel anxious about money a lot even though I don’t really need to.

But that is a mouthful. And really, none of these things feel comfortable to me. So for now I have pushed these questions to the back of my mind. And they surface when I am up late, working and wondering if I am doing the right things. And if not having resolved these questions for myself is why I wonder if I’m on the right path.

It was a hard class for me, because photography is a very technical thing, and I was an English major, which is all theoretical, even in the tangible product - papers full of ideas that I would write the night before they were due, for the most part.

But photojournalism is something you can’t half-ass, and it’s about luck as much as it is about patience, and so much of it is about looking at your work in a measured and impartial way after the shooting is done. It’s really honorable and really difficult. I spent a lot of my semester in his class biting my nails from the back of my boyfriend’s motorcycle, hoping this sort of high-concept (and slightly dangerous, in hindsight) project I was working on would gel. And my professor made me feel like I was awesome for trying. And he helped me figure out how to make it work.

I have a lot of respect for him, and he saw me at my most high-strung and anxious, because I really wanted to do well in his class. He also was one of very few profs that actually cares about you as a person, and he checks in with his former students all the time, as they do with him. Last night was his retirement party, which made me sad for all the kids that will never get to learn from him. It was a relief to talk to other people there and realize I am not the only person who would email him every few months after graduation, freaking out because I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. And he always replied with long, analytical, thoughtful emails and useful contacts that helped me dig myself out of my self-pity so I could spring into action and adjust my life. He has always reassured me that I can do more than I think I can do, and that I just need to chill out and work and create a good network for myself, and I’ll end up where my life needs to go.

And also - and this is the best thing about this man, the part that makes me so inspired and happy - he is proof that one person can change the life of many people for the better, by caring about and working with them one at a time.

There’s a book called Literary Lives, by Edward Sorel, that taps into this perfectly, as it’s basically a tell-all of famous revered figures (Jung, Rand, etc.). I saw it once in New York and reading it made me feel better about things. Now I’m buying it so that the next time I want to elevate someone to demi-god status for their accomplishments, I don’t.

I just renewed the registration for my car and it took about 1.5 minutes. And there are RSS feeds! And video! Next up probably there will be a YouTube special pitting cranky DMV employees against road ragers. Or MAYBE at the very least, tell-all blogs in which those DMV employees write about all the customers that made them so mean in the first place.

But to be positive again, I’m starting to feel good cosmic vibes (if I believed in them) with parking in this city, too. A few months ago I charmed my way out of a ticket just by being very nice to a meter maid. And the other day I made it in time to refill the meter, with just a single minute to go. Someone’s looking out for me, and I’m going to give credit for everything to the governator. Goodness knows it is his Austrian sense of order and discipline that has kept California from falling into the ocean in the last few years, and his Hollywood sense of fun times that keeps everyone smiling. Vielen Dank, Arnold.

Oh, and apparently Antonio Villaraigosa had a mistress? Erm, where have I been?

I was led to believe this would be a dance recital. But there is one six-minute dance number and the rest is Broadway songs that won’t end. Three hours of them. Bad song-acting. Thinning hair. Dubious sexuality. Awkward dresses that do nothing to cover chunky legs encased in flesh-colored nylon. At least in a proper musical you get a plot, however flimsy. This thing is like a high school choir tryout, act after act just belting saccharine songs that have nothing to do with each other but somehow all sound the same. A guy who yells more than he sings gets three numbers. There’s no justice in this world.

But wait, it gets worse. They cap off the night with a “fusion belly dance.” (There were two dance numbers, fine.) Three girls in their bras, bindis firmly affixed twixt their brows, doing poor belly rolls to a Yin Yang Twins song. To the girl with a massive white flower behind each ear… in silhouette, you looked like a gyrating Yoda. And perhaps that made staying through the end worthwhile.