by Bernie Su
Dr. Gardiner seemed to think about it for a second. “Your videos do have momentum, but more importantly, they have message. Especially your most recent one, where you were honest about your family’s financial straits. That had resonance, and depth.”
I could feel myself flushing. First, out of relief knowing I made the right decision to put that last video online, then with the creeping realization that Dr. Gardiner was watching my videos—long after I turned in my paper on my end-of-term project.
“You might want to also consider going to VidCon,” she mentioned. “To gain other vloggers’ perspectives for data.”
“Charlotte and I are talking about it—we really want to go.” VidCon is a huge convention about web video, and it would be an incredible opportunity to meet people in this new industry—and luckily, it’s in California, only a couple of hours’ drive away.
“Okay. I’ll sign off on the thesis topic,” Dr. Gardiner declared.
I’ll admit, I squeed.
“But—” She held up a hand, halting my glee. “I want to give you a warning. You’ll be letting strangers into your life, your world, for almost a full year. And your videos have gotten more popular than I think any of us expected.”
At this point I’ve posted twenty videos and I have over 100,000 views each. That’s two million views. And we’ve even made a little money, what with YouTube advertising. Not a lot—but maybe enough to buy some VidCon tickets?
So yeah, I’d say we exceeded expectations.
“You need to be mindful of what you put out there, and how it’s affecting the people you involve,” Dr. Gardiner continued. “Your sisters, Charlotte Lu . . . even the people you talk about but we don’t see. You’re not dealing in theoreticals anymore. These are real people. There will be consequences—some good, some not so good—for having their lives exposed via your lens.”
“But you just said that when I talked about something real—my family’s money problems—it gave the videos depth and resonance.”
“True. You still need to be honest. But you also have to figure out how far the contract you have with your audience extends.” She smiled at me. “It’s a fine line to walk, and it’s one you’re going to have to figure out.”
I thanked Dr. Gardiner, and wished her a happy summer before I left.
On my drive home, I thought about what Dr. Gardiner had said. And she’s right. What I do and say on the videos has affected me, and the people around me. For people like Jane and Lydia, it means some notoriety—but I would never put anything involving them on the videos that they didn’t want seen. And Lydia especially doesn’t seem to mind the notoriety. In fact, she’s thriving on it. She has gotten so many Twitter followers since I started these videos. Hell, since the video that she posted ON HER OWN this morning with Charlotte (and you’d better believe I’m gonna have a talk with both of them about that later) even Lydia’s new cat, Kitty, is getting a record number of Twitter followers.
It’s a little surreal.
For myself, it’s startling to realize that my professor has been continuing to watch my videos and will know everything about my life in the upcoming year. Everything. As well as all my classmates—it’s sobering to walk into a classroom and realize everyone there has seen you in your pajamas because you wore them on camera. And there are a lot of faceless other people who know my business, too. That’s part of having a message people engage with.
But those faceless people have been so supportive. The feedback, the commentary, has been immensely gratifying. It’s like being told that yes, maybe I am cut out for this industry. Maybe my voice does matter in the grand scheme of things.
I have a lot of ambitions and dreams for what I want to do with my life: I want to be able to effect change. To make at least my small corner of the world better in some way. To inspire and be inspired. (I would also like to find a way to get paid for it.) It may seem silly and grandiose, and not at all the practical thinking that my generation is told we need to overcome our lack of job opportunities and our belief in our specialness. But it’s how I think. And every time people online contact me and say they like my videos and it makes them feel not alone, I feel kind of like I’m doing it.
So, I do have a contract with my audience, and well-meaning warnings aside, I do have to honor it.
I have to be as real and open as possible with them. And hopefully, they’ll continue to watch.
TUESDAY, JUNE 19TH
One of the more enjoyable aspects of being on summer vacation is my lack of schedule. Oh, trust me, I’m still doing a lot of work, but I’m not beholden to a rigid class structure. Instead, my only parameters for when I get work done are the hours the library is open. Thus I can indulge in the occasional sleeping in, linger over a cup of coffee in the morning . . . and I can get the mail.
I love getting the mail. It’s a personal quirk. It’s so much more satisfying than checking my email in-box, because I have to wait. The postman has to bring messages to me. Could it be a missive from a friend or relative? A check that will solve all my problems?
No. Usually it’s just bills and catalogues—but I have hope for a real piece of mail in my lifetime!
And today I was rewarded for my efforts, because today came a letter . . . on pressed paper. With a Netherfield return address.
“Lydia,” I said, upon quietly entering her room. All right, perhaps I barged in and forced her out of bed. “Is this what I think it is?”
Blearily, she took the envelope from me. When she read the return address, she smirked and ripped it open.
“Lydia!”
“What? It’s addressed to the Bennet Sisters. I’m a Bennet sister, too.” She scanned the card. “Formal invitation, very nice. This is gonna be swank.”
“I can’t believe that you got Bing to actually throw a party, for no reason other than you asked him to.”
“Hey, there are benefits to extracting promises from people when they’re buzzed, and then stalking their street until they get home and you can casually run into them and demand they fulfill said promises.”
