Looking a little dazed and confused on his first day of school

In addition to all of the b5media drama, there have been a lot of other changes going on around here the past few weeks. Luke started a new job two weeks ago, I started a new day job one week ago, and Cooper started daycare. So basically, everyone’s schedules have drastically changed, and none of us has any idea which way is up at any given time.

The whole job thing happened really quickly, so it was very fortunate that I was able to find a daycare for Cooper that didn’t creep me out. I had toured a few places over the summer, and although they were nice (and in one case, very expensive), there was something that depressed me about each of them. Neither was a place I wanted to send my child all day.

Luckily, we found one that the three of us felt good about: it was clean, the teachers seemed competent, and it has a good curriculum. Cooper has been going three days a week for the past few weeks, and he seems to be adjusting pretty well to the new environment. He’s even adjusted to the part of it that completely boggles my mind: the sleeping arrangements.

Cooper’s room is made up of kids from about 13-20 months old, so these are definitely kids who aren’t old enough to be considered pre-schoolers. In fact, I doubt that any have graduated into a big-kid bed. However, at this place, the babies take naps not in cribs, but on mats. Little naptime mats, which are common in pre-k and kindergarten classrooms, are being used for kids who have just started walking. How does that even work?

Cooper’s a nut. He flings himself around his crib when he sleeps, and I’ll often go in to check on him, only to find a foot sticking out between the bars, or a tuft of hair, or both of his arms. Yet somehow, he manages to just go lie down on the floor and sleep for like two hours. This honestly defies all physics and logic to me. Despite the fact that I get daily reports that say he sleeps, I still can’t wrap my head around it.

What I can wrap my head around? The illnesses that we’ve been passing back and forth for the past two weeks. Cooper caught a pretty bad stomach bug, of which I had a milder version. Then he brought home a cold that affected both Luke and me, with the worst of it landing on my first day of work. Then, Cooper ended up with a 104 degree temperature and his first-ever ear infection, which he, never one to do anything half-assed, made a double. So, two infected ears, snot, diarrhea, and a jacket sent to the cleaners after a spectacular Pedialyte and banana vomiting incident. So basically, February? LIVIN’ THE DREAM, BABY!

He's still pretty cute even with snot pouring down his face

It turns out I’m still on the b5media mailing list, and there was an email that went out to bloggers last night to which current bloggers responded. It was about a small problem, but what really struck me is that there are at least a few bloggers who were concerned about this small problem. You guys, you have much bigger problems with which to be concerned.

Elizabeth Spiers, formerly of Gawker, has taken a senior role at b5media, and has announced on her personal blog that they’re hiring. She says, “One of my larger clients is launching a new lifestyle site and relaunching three others and I need new staffers for all of them. (We’re basically tearing them down and starting over—redesigning them, restructuring editorially and adding lots of new original content.)”

According to the Inquisitr, Spiers later confirms that the client is b5media, and then also asks for contributors. I cannot put this any more plainly: if you currently blog for b5media, you are losing your job. Don’t waste your time responding to small problems. Get your stuff together and figure out your next steps. At the very least, you guys have a warning.

- On February 16, I received an emailed form letter stating that my contract with b5media (who owns a large blog network that included Medium Dreams) had been terminated. There was no reason given for this, other than a vague “new direction for the company” excuse.
- In the letter, they tell me to email info@b5media.com if I have any questions. At this point, I’m thinking I’ve been fired, so yeah, I have questions. I’m a freelance writer, so if I get fired off of a job, it’s pretty important to find out why. That way, I can either not make the same mistakes again, or learn from the experience in ways that will help my other writing jobs. I email them, and I don’t hear back.
- I contact a b5 blogger with whom I’ve been working, to see if she has any insight into why I had been fired. She emails me back immediately, telling me that the entire entertainment channel (around 50 blogs) has been let go, including her.
- I go to Medium Dreams and find that I’ve been locked out of the site.

