I Have a Blog?

Yes, yes, I know, my postings have been rather sparse. I think it's because I've been posting status updates on my Facebook account. I gave Twitter a shot, but I find the 144 character limit daunting. It got to a point where I thought if I couldn't whittle something down to 144 characters, then it was too dense. I think this is also what people feel about the healthcare reform bill. We will eventually get to a point in society where we will only use the pain tolerance chart to communicate our feelings about something. Because anything else would be excessive, no?

Anyway.

I am inspired to write when I am challenged. And for the past two months I have been home with Baby Boy, so the challenges? Not really there. Many of you are thinking, "Herm. Isn't a newborn challenging? Especially when you have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old?" I guess it is, but dudes, I have GOT this. Older Boy is in kindergarten, the Girl is in daycare, so it's just me and the babe. His demands are easily met, and then he goes back to sleep. Easy-peasy. I've built shelves, tested out recipes, rearranged furniture, and corresponded old skool style.

There will be a deluge of annoyance when I return to work. Mostly because I don't control the environment Stromboli-style, as I do at home. Ugh, I can already feel my hackles rising. The meetings, the e-mails, the meetings... 'Til, then, though, I'll be the overlord of my own little 10,000 square foot patch of earth.

Look at Me, I'm a Relationship Expert

By far, the most popular post on this blog is this: Questions a Man Should Never Ask a Woman. People from far and wide, like Kuala Lempur and Ontario, have Googled permutations of this thought... "Questions to ask a woman," "questions guys should ask women," "questions to never ask a woman."

If you Google a phrase like that, my itty bitty post will be somewhere in the top 10 results. How'd I get to be so popular? Algorithms, baby. Google works like this: the more often a link is picked from among search results, the higher up it will go in the presentation of the search results. So, in essence, if someone clicks on a link, Google ranks it higher whether or not the info it contains actually satisfied the searcher's needs. Kind of like some of the talking heads on TV -- they've been on TV as an expert, ergo, they are experts whether or not they make sense.

I'm looking at you, E!, and all of your hair, makeup, and fashion "experts."

What? You thought I meant political pundits?

Here's the dirty little secret: I met my husband when we were 18, we started dating when we were 20, and we got married at 24. I dated eight guys (two seriously) before Super Ninja and I became an item. Oh, and that phrase "dated" is being used REALLY liberally. Like, "We held hands in the cafeteria in middle school and went to the Fall dance together" kind of liberally.

So, Google, what on God's green Earth do I know about relationships? Maybe I can recognize a jerk straightaway, courtesy of some of the characteristics of the Great Eight (who shall henceforth be known as the G8).

Oh well. Maybe I'll write a couple of other Top 10 Questions lists to see how many more innocent Googlers I can lure here to read my sham relationship posts.

Blogging and the Economy

So, I'm thinking that the economy is having an impact on the economy. Why? Because there are a handful of blogs that I pop to on a weekly basis, and they haven't been updated in ages. I can only assume that the writers have better things to do, like working second jobs to keep their kids in shoes or something.

I know I'm not a daily poster or anything like that, but we're talking weeks and months between postings. Maybe the blogs have just run their natural course. I wonder what the life span is on a blog? Or maybe I'm the Ted McGinley of blog readers? Seriously, some of these blogs were downright prolific until I became a regular reader. Then, a month or two later, nary an update.

Watch out, blogosphere! The Blog Reaper is looking for some new sites to add to her roster!

I Am a Relationship Expert (well, Google thinks I am)

An inordinate number of readers come to this site via Google searches using a combination of the words/phrases "man," "woman," "questions," and "don't ask." Based on my stat counter, many of them leave after zero seconds, so they figure out pretty quickly that I have no idea what I'm talking about and they must go to other fun links, like, "Asian man/black woman dating question? - Yahoo! Answers."

Sidenote: WHY would you go to Yahoo! Answers for some advice on that topic?

I'm suffering from blockage (AGAIN), so you get to hear all about my blog stats. Because you will love that information, and absorb it, and dissect it over your own dinner table later today, won't you? WON'T YOU?!?

Meh. It's a beautiful day. Methinks I will go stomping around the 'hood and see if any misadventures lay themselves at my feet.

