- Most blogs have about a one year shelf life.
- There is such a thing as over-posting, but I’m unclear as to what that is.
- Blogging takes a ton of work. Really, it does.
- The trolls will come and they do not read most of what you say before they chew you out in the comments.
- It’s really up to you whether or not you allow the trolls to have their say on your blog.
- No one will read you for a couple months. It’s okay. Soldier on.
- If you want people to read you, read other blogs.
- You may be 1000% certain that you are The New Dooce, but you’re not. Now, you might be as talented as fucking Hemmingway, but you’re not going to get the same press that she did. No press = no instant popularity.
- There’s more politics than you can imagine in blogging.
- If you want more comments then comment until your fingers bleed.
- Get a reader and subscribe to the blogs you like. Comment the shit out of those blogs. People will (eventually) come.
- I’m more likely to comment on your blogs if you’re a loyal commentor on my blog.
- There will be bloggers who will NEVER visit your blog no matter how many amazing and witty comments you leave. Period. Move on if it hurts your feelings.
- Begging for comments is distasteful.
- Support each other as best as you can, in good times and in bad. Every comment helps.
- Every couple of weeks, some new trend will piss off a number of (especially) mom bloggers and they will become annoyingly polarized.
- Resist the urge to chime in about Your Take On This Trend. Seriously.
- Every time the Today show features Dooce, there’s a bazillion start up blogs that believe (hehe) that you can $40,000 a month blogging. Maybe if you’re Dooce that’s true, but for the rest of us? Bwahahahahaha! I don’t mean to sound mean, and if you do manage this, pat yourself on your back for me but don’t get your hopes up.
- Whenever one of those stupid blog contests gets started, everyone freaks out. It will blow over.
- If you’re totally blocked for ideas about a post, describing the boring minutiae of your day is probably not titillating to others. Write it if you must, then delete it. Hopefully that will get your juices flowing and you can write about something more interesting. A turd of a post will always look like a turd no matter how you dress it up.
- Talking shit about anyone–especially behind their backs on your blog that they presumably don’t read–is a bad fucking idea. Password protect those, or better yet, don’t write them at all. Although they may be satisfying, remember, those are the posts that the very same people you talk about may find. It’s a smaller Internet than you think it is and you’re not as anonymous as you think you are.
- If you don’t want people to respond in a negative manner, then don’t let it all hang out there. Not everyone will agree with you and there are people who will happily tell all of the ways you are wrong. You don’t have to like it, but if you put it out there, you do have to deal with it.
- There is something about being able to hide behind “anonymous” that makes people say really dick-ish things that they probably wouldn’t say to your face. It can hurt, I know this, and people will get you all wrong and it will suck, but if you don’t want to deal with it, go private or password protected.
- Your feelings will get hurt. I promise you this.
- Although most of your followers will wish you well, there will always, ALWAYS be a contingent that hopes that you will fail. And fail badly.
- Sarcasm doesn’t always translate well through the written word, so be careful when you use it.
- Music on blogs is universally hated. If you want to put it on there, it’s wise to leave the playlist on mute and allow other people to turn it on should they want.
- Don’t clog up your sidebar with crap. Especially blinky crap. Because it makes the page take like 40 hours to load and then people will click away because who really wants to sit there, waiting for the page to load?
- Don’t put shit on the Internet you wouldn’t wear on a tee-shirt.
- Beware of the donate button. It causes many people to be very, very mad.
- Begging for money pisses people off.
- Constant self-promotion can be a real turn-off.
- Meme’s, although a nice tool to get the writing juices flowing, are usually boring to read. If you like doing ‘em, then fuck it and do ‘em anyway.
- Edit your posts. Edit them religious.
- Paragraph breaks are a necessity. I cannot read anything not broken up by paragraphs.
- The background of your post needs to be something that is appealing to the eyes. Some colors (especially pink, which is a favorite color of mine) although lovely, leave the reader squinty and headachey. Check out what your finished post looks like YOURSELF and see if you can read it without adjusting your monitor.
- A black background is very, very hard to read.
- If all your tweets on Twitter are links to stuff that people can buy from you or ways to get a zillion followers overnight, you’ve probably pissed off a good portion of your readers.
- There is such a thing as over-sharing.
- Remember that your kids may one day read whatever you’ve written, so choose what you share (especially about them) well.
- Writer’s Block does end.
- Don’t lie. And for God’s sake, don’t fake a dead baby. I don’t even have words to describe people who do that sort of thing.
- Don’t idolize the success of another blogger. Also, don’t hate them for it. In blogging, you often get what you put into it. And the higher you climb, the more pressure there is.
- Be kind to other people. You gain nothing by being cruel.
- Blog for yourself, not for other people.
- Stuff on the Internet–even the stuff you erase–is never, ever, EVER gone. EVER. So make DAMN sure you want to live with whatever you say.