- I talk further with a few different (now former) b5 bloggers and find out a little bit more. Everyone has been laid off so that b5 Media could start a general pop culture blog, staffed with all new writers and editors.
- By the end of the day, all 50 of the blogs are gone, and typing in the URLs leads to the new pop culture blog. RSS feeds have posts to the new blog, and Twitter accounts for specialized blogs are being taken over with feeds that have nothing to do with the original sites for which they were made.
- I get pissed. Not so much for myself, as I’ve only been working with them since September, but for the people who have been building an audience and an internet presence for years. Some people even ran several blogs (up to 7 in at least one case). Then, in a blink of an eye, all that hard work: gone.
- I get a Google Alert for Medium Dreams, with an old post from the site. I click on it and discover that all of the Medium Dreams content has been folded into the new pop culture site. I am still listed as the author, making it appear as though I work for the new pop culture site. I do not.

Look, there’s one thing that I’ve learned in my time as a freelance writer: the corporations for which you work are concerned with the big picture– not individual contributors. They’re running a business, and I understand that perspective. It isn’t what they did that bothers me so much; it’s how they did it.

In the blink of an eye, years of peoples’ work disappeared without warning. We weren’t even allowed to say goodbye to our readers, or explain to them what was happening. They simply went to our sites and saw something completely new, unfamiliar, and unlike what they were looking for.

Some readers have gotten a hold of me either here or on Twitter, and have asked if I plan on blogging about Medium somewhere else. The answer is, I don’t know. There are definitely advantages to doing a site like this for a corporation. Namely, the subscriptions to the photo agencies (which is where I got all of the photos for the site that weren’t episode photos), and the professional site design. You guys, I wasn’t a design major in college. I don’t know how to make things look pretty.

I do, however, own www.mediumdreams.net, so there’s a chance I may do something with it. I’m still mulling my options, and I’m just not sure logistically if it’s a good idea or not. What I do want to do, however, is thank everyone who read the site, and especially those of you who commented. You’re the reason doing this was so much fun, and you are all fantastic. Thank you for your support; I really appreciate it.

Southwest Airlines has been at the front of my mind recently. My very last post, in fact, was about a Southwest flight to Florida I just took with my son. While it was a ridiculously stressful trip, the stress was mainly due to the fact that I had a newly-mobile child who was being forced to remain mostly immobile for about two and a half hours. In fact, I kept on saying that Southwest, with whom I had not flown in some time because they stopped having service in and out of the NYC area, was quickly becoming my favorite airline.

The past decade has been a rough one for air travel: prices have gone up, while service has gone down. The airlines are almost uniformly stripping us of amenities while simultaneously nickel and diming us for everything they can think of. Southwest, on the other hand, has been working on bucking the trend, offering free checked baggage and the ability to change your flight with very little stress. The trade-off, however, seems to be a high dose of public humiliation, given out seemingly at random.

I’m a huge fan of director Kevin Smith. For the past two years, roughly, his Smodcast has completely revolutionized my commute and my workouts. Yesterday, Smith took to his Twitter account and told his over 1.5 million followers that after he boarded a Southwest flight, he was then asked to disembark the plane, as he posed a “safety risk.” How can a famous director pose a safety risk on an airplane?

While it’s entirely possible, I suppose, that Smith had decided to get on this flight with a fistful of Oxycontin, which he was then sticking in caramels and delivering to the children on the plane, far more likely is his claim that the danger he posed was much simpler: Southwest deemed him too fat to fly. While this may seem like a crazy thing to have happen to anyone, much less someone famous like Smith, history backs his story up. Southwest was sued by a woman after a similar incident in 2003, and Southwest has a very detailed Q&A section on its website regarding this very issue.

Right or wrong, Southwest’s size policy has been in effect for over two decades, so that’s not the disturbing part of this story. In Southwest’s response to Smith posted on their blog and then quickly taken down (the link goes to the Google cached version), they say that Smith generally buys two seats when he travels with them, but “When the time came to board Mr. Smith, we had only a single seat available for him to occupy.” However, instead of saying, “dude, you’re on standby and we only have one seat. Try another flight, or perhaps a salad, fatty,” they allowed him to board and then kicked him off of the plane. Did the dude turn into Violet Beuregarde between the gate and the seat? Doubtful. So why did Southwest need to resort to public humiliation?

Southwest needed to get their shit together before they started boarding standby passengers. If they let him on and felt later that they made a mistake, then they need to deal with that in a way that puts the customer first, regardless of his or her size. This is something that Southwest should be better at than other airlines, yet they seem to consistently fail.

