Happy Anniversary
Well, shit, I totally missed that. Six days ago, April 24th was my anniversary. Grab a seat. Here’s the scoop …
I coded my first website when I was living in Los Angeles from 1995 – 1996. My manager / a fellow student, Scott Barrow, would later work for Napster. (Remember them?!)
A year later, in 1997, when I was living in Canterbury, I built a site called “Everyday Life”. Picked the name because people kept asking me what it was like to be black in England, and I was like: Um, living in a place is different than visiting a place — there’s no easy, crisp way to describe something when it’s your everyday life. I kept writing on that site after Canterbury, when I moved to London.
Couple years later, in ’99 — now living in Chicago — I started yet another website. Mostly, I talked about my summer job in Chicago & about whether or not I was going to return to grad school in Florida or move back to the UK / Europe.
I picked grad school. I eventually shut that site down when fellow grad students in my program started reading it. My thoughts at the time: It’s private. (We all thought about the internet differently then.)
Eventually, I did leave the country again. New city: Amsterdam. New … wait for it … website. I started a “weblog” to write about life in Holland and to keep in touch with friends.
Fast forward to 2005. I’d just moved to yet another new city, Nieuw Amsterdam / New York, and I started yet another website. From my tiny studio, I remember thinking: since I’m always going to be online, this time, I’m gonna pick a name for a website that I’ll just keep using for good instead of starting and stopping. I’ve always been that weird, quirky one that never quite fit in — and that’s okay. Depending on the country I’ve lived in, people have used different words to describe my ethnicity (hint: not “Black/African American” in either Holland and/or the UK). Nevertheless, my skin has always been and will always be descriptively the color brown. And, I’m femmy / chicky. Yep, FUNKY BROWN CHICK. I picked it, and started writing about my life and sexplorations in New York.
Magazines, TV networks, newspapers, etc. noticed. They asked me to write about sex for them. I did. (I still do.) I incorporated a part-time business / sole proprietorship for my side writing hustle, and I kept working full time in Newsweek’s marketing / public affairs teams.
Fast forward 12.5 years. Several jobs later and … you guessed it … yet another city. After hemming and hawing — and saving $$$ and planning — I quit my latest full time marketing job. To bring everything under one house, I added a second line of business to FUNKY BROWN CHICK, and I brought on a team. That happened on April 24, 2018.
FUNKY BROWN CHICK is a pop culture, entertainment, and data analytics firm. A woman and minority-owned, dues-paying member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, we’re doing business differently. Social impact, not profit, is our bottom line. Learn more about the firm: funkybrownchick.com/about.
I’ve been writing about my life online since the days of Angelfire, Ask Jeeves, Dreamweaver, etc. I’m on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and/or TikTok daily. Those are the brief takes, quick hits. When I have more extended thoughts and ideas that I want to share about my life online (like this one), I’ll do that here.
So, I’m a few days late, but all of these words were meant to basically say: happy anniversary. 🎉
When I can actually leave my house again ( … previously, I used to work out of our two coworking spaces … ), I’ll throw a party. You’ll all be invited because, of course, I’ll share it online, too.
This post originally appeared at twannahines.com.