- Remember, it’s all supposed to be fun. Enjoy what you write, take pride in it, and if someone else comes along and tells you that you suck, tell them that Aunt Becky told them to shove it up their pooper.
————-
What am I missing here?
You: Five-foot ball of (presumably) woman with wisps of white hair on the top of your head, yet normal looking bright yellow hair to your shoulders on the sides, almost like that guy from Rocky Horror Picture show. You were as tall as you were wide wearing an indiscriminately grey sweat suit with running shoes that looked like marshmallows.
While I initially thought that there was something wrong with you (perhaps you were out on loan from one of the many area hospitals on a Day Out program or something), once you opened your mouth to berate your frail 100 year old (give or take, how could I be sure?) mother for being “a big stupid idiot,” I realized that no, you were just a huge bitch.
I mean, sure, older people can be kind of annoying (especially when they talk about their various medical maladies during dinner, or recount their last colonoscopy as you eat chocolate ice cream), but come on, the woman was clearly looking at a box of tissues. This may mean she has the sniffles, but not that she’s an idiot.
The way you dragged her up and down the aisles, making sure that you’re gigantic self blocked the entire aisle as you loudly waxed on and on about your collection of cats and their various maladies while telling her how much she sucked was pretty deplorable. I was going to say something to you, but I was afraid you would sit on me and that would be the end of Aunt Becky.
AND WHAT WOULD THE INTERNET DO IF ANOTHER MEDIOCRE BLOGGER STOPPED BLOGGING?
Anyway.
You wouldn’t know about my blog.
You were too busy making damn sure that my husband, The Daver and I would not be able to get in front of you so that we would not (I presume) beat you to the pork skins that you filled your cart with. Had you known that I do not eat pork and this would, no doubt, be a moot point, I am certain that you would still have blocked me with your blueberry shaped body.
I only came into contact with your face, which bore a striking resemblance to a melting candle, I must say, after The Daver and I thought we’d shaken you. But no, we approached the frozen food section of the store–where I was trying to buy eggs–just as you and your poor decrepit mother did. And although there was more than enough room for the lot of us, you blocked us with your cart. I noticed you’d bought only Friskies and fried pork skins.
When Dave tried to steer his cart around you (we were not gorging ourselves on all the free samples of ice cream they were shilling) so that we could get our eggs and move onto another section of the store (perhaps pesticides? That information is neither here nor there), you did a most odd thing.
Not only did you deliberately try to run into him with your cart, you then did the “talk to the hand” gesture in his face. Which, for a ball-shaped fat white lady, looked even more absurd than you can imagine it did. He narrowly escaped with only a minor scratch on his leg, but, you done fucked with my husband.
Bad idea, lady.
I waited until the right moment, as you were making a frantic beeline to the frozen pizzas and just as you thought you’d done showed me, I came up from behind and totally blocked your ass. You had to use all your muscles to stop your cart from t-boning mine.
The look on your melty face was priceless. And I just wanted to say a hearty, ‘Thank You.”
You made my year.
—————
Who’d YOU miss a connection with, Internet?
From the ages of, oh, I don’t know, 3 to 24, my brother hated me. Unresolved issues, a sprinkling of jealousy and a (now ex) wife who fanned the flames of contention with her equally fcuked-up relationship with her own little brother made for a gigantic cluster-fuck of a relationship. For years I was baffled, then sullenly resentful, then I got over it.
You can’t make people (even family) like you. Period. End of story. Fin as those wily French say. Or is it the Eye-Tal-Ians? I can’t be sure.
(Years later, thanks to my sister-in-law, we get along just fine, thankyouverymuch, to the shock, I think, of us both)
But back then, when I was a teenager and he was my current age (28), he and his shrew of a (then) wife who shared my name (first, then last) bought a house in St. Charles, not too far–maybe 5 blocks–from where I live now. The only difference is, my house is in a 70′s construction subdivision, and his house was one of the original in the town. And, because he has a penchant for the dramatic and macabre, the old house he bought wasn’t any old house.
No, not a bit. Not MY brother.
It was built in 1837 in the heart of what was then downtown St. Charles, by a builder whose wife was a member of the spiritualist movement. Her name was Caroline and she believed that she could send and receive messages from the dead. As a famous medium of her time, she held many seances in her home, including one for Mary Todd Lincoln, who came to St. Charles in hopes of communicating with her deceased husband Abe.
But no, the macabre doesn’t stop there.
Once Caroline passed away, one of her daughters picked up right where her mother had left off, conducting seances in the same house. Her daughter later married a man who was an undertaker. The house was then used as a funeral home with one of the basement rooms used as an embalming and viewing room. The name of the undertaker is still etched into the glass on the front door, my brother happily pointed out when we came to tour the house.