It’s hard to argue with that logic.
“Still—let’s not tell Mom,” I said. “For a little while at least. The less time she knows about the party, the less time she has to scheme.”
She shrugged, handing the card back to me and then springing out of bed like a chipmunk on a sugar high. “Whatever. Oh! But I get to tell Jane!” She turned contemplative. “I wonder what I’ll have Jane wear?”
“What you’ll have Jane wear?” I asked. “She’s pretty good at picking out her own clothes.”
“For like, work, and looking classy or whatever. At this party . . . Jane is gonna step up her sexy game.”
“She is?”
“Once I get through with her.” Lydia winked and was out the door. I could hear her humming dubstep under her breath on her way to the bathroom.
I’m not worried about Jane’s wardrobe. She is far better at controlling/indulging Lydia than the rest of us—even our parents. She’ll wear only what she wants to. But I have to admit, I am sort of dreading the party.
Jane and Bing are rolling along merrily, but that can be a little . . . exclusive. They can be in their own little bubble. And I’m sure that the party will be great, but with George Wickham out of town, it’s not like there is anyone that I’m looking forward to seeing. Add to that, I don’t know what I’ll have to contribute to any conversation. Let’s face it, Bing—while great and open—and his friends attract a certain type of person. The rich and driven kind. Who’s likely to be at this party? Not just locals like me. Med school friends, maybe. Prep school and Harvard chums. Wealthy family friends. Caroline’s elite crowd. Darcy.
What do you talk about at a party when school’s out for summer, and you have no job and an uncertain future? It’s a recipe for awkward.
But awkward or not, when an invitation arrives on embossed card stock, you can’t ignore it. I’m enough of my mother’s daughter to know that.
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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27TH
We’re going to VidCon! Charlotte made it happen. Somehow she contacted them, pointed them to our videos and views, and they sent us tickets!
But it’s not just us going. They also sent Jane a ticket—and Lydia, too.
Jane’s happy to go—she’s happy to meet people who like the videos, and she’s going to meet with her work’s LA-based flagship branch, just to see the place and come face-to-face with some of the people she talks on the phone with all day long.
Lydia is also happy to meet people who like the videos . . . and to see if she can get said people to buy her drinks during the convention.
I’m not speaking on a panel or anything (what would I talk about, anyway? How to leverage your mother’s insanity for tens of dollars and the occasional gif-set?), but I’m going to try to learn as much as I can (half of the programming is for people who want to make videos, not just watch them) and hopefully meet some cool people.
“We should bring some business-type clothes, too,” Charlotte said, raiding my closet and pulling out my sole suit jacket. “We need to be presentable.”
“Presentable? We’re not street urchins.”
“This is not only an opportunity to learn—it’s going to be an opportunity to network. There will be dozens of new media companies there. And in another year we are going to be looking for jobs. Probably at these very same new media companies.” She pulled out a jean jacket I haven’t worn since seventh grade. “What about this?”
“No. Jane would kill me.”
“Oh? Jane’s survived your mother with enough strength left over to kill you?”
“Barely.” I snorted.
Bing’s party went off without a hitch. And it was actually more pleasant than I expected. I shouldn’t have worried—of course Bing’s friends are as nice as Bing himself (with a certain notable exception), and nobody wants to talk about their real lives, anyway; we’d much rather talk about music and art and the latest Internet meme. So, obviously my bout of nervousness was just a momentary lapse into hereditary drama.
The real drama was the fact that Jane didn’t come home with us. She didn’t come home until the next morning.
And Mom was livid.
Not because Jane didn’t come home until morning—but because Jane came home at all.
What did she expect? That a date that lasts until dawn is an unequivocal proposal of marriage? I’m half shocked that Mom didn’t have Jane’s belongings already packed up and in the trunk to take over to Netherfield.
But when Jane came home, after being told that she was neither engaged, pregnant, nor cohabitating, Mom just tightened her lips and went into the kitchen, unwilling to look at or even talk to her daughter. She just changed the subject by vaguely commenting that the cabinetry was looking outdated.
What Mom didn’t seem to notice is that Jane came home . . . different.
She was lighter, somehow. Glowing. And no, it wasn’t a glow that comes from sex. Because according to her she didn’t have sex:
But it was more like all the little steps that she had been taking with Bing—the tentative getting-to-know-you, getting-to-like-you dance—had led up to this. She was no longer slowly falling. It had happened. She was there.
I could hear Jane through our shared bedroom wall. She was on the phone with Bing, telling him about what she was packing for VidCon. She was laughing, her voice itself smiling. Whatever happened that night deepened everything. For Jane, at least. One assumes for Bing, too.
Oh, my God. I think I witnessed my sister fall in love.
Strangely, I can’t help but feel a little . . . sad. I don’t know why, though. Jane’s in love! Jane’s happy! That’s a fantastic thing! But it also means change is coming. Jane doesn’t belong to just us anymore.