Blurgh

I like women. Hold on, hold on, before you suck in your breath in shock that I'm revealing that I'm a lesbian, let me clearly state that I don't like like women. That'd make Super Ninja a beard...or whatever the equivalent cover-up terminology would be. A wig? Falsies? Yep. I'm going with falsie.

Anyway, I'm prefacing this post with a disclaimer about how I generally enjoy women's company because, well, I'm going to write about a trend that I'm noticing. And I don't want you to get all in a twitter that I've fallen into the "women are jerks and just bash each other all the time unlike men, who are awesome, and are only ever friendly and honest and supportive of each other."

Here's the thing: there are a couple of womens' blogs that I've been following that started out all snarky and edgy and unique, and now they've devolved into...well, the bloggie equivalent of Molly Shannon's Jeannie Darcy character from Saturday Night Live. Here are topics that I am banishing from this blog:

1) PMS.
2) An insatiable love for shoes.
3) Why men suck.
4) The myriad ways in which men and women are different.
5) Complaints about how being a woman sucks.
6) Diatribes against the American social norms for women, iff the social norms listed revolve around make-up, depillation, hairstyles, and shoes. (This is somewhat of a subsidiary of #5, but it comes up often enough that I thought I'd give it its own entry.)

[ADDED 11/29/2007]

7) An insatiable love for chocolate.
8) An awesome sale.
9) Having a frustrating dating life (note: STORIES about having a frustrating dating life are interesting. Repeatedly stating, "Jeez, I have a frustrating dating life" is not interesting.)

I know that there are more that I'm forgetting, but these are the ones that really grate on me, so I will endeavor not to put you through the same "I've heard this a thousand times" blah-ness.

What's In a Name? (Or, Jenny McCarthy Wants to Be Me)

I'm not a moron: I don't think that Jenny McCarthy actually wants to be me. My life is not so much about the fame and the rock hard abs and the $20-million-a-picture boyfriend. But we have (I shudder a weensy bit when I write this) similar writing interests. She wrote this and this, and I wrote this and this. My blog title is "Louder than Words," and so is McCarthy's latest book.

Okay, hundreds, nay, thousands of women write about these topics. Jenny and I are two of many, many similarly-aged women going through marriage, childbearing, child rearing, career issues, etc. Makes sense that we'd both write about these experiences.

BUT, I have been thinking about changing the title of this blog recently, and Jenny McCarthy's new book adds fuel to the fire. I mean, what if people start to confuse the two of us? Snarf.

Jenny's book title comes from her experiences with raising a child with autism, and my blog title comes from...well, I'll be honest: I ripped it off. "Louder than Words" is from a line in Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle." Since it's one of a few dozen songs that I love to belt out in the car, I know all the lyrics. And when I started this blog and thought, "a quote from a poem or a song about words would be a cool title," and well, this song came to mind. There's no subtext. I am not a man of great experience, nor am I hard to handle. It just seemed like a good fit for a word-based medium.

So, yeah, the more I think about it, "louder than words" doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for a blog. The actual lyric is "Actions speak louder than words." Which, now that I think about it, is the same sentiment expressed by Extreme in their hit single, "More than Words."

Crap. I know all the words to that song too, which KILLS me because it is rife with bad grammar. Not only that, but I'm convinced the human brain has a limited capacity, like a bucket, and retaining these lyrics is keeping me from learning something truly important, like how to manage a stock portfolio.

What is wrong with me?

Back to the original point of this post. Which was...wait, don't tell me...oh, right: my blog title doesn't make sense.

Written words don't make any noise, unless you read them aloud. Barring that caveat, EVERYTHING is louder than words. Clearly, I've got to brainstorm new titles that (a) make sense, (b) reveal transcendent coolness (or at least semi-hip geekiness), and (c) aren't twee.

That last one isn't really important. I just like the word twee and I don't get to use it often enough.

If I stick with a shout-out to a song, though, here are songs that actually have a random significance from my childhood:

- "Brass in Pocket," Pretenders
- "One Way Or Another," Blondie
- "Back in Black," AC/DC
- "Heartbreaker," Pat Benatar
- "Another One Bites the Dust," Queen
- "Elvira," the Oak Ridge Boys
- "Never Surrender," Cory Hart

I'm going to stop there. My parents and older sibs exposed me to much, much music, and this represents just the teeniest sliver of my childhood soundtrack. You'll note that there's no Raffi or Disney. Just be glad I didn't toss in Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass...

Bustin' Through Writer's Block

Any tips on how to punch through a sincere case of writer's block? I'm more stuffed up than my nephew after rolling around in some dog dander. And the blockage is on all fronts, baby. Chick-litty work-in-progress, blog, e-mail -- my keyboard might as well be a thirty-foot high Cold War masterwork of concrete and rebar. Can't get around it to do the work.

What's up with that? The WIP, well, that one's easy to explain. I'm at the tail end of it -- reworked the final scene and everything -- and all I really need to do is take an hour to read it, then hit the revision process. That's when I can take it like it's a wrinkled sheet and snap it flat to fold it up into a neat little package. Where to find that time to read and edit and rewrite and re-read and edit and rewrite, though? My goal is to have query letters out by my birthday. If I have a deadline, I can usually find inspiration to climb over or tunnel under my own personal Dark Tower of Fruitlessness. Usually.

E-mail's another story. With that one, I put a little too much pressure on myself to scribe something witty, or intellectual, or both. Usually both. Inevitably, I send something out that was written in a state of delirium with many, many errors. Not spelling errors, because I take advantage of spell check, as all writers using modern media should. My errors tend to be of the I-used-the-wrong-word or I-straight-up-forgot-to-include-a-preposition kind of errors. Just the type of goof that makes people smile and think, "Wow, she must have been really delirious when she wrote this." I hope. Oh, Lord, I hope people think that and don't think that I have some kind of learning disability that prevents me from noticing when I skip prepositions.

Writer's block on a blog, though...yikes. LtW is an online journal for me, 'kay? And when I find that I don't have anything to write about, well, I start to think that maybe I'm not engaged enough with the world around me. Shouldn't I be fired up about the news? Well, I am, but other people provide better analysis than I. So go read them, I think. Regardless, my niche is commentary on pop-culture for the under-forty set, but the stuff that's been going on there is pretty boring too. I know, I know, rehab and jail are pretty juicy topics. Yeah, for a Lifetime movie.

And the stuff that's going on for me personally, well...life is sweet. Not a lot of conflict happening at the homestead, and conflict is the root of comedy and drama, yes? I s'pose I could talk about how the Boy is an exhibitionist and streaks around the house after a bath, but that's about as far as the story goes.

Blah. I'll figure it out. We've got a few events this weekend that usually provide some fodder for Ye Olde Blog. A dance recital and Father's Day -- let's see what happens, shall we?

You're Uninvited, An Unfortunate Slight

Aw, man, twice in the past month the authors of blogs that I have regularly visited have shut me out. Not me, personally, but they limited access to the blog to "friends" only. Fair enough. If I were writing about some of the stuff they were writing about, or had some of the same issues, I might not want to put it on public display. Maybe I should crack through my layer of shyness and extend my virtual hand in friendship. I could let 'em know that I think they are talented writers and have enjoyed reading their hilarious, introspective words, and humbly request that they continue to let me do so. They'd probably think I'm some wacky Peeping Tom and hurl a few choice words at me.

Honestly, I'd guessing that a rash of these "privitizations" will occur. Blogging first blew up, what, two years ago? For many, blogging was an easier way to update friends and fam on their day-to-day affairs. Ya know, without all the labor of adding people into an e-mail address list. For others, blogging was viewed as a way to offer the world a peep at your inner sanctum. But that's all that it would be: a peep. For some others, ahem, it provides a medium wherein thoughts and ramblings could be published for the world at large to read. (In the case of LtW, "at large" means about twelve very discerning strangers.)

For those that fit into categories one and two, strange URLs and random comments invade the blog. And the author might realize exactly how much of his soul's been tossed onto the interweb. Me, I don't put anything up there that will haunt me later, so you may rest assured, Gentle Reader, that LtW will stay active. But some people do dissect rather personal parts of their lives that might, I don't know, cause friends, spouses, and employers some concern. Hence the lockdown.

Ah well, there's like a bajillion blogs out there, so I'll just find some new ones to enjoy.