Colleen Taylor

"If you try to connect the dots of your career, if you mess it up, you're going to wind up on a very limited path. If I decided what I was going to do in college -- when there was no Internet, no Google, no Facebook... I don't want to make that mistake. The reason I don't have a plan is because if I have a plan I'm limited to today's options."

I'm a little behind on this, but all of this New York Times Op-Ed based on Jonathan Franzen's commencement address to Kenyon College's Class of 2011 is worth reading. I particularly wanted to share one bit about the difference between "the world of liking" things on Facebook, and loving things and people in real life.

Franzen's speech isn't pertinent only to today's new college grads-- those supposedly super distracted kids that grew up with Facebook, texting, sexting, and all the rest. People of all generations are now tempted to spend more free time in the shiny, simple world of online social networks. We're all busy, and maintaining real life relationships can be much more hassle than keeping up with the hundreds of electronic connections we have online.

But in the end, loving someone in the flesh is much more rewarding than "liking" things online-- or really, anything else that we can do in this life.

"The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

...When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, 'Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s' is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer."

I came across a clip from a recent Oprah Show dedicated to the "greatest lessons" she's learned over the course of her on-air career. I'm not the biggest Oprah fan, but I really liked her anecdote about why she stayed in Chicago, where her show still airs in its original 9 A.M time slot, for so long. Essentially, it's a version of "dance with the one that brung ya," an adage to which I personally try to adhere for as long as practicable.

"Years ago... I was gonna get paid a lot more money to move to Channel 2. They wanted me to move to Channel 2 at four in the afternoon to help out their news, and they were gonna pay me a bunch more money to do it. Like, millions of dollars.

And I said to [producer] Roger King, 'I'm not gonna do that.' He was like, 'Are you crazy? Did you not understand what I said? How many zeros are on the check?' And I said, 'No, because the 9 o'clock Chicago audience was where I started.' And he said, 'Do you think those people are still sitting there watching TV?' And no, I didn't.

But I did feel that there was something energetically right about staying where you were, and being loyal to the people who helped you get started. So I'm grateful to Chicago."

"Her nails are unmanicured, which on her looks like the last word in efficient chic, and I suddenly find myself wondering why I bother with a weekly polish."

--from a recent New York Times Magazine article about Cate Blanchett written by Daphne Merkin

I'm certainly a fan of the weekly polish, but I can totally relate to Daphne Merkin on this: When I come into close contact with a smart, compelling, put-together woman, I'm liable to call every single one of my current sartorial choices into question.

If I'm wearing flats and I meet a cool woman in towering heels, I instantly wish I were literally in her shoes. Suddenly I want to swap my trendy pastel polish for her understated beige manicure, or vice versa. This happened most recently while covering the Women in Tech panel at Facebook, which featured some really brilliant (and amazingly dressed) women.

I recently read a memoir by Carole Radziwill that focuses in part on her friendship with the late Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. I was too young to really appreciate CBK's style in the early 90s, but reading about her personality, and looking at her photos now, is enough to make a girl want to remove all her nail polish and toss out 90% of her wardrobe, jewelry, hair products, and makeup.