(WOW, I know, SHOCK! I’m actually writing about blogging for once. Usually I try to keep myself as far away from the “blogosphere” as humanly possible. This is not to say I don’t read blogs–I certainly read them. I just got tired of the metacirclejerking around 2002 or so. I don’t even have a category called “blogging” and so I will slap this under “ranting” I suppose.)
Today I read a blogpost that made my blood boil. I know, I know, I’m the excitable type to begin with. I was going to link it and tear it apart, shred by delicious shred. And then you could read it, too.
But the conclusion I came to was that it was really a boring post by a boring blogger. You don’t need to see that, and she doesn’t deserve your eyeballs or the ad revenue.
In a nutshell, the post was ANOTHER one of those tedious diatribes on how to blog. This always results in two things, especially among the more popular blogs. The first thing it results in is the deluge of fawning commenters. “JOO are so right! No one has ever been righter! I am going to print this list out and have it tattooed on my arm! Blogging Commandments! No one has ever thought of that before!” The word “netiquette” is tossed about, which makes me want to further stab my eyes out. Or, like, grow new ones for the restab. I dunno.
The second thing is the Wave of Self-Righteousness, wherein the holy and correct bloggers take turns patting themselves on the back for their fastidious and careful blogging, via comments and backlinking. A commenter even went so far as to say, and I paraphrase because I will turn this internet around if I have to look at that post again, “my lawyer husband told me I would be screwed in a custody battle with the post I wrote yesterday.” WTFBBQ? Did you really spawn with that? Good thing he’s letting you know exactly how far you can go. I wish I had a husband who would do that for me. He could also inform me of the proper length of my hemline and other appropriate, ladylike ways to comport myself online and off.
Longtime readers know that I blogged about my life while I was married, and my online writings were used in an unsuccessful bid for stripping me of my rights to see my older child. I was called a “pornographer” and was accused of exposing my children to sexual predators through my blog. I was even called INAPPROPRIATE. Oh noes! The “I” word. I take responsibility for choosing to blog, even though I knew he was a sketchy guy who I witnessed doing morally grey things many, many times.
You know what my real mistake was? It wasn’t that I dared to put my life out there at all. It’s that in my situation, I wasn’t open ENOUGH. I covered up the fact that my fucking lazy ass husband wasn’t going to work and all the weird bullshit that went down in our marriage. I did not post about how he neglected her, who was helpless (and, less importantly me, who is not helpless) and he took this as an opportunity to show the court what a great dad he was, because I only posted the positive things. I was ashamed of the conditions we were living in and writing, reaching out to other people who were laughing to prevent themselves from crying so I wouldn’t lose my fucking mind. This meant that for the most part, I wrote about my past. Where I did horrifying things like have sex with consenting adults and steal candy from the neighbor kid. I’m a revolutionary, I tells ya.
So if blogs are to be taken as gospel in court by idiots who can’t read between the lines, or by assholes who will turn your words against you, then I am not going to censor myself for the sake of propriety or insulate myself against future bullshit.
I am not perfect. I am not nice, which is different than being polite. But for fuck’s sake, my life is interesting to me, and I want to be interesting online and off. If I wanted some fake-ass representation of myself up, I would just post a picture with a bag over my head with a smile drawn on it. And, you, when you censor yourself so much, you are BORING. Well, to me anyway. Based on some of the more popular bloggers, someone out there is eating up BORING with a spoon on toast.
ADDITIONALLY, there was some tongue-wagging in the comments of the heinous post I am alluding to about “certain mommybloggers” who are not Actin’ Proper in their blogs. Boy are they cruisin’ for a bruisin’. And you don’t enjoy watching trainwrecks (LIAR), but they will get what they deserve for feeding their kid Lucky Charms three meals in a row, or not vacuuming or some crap and brazenly declaring this publicly. Oh yes indeed. HOW DARE YOU ACT HUMAN. Motherhood is a tough gig, man, with long hours and few benefits. Some days I cannot remember why I am doing this, like, all day. (And this is not the part where I write, “And then Madison gave me a gummy smile and it was all worth it.” That sentence ended where I stopped it. We do not roll like that around here.)
You know, all those trainwrecky people who you may or may not be watching, their lives may hit that wall. They will probably live through it. They will probably learn something. They do not need blogging rules. They need to figure it out for themselves. And don’t think I didn’t see what you did there, with your comment that people should Digg your post. So glad you are writing altruistically for the benefit of the confused blogging hordes.
And this is why I do not make rules for blogging.