Southwest understands that paying for checked baggage sucks, so they don’t charge you. They understand that sometimes shit happens and you need to reschedule your flight. They don’t charge you for this– instead, you just pay any difference in the ticket price. They’ve even changed their cattle chute boarding process to a far more civilized zone seating process that allows you to freely walk around the airport instead of standing in line for hours, but still allows you to choose your own seat.

They do all this while still boasting impressively low prices. I had to fly down to Florida unexpectedly for a funeral, and I was able to buy a ticket from IAD to TPA on only two days notice for $99. That’s unheard of, and without that fare, I never would have been able to make it down. Southwest does a lot of things right, but it’s the one-on-one interactions in which they fail.

With their new boarding process, Southwest has eliminated pre-boarding for families with small children. As a mother who was flying by herself with her 16-month-old child, this proved to be disastrous. Instead of being allowed on the plane first, where I could put my stroller in the bag to be gate checked, I struggled to pack it away while waiting in line to board, so I wouldn’t hold up the crowd. While I was doing this, Cooper, no longer contained by the stroller, managed to get away from me, and for the better part of a minute, I had no idea where he was.

It was short, and everything worked out fine, but in that moment, I was living every parents worst nightmare. And for what? Would it be that much more difficult to let me down the tube so I can put my stroller away in a more enclosed environment, without having people trip over me?

But that’s the problem with Southwest: they do things that are seemingly too difficult for other airlines to do, like allow you to check bags for free, but can’t manage the simple things, like letting someone with a baby on first, or treating people with basic respect.

Kevin Smith is going to be fine. He’s going to pay a little more for those short flights to San Francisco and Las Vegas, and he’s going to move on with his life. But what about the rest of us? What do we do when we don’t want to support an airline who would kick someone off the plane for weighing an arbitrary amount, or for wearing a skirt that someone deemed too short, but we can’t afford to pay double or triple the fair that Southwest offers? We do what all middle-class people are forced to do in this country. We sigh, we rationalize, we admit defeat, and then we toast our position in the “A” boarding group.

I’ve flown with Cooper several times. While we’ve had a few dicey situations, overall he’s pretty good on a plane. I know all the tricks in order to assure success: plenty of food, drink, toys and other distractions. However, when I unexpectedly had to go to Florida the other week alone with a now-walking Cooper, it was a whole new world.

Matt Logelin must be some sort of crazy voodoo magician, because holy Christ, traveling with a mobile child is an entirely new level of stress that I was wholly unprepared for. I mean, yes, I was logistically prepared, and I knew the fact that Cooper was busy cutting three molars may complicate matters, but what I didn’t expect? What I didn’t see coming? Was lining up for our flight and having Cooper running away from me. To the point where I couldn’t see him. In a busy international airport. And then I died.

Cooper ran out of the gate area and was almost in the main terminal, when passengers started alerting me to where he was. We ended up catching him, but anyone who has ever interrupted a baby on a quest for freedom can probably guess what happened next: screaming, thrashing and crying were all on the menu, and lasted, unabated, until we sat down in our seats. Why my completely full flight stayed completely full after that is completely beyond me. I would have assumed that at least half of them would have said, “not. Fucking. Worth. It.” and hightailed it in the opposite direction.

During the flight itself, it was a constant game of, “do you want some blueberries? Would you like to play with the container? Let’s read a book. Let’s play with Scout. No, you can’t get down. Let’s go to the front of the plane to change your diaper. It’s occupied and I can’t wait up here? Let’s go to the back of the plane to wait for the only bathroom with a changing table to free up. Let’s go back to the front of the plane and change your diaper. Rock, rock, rock. Sleep.

Yes, the only reason I didn’t just dissolve Kate Gosselin-style over Georgia is because at the halfway mark, Cooper passed out. Not only that, but he stayed asleep for the rest of the flight, even allowing me to read a little bit. I snapped this picture as a reminder that even though we’re trapped in a tin can, hurtling through the sky, and my heart rate has been somewhere around 200 for the past two hours, he really is still my snuggly, adorable little boy. Until we landed and he refused to take a nap for the next five days. But that’s a different story.