When I first started GenPink I had very clear plans in mind.

GenPink is about being a twenty something woman. Letting others know how our generation is different than those before us. We are career women, single & married, girl friends, and individuals. There is a delicate balance in being an individual and being part of a support system for your friends, family and your environment. GenPink is about balancing family and work, technology, entertainment, and exploration of new ideas.

I believe there are two types of people - doers and planners. Those who DO and then possibly figure out a plan and those who plan and prepare before they take the first steps. I am very much a planner. I research, doodle, plan, rewrite, analyze and compare options before most any big move in my life.

Before I bought my domain name and started this blog there was some seriously planning. Since opening my doors to the blog world I have diverted from my plan and for a while I was not able to figure out why.

Tonight, the answer came to me. From everything I have read about becoming a successful blogger the first and most important step is developing your niche. Simple - my niche is twentysomething women. This seems simple enough. Wrong!

The problem is being twentysomething is not really inclusive of anything besides a decade of birthdays.

When I was in college I had (still do) a great group of girlfriends. For me each girl friend brought out a different part of me. I spent the wee hours of the night doodling, xacto knifing, printing, gluing and all other things graphic design with my graphic designer friend. Naturally, my fashion design roommate was my go-to gal for all things fashion. My other roommate I would consider to be a bit of philosopher. We often spent late nights discussing life. Each one of my friendships developed based on our common interests. Collectively the 6 of us had a great time in college, we had fun, we cried, we laughed, we watched Sex and the City and we developed lifelong friendships. Now that we are out of college we are graphic designers, art teachers, fashion designers, mothers, photographers, wives, single, happier than ever and stressed out of our mind. How can my niche be twentysomething women when I don’t even have 1 word to describe my 6 college girl friends.

I could focus on myself and write for someone like me, but I am more random and diverse than any person I know. How many women do you know that get just as excited about learning a new CSS trick as decorating the imaginary house in my head.

I would never call my photographer friend to tell her about a fabulous font website. Just like I would only call 2 of the girls to tell her about this interesting intellectual post about Gen Y girls being princesses. I had a fear that blogging was the same way. But by trying to not leave anyone out I was striping myself of all my areas of interest.

So to sum things up the problem is I have too many interests.

The solution - I am just going to let myself be random. If you are reading this (and better yet are subscribed to my feed) and you could care less about graphic design, feel free to skip over my post about the fun color generator site. Also, I am planning a redesign to encompass my personal style and my randomness. I am open to any other solutions/suggestions to my blog identity problem.

My mom is a professional speaker and she starts many of her talks by saying "I will be covering many topics, I have many opinions and as always I say ‘take what you want and leave the rest.’ "

So from now on I will not hold back from writing about the cute shoes that I want for fear of not appearing to my intellectual friends.

I was so proud of my self today …

You see I have an addiction to my feed reader. My mom says I am a high information sort, but I think I am just "into" way to many topics. Design, diy, blogging, finances, fashion, decorating, cooking, going green - to name a few.

So my problem is I subscribe to so many blogs that I can never catch up. Today though, I started actually deleting blogs from my reader. *gasp*

I found a fun feature in my GReader (google), on the Trends page (section?) there is a little tab that says "Inactive." When I looked over this inactive list and realized that some of my subscribed blogs hadn’t updated since May or June (and I hadn’t noticed) I decided I could delete them.

Of course in the process of trying to figure out which blogs to delete I ended up catching up on my reading which always results in finding more blogs. How can deleting blogs from your feed reader cause your feed count to grow do you ask …

Bloggrl is in my blogging folder in my reader she has a funny post about Contest Blogger. So naturally I visit Contest Blogger which then leads me to a contest. Imagine that! I pop on over to Dear Crissy for two reasons, #1 the mention of $50 and #2 I love the cute graphic of her blog. Come to find out Crissy is a 27-year-old artist, photographer, and writer. Which could only mean 1 thing. Dear Crissy is now added to my "twenty-something" feeds folder.

They say the first step to overcoming an addiction is admittance. So here I am - I have an addiction to my feed reader. In the process of trying to narrow down my feeds I ended up adding 2 more. Hey but maybe I could win $50!

It’s Friday night and for the first time in months I had a whole evening to myself. I chose to spend it catching up on Oprah that had been recorded over the past few weeks.

The episode I just finished watching was about women in their thirties - Thirty Something in America. At first I was going to skip over this since I am only 25. After a second thought, I decided that I should give it a listen. For the most part the issues the women in the show were facing were a bit out of my reach at this stage in my life.

My favorite part of the show was at the very end Oprah asked a few women …

"What do you know in your thirties that you didn’t know in your twenties?"

These were the answers that spoke to me:

• "I think one of the things that I know now is that life is life. So, you just have to kind of go with the flow and go with your gut, go with your instincts and not hold on to bad experiences and bad people too long waiting for them to change or evolve into something else. You just need to move on and count it all as a lesson." - DeChane
• "The one thing I have learned in my thirties that I did not know in my twenties is how valuable my friendships are … Once you are sucked into your thirties and trying to figure out where your life is going, it’s the friends that really make the difference in your world." - Molly
• Oprah’s closing thoughts: "There is a common thread that runs between us all … We all have the same desire to be valued regardless of where we come from or what we may be going through, and to love the people most important in our lives and that is our connection to each other. So I say thank you."

I found a great post today through sk*rt of The Magical List of Outstanding Women Bloggers. I am always excited to find new blogs to feed my addiction (and my reader), especially women bloggers.

There are over 150 women bloggers listed. One issue I had with this thorough list - it’s not categorized and there is no way to know what each blog is without visiting each one individually. I guess that’s two issues. So …

Here is the continuance of the outstanding women bloggers list, with blog descriptions. I look forward to making my way through these new blogs.

(more…)

Yay it’s 5 o’clock! I’ve had some pretty funny discoveries today on my down times. I wonder why my professors in college never told me that design is really a degree of "hurry up and wait"? Anyways, I did some browsing throughout the day while I was waiting on hold, or waiting for a returned phone call, you know the drill.

My random Tuesday finds:

• Old Habits - this whole scenario between husband and wife sounds like something I have lived through. Might I add that I literally laughed out loud.
• Men are from Google Women are from Yahoo
• I want this rug & this ring
• Crazy fun spiral pictures - I am a sucker for fun photography
• I had no idea that bathroom signs could be so creative. Maybe my design niche should be bathroom signage. ps- there is a crazy imac ad in the top right hand corner of that page that freaked me out.

I think I may go home and have me some Skittles Vodka (not really but sounds fun).

Check this out: 84% of sunscreen products are harmful to our health
Quite alarming