“Plus, if there’s one thing I’ve noticed over the years, it’s that golden retrievers tend to like it rough anyway.”
–November 4, 2001

*Due to scanner shenanigans, there will be no pictures today. I am hoping that pictures, with commentary (oh sweet Baby Xenu, my hair), will start tomorrow. Sorry!

What’s A Tater, Master?

So, let’s talk about the year I invented my blog, shall we? This story would not be complete without mentioning how I got into blogging in the first place. My friend, the oft-mentioned Daniel, was the first one to show me his (ooh, dirty). It was blue and the font was really cool, and there were no dancing hamsters or animated fireworks gifs anywhere, which was my impression of homemade webpages up to that point.

“A web log?” I said, just like the aliens in those bad TV shows who somehow can speak English but have never heard of the strange Earthly delights the two spunky children will eagerly tell them about, which will be whatever the sponsors tell them to use.

Daniel slowed down and used smaller words. “Yeah, see, and other people link to you, and you link to other people.” Daniel wiggled his mouse over his list of links.

“Why?”

“Because it’s like a community. I tell other people about blogs I like, and people send me links. And people read what you write.”

“What do you write?” I said.

“Whatever I want. I publish myself. It’s sort of like an internet magazine, too. And it’s all free.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, but what I was really thinking was, “why would anyone want to do that?”

Stuck at my shitpickle no-money mo’-problems house in Crown Hill with a wee tiny, I started reading Daniel’s stories, which I loved. A few weeks later Daniel put me on his webpage. Holy crap! There I was on the Internets! After that, I was starting to see what the hubbub was about.

And then I had a crappy fight with Daniel, the details of which I shall gloss over here (it makes me sad just thinking about it) and we lost touch for a while. Then I was really stuck in my house, moping and listening to sad jazz songs. Daniel was sad that we were fighting too.

I, Asshole

Sometimes I would peep at his blog, or read other blogs. In 2001, lots of people were on the Diaryland, and it looked like it was made for technodolts, so I decided to jump and have at it. I was very lonely then, as I was for most of my marriage. At that point I was even lonelier than before, because I had been so isolated from other people, and Daniel offered true friendship, which was something I hadn’t had in years.

“I, Asshole” was the first potential title to pop into my head. I have discovered that my first impulse is often my best one in these matters. It was a play on Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, because I thought that was hello-clever, but also I wanted it to convey that I was on the edge of the map–Here There Be Assholes. You probably can’t find anything to say about me that I haven’t already said about myself. I will laugh at myself the hardest.

At first I told no one that I was blogging, not even my husband, because I didn’t tell him anything anyway. I was as anonymous as possible while I was getting started, and I often wouldn’t even blog about my current life. It was mostly the past and a collection of links to pages that caught my eye. In porting my blog over to many servers and services, I have lost my non-epic-stories from that time, so I’m not sure what mundane everyday life was like, which is how I blog now.

I remember the feeling though, of writing and hitting “publish.” It felt GOOD. I couldn’t STOP. Why didn’t everyone have a blog? I wondered. The POWER! Ha ha, I just said “penisloaf” on the Internet! I published my email and had a Diaryland guestbook so other people could goatse spam me or leave my favorite type of comment, which was that I had made someone laugh that day. I took online tutorial programs to learn html so I could ghetto up my blog good and proper. Daniel took a look at my bastard code a few months into my life as a blogger and declared, “GOOD LORD, woman, you don’t even have head tags!” Now I leave the coding to someone more capable, although sometimes I feel like I should have a broken jpeg somewhere on my homepage as a tribute to my lame and aggravating d-i-y past.

Franny was eleven months old when I started my blog. I was twenty-three. I was hitting school hard to finish my bachelor’s degree, which was in art history. I had taken two quarters off for spawning, and so was trying to hurry up and finish. I was taking my GREs, applying to library school, and going to Seablog meetups to meet someone, anyone.

The Seablog meetups were kind of weird, because I didn’t know how to describe my blog. There were so many (sorry) self-important tech bloggers in those days, who believed that they had the One True (Blog)Ring, and I felt a little out of place. I told people that I blogged about my life, and they went back to their conversations about how XML was the next new blog thing, and my god, have you seen what that Dave Winer is up to now? Now everyone has a blog label and people say, “Oh, you’re that momblogger,” or “You’re that swearing blogger.” Kirk calls me an “identity blogger,” and I like that. I just turn away…and think about Dave Winer. Just kidding, I haven’t thought about him in years.

Secular Humanism at Its Finest

An aside: a couple of months after starting my blog, I found the