But I couldn’t be sad at that moment. Because I was picking out panels I wanted to attend from the VidCon schedule on my laptop, and Charlotte was picking a truly hideous peacock-blue pantsuit my mother got me upon college graduation out of my closet. (Because every proper young lady needs a peacock-blue pantsuit for “interviews, dear. We want you to look your best for those—especially if the interviewer is a handsome, successful man.”)
“No!” I said, horrified. “Not unless you want potential networking opportunities to think I time-traveled here from the seventies.”
“Hey—as long as potential networking opportunities remember you.” Charlotte grinned, throwing the pantsuit on the pile.
“You’re as bad as my mother.”
“I can live with that.”
I laughed. See? It’s hard to be sad when this time tomorrow . . . we’ll be at VidCon!
SATURDAY, JUNE 30TH
Vidcon was Amazing! And yes, that capital “A” is intentional.
I learned so much. I met people—people!—who watch my videos. I saw Driftless Pony Club perform and laughed my ass off while Hannah Hart spoke.
I MET HANK GREEN.
And it wasn’t all just fun and games and fangirling over YouTube vloggers and buying awesome not-ironic-therefore-ironic T-shirts from the exhibit hall. As per Charlotte, we did actually “attend some educational panels and participate in networking events.” The industry panels were all about how to grow and sustain an audience—how to best use the tools available to us (seems like everyone is working on a shoestring on the Internet) and how to market most effectively. We learned about the future of storytelling from Loose-Fishery, the biggest transmedia company around, and saw another talk about multi-communication platforms from a designer at an app company called Pemberley Digital. And I know to the layperson (aka Lydia, who camped out in the hallway and set up her own mini autograph-signing station until the event organizers told her to stop) it seems boring, but I was deeply intrigued. And Charlotte? Charlotte was fascinated.
Aside from the awesome weirdness of meeting people who watch my videos in real life—and like them—we met several people who run their own companies, who were enthusiastic about talking to us about what we were doing and how we did it. We collected business cards out the wazoo. (“Wazoo” is the technical term.) Charlotte even arranged for us to take a tour of the YouTube offices in Los Angeles on the way back home.
I am so, so lucky to be a part of this ridiculously weird and wonderful community.
But not every encounter was full of enthusiasm and learning experiences. There was one particular out-of-the-blue moment that was not wonderful—just plain weird.
After all, it’s not every day your second-grade husband comes up to you while you’re filming and demands that you call him “Mr. Collins.”
That’s right, Ricky Collins, the spastic kid who played the Wizard of Floss in our elementary school play about hygiene and managed to fall off the stage, has decided to become a web video content creator. Oh, and he tricked someone into giving him money for it. Although, from what I could gather, he doesn’t know much about web video—but it’s okay, he likely has “people” for that. People who call him Mr. Collins.
Also, he seems to have developed a fondness for multisyllabic words. I guess that’s what comes from losing the school spelling bee at an impressionable age to the ever-impressive Charlotte Lu. And he was rather overdressed for the conference. Web video is more of a blazer-over-jeans-and-graphic-T-shirt crowd, not a Men’s-Wearhouse-oversized-suit type place. (Although there’s a man who would appreciate a peacock-blue pantsuit on a woman. Too bad he’s engaged.)
I was so taken aback by him, I sort of brushed him off. Charlotte says I should have been nicer. More open and politically conscientious. After all, he’s a man with investors and a company in our field. But it’s kind of hard when the annoying kid who grew up down the street from you is tumbling into your videos and demanding that you address him like he’s lord of the manor.
But enough about Ricky Collins. I doubt our paths are destined to cross much in the future. That’s what Facebook was invented for—to keep people you don’t care to remember at a polite distance.
For now, we are headed home . . . except we don’t have a home to go to.
Not kidding.
When Jane got back from her perfect night with Bing and Mom “decided” that the kitchen cabinets were out of date, she was apparently inspired to have the entire kitchen redone. She justifies it by saying it will raise the value of the house—which makes me nervous that my parents really are thinking about selling the house—but I know her reasoning is deeper. More twisted and devious.
She is using this remodel to kick us all out . . . and cleverly deduced that upon hearing our predicament, Bing would offer Jane a place to stay.
So for the next two weeks, Bing and Jane will be cohabitating, ostensibly to save her the double commute from cousin Mary’s house an hour south. But we all know the real motive. And I’m happy to do my little part to thwart it.
What Mom didn’t count on is that when Jane asked, Bing was happy to extend me an invitation to stay at Netherfield as well.
So, instead of being squished up in Mary and Aunt Martha’s two-bedroom bungalow with my parents, Lydia, and her cat, I will be enjoying my own en-suite bathroom while playing chaperone to the lovebirds.
I can’t wait to see Mom’s face when we tell her.
But now, instead of going home and relaxing after these crazy, exhausting, oh-my-God-I-haven’t-walked-that-much-in-years past few days, we get to go home and spend the next week moving everything out of the kitchen and packing up the house.
Thank goodness we already filmed next week’s videos here at VidCon.
. . . Oh, no. How am I going to film my videos when I’m a guest at Netherfield?
MONDAY, JULY 9TH
