About Me

The story of how I got here is one that dates back to March 2004 when I graduated from UCLA with a B.A. in English and a boyfriend that I was madly in love with. A few months after graduation Josh proposed and we started planning our wedding and life, which involved moving from San Diego to Louisville so he could pursue his PhD in Child Psychology. When I started to realize that his dreams weren’t mine and that the future was becoming the present, I totally freaked out and called off the wedding.

Since I was still fresh out of college and had previously only worked part-time in preparation for my impending marriage and move, I knew that finding a “real” job was going to be difficult. Instead of confronting the challenge head-on, I went back to work for Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Del Mar, California as a Shift Supervisor (for those of you that haven’t been exposed to Coffee Bean, it is far superior to Starbucks and my preferred retailer of all things coffee and tea). CBTL proved to be the foundation for my current place in life, although at the time I thought I was just making good friends and learning management skills.

The very nature of the employee culture at CBTL centered around sharing experiences, connecting with friends, and staying hip to all things trendy. Thus, I was introduced to MySpace. It became a need in my life; a social outlet and creative muse that inspired me to make new friends and start blogging. This is when I feel in love with blogging. As a writer who has never had anything published or recognized other than the purely analytical papers I wrote in college, I fully embraced the joys of quick and immediate self-expression and recognition. I found something that I wanted to do incessantly. It was so rewarding to know that my words were well-received and even enjoyed. Blogging became a decadent pleasure and I wrote to make people laugh, to talk about the taboo, and to share my most intimate thoughts with an undefined and unknown public audience.

Skipping about 20 chapters in my life, I now find myself working as Community Consultant in this crazy web space so many of us call home. I’ve got some great experience under my belt, which includes being mentored by a brilliant woman business owner and a few community evangelists.

Here, at ContentDynasty.com, I hope to find an audience that can relate to me as a person and professional in the online space. I can only promise that this will be an honest and sometimes humorous adventure; hopefully inspiring a collective wisdom from the community at large. I do, on occasion, password protect a few blogs that are sensitive in nature, but I’d be happy to provide you with the password if you send me an email (and identify yourself) to jvangrove at gmail dot com.