(To think I was happy that my own home had central air.)
Anyway.
My brother and his then wife bought this home in the later 1990′s when I was a teenager. Shortly after this, my brother began to travel for business, leaving the country for weeks at a time. Also around this time, my former sister-in-law asked for a divorce. Even less reason for Aaron to be home.
So, when he was gone, I was occasionally asked to house sit, which confounded me: here I was, 18 with a boyfriend, and I was asked to stay in a house ALONE without parents, by my brother who hated me? Surely, there was a catch.
Turns out there was.
For someone like me, who firmly didn’t believe in ghosts, I wasn’t scared by the rumors that the house was haunted. Sure, the chalk painting on the wall in the basement (later, I learned, was the embalming room) of a wide-eyed girl with the phrase “JUST A PURE GIRL” underneath it was a little creepy. But St. Charles is an old town and between the houses I’d been to that had passages for the escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad and all the other old weirdness, I chalked it up to nerves.
He’d bought a creepy house.
End of the ever-loving story.
But no.
One night, after I’d promised my mother that I would pop over there to water the plants and hang out so that it looked occupied and lived in, I dragged my then-boyfriend over with me. Figured we’d listen to some music, hang out without any interruptions and maybe get a chance to have The Sex.
But no.
We pulled up, parked and walked in after I unlocked the door. It was like walking into a wall of unease. All merriment, all joy, all laughter was suddenly just gone. Sucked out of the both of us, like we’d entered The Vortex of The Fun-Free Zone. I eyed him and he eyed me back. The disenchantment was mutual, but we were going to power through it. Maybe it was just nerves or something.
But no.
We walked around the house and if we’d been actors on a stage, the directions would have read “The couple walks about, trying their best to act normal.” Very awkward and highly unexpected for the both of us. I went to the CD rack to pick out a CD as I knew my brother’s collection was far better than my own, hoping, I guess that a little familiar music would still the feeling of disquiet.
But no.
We sat down on the rug in front of the stereo and began to listen to some Mazzy Star. Okay, I thought, maybe it was just a case of The Nerves. Then the phone rang. Startled beyond anything, I jumped up, my heart thudding unhappily in my chest as I realized I was sweating profusely. Better answer that, I thought as I went for the handset in the kitchen. Give the illusion that someone is home, yeah, that’s the ticket.
(my brother hates to talk on the phone, so in hindsight, this was NOT what he’d have done)
Having been somewhat of a phone aficionado for most of my life, I was shocked that I couldn’t answer it. I tried to answer it, I pushed the right buttons on his new-agey looking phone, but no one was there. On and on it rang, Tim and I looking frantically at each other like answering this fucking phone won us the right to live or die. I couldn’t manage to answer it. No way, no how.
Then, just as the phone stopped ringing, the sirens downtown began to go off. The house wasn’t super close to the police or fire department, but the sirens were loud and close. All of a sudden, I got a vision of a car wreck somewhere close where people I loved had died. Popped into my head out of the clear blue sky. My whole body was covered head to toe in goosebumps and I began to shiver uncontrollably in the warm summer air.
It was then that I knew we had to get the fuck out of there before something Really Bad happened.
There was a murderer there and I could smell his sickeningly sweet cologne right behind me with a knife and a gun and a rope and i was going to die like this, in this creepy house, there was a fire about to start oh my god a fire a fucking fire and we would be trapped, burnt to a crisp, the gas main oh my god the gas main was going to suddenly pop a leak killing us quietly while we slowly drifted off into a never-ending sleep DANGER!DANGER!DANGER! red danger, red danger!! the porch was going to collapse on us wow it must be unstable holy shit got to go got to go, killing us in a load of dusty horsehair plaster where we can’t get out and crushed, oh my god crushed the swarm of bees in my head, oh my head, oh my god, my head.
I took one look at Tim who looked back at me, both of us ashen under our summer tan, and we ran. We fucking bolted from that house as quick as we fucking could, panting and breathless. I called my mom to beg her to come and lock up after me because I couldn’t do it. My hands were too shaky to work the key into the lock.
Aaron sold the house several years later, had a couple of good laughs at my experience with the ghost, whom he claimed “hated women.” My mother, conversely, loved the ghost in that house who, apparently, loved her back. So the ghost, just like anyone else, had preferences.
It sounds so flimsy when I retell it here, because I can’t inject terror into your body like it was injected into mine. The analytical side of me says that what happened was just a stress response to being in the house of someone who didn’t like me particularly. It says it that I was feeding off the emotions of my surroundings and letting it overtake me. It says that there’s no such thing as ghosts.
The irrational, emotional side of me, though, doesn’t agree. The emotional side of me calls bullshit.
————–
Do you believe in ghosts? Have you had anything like that happen to you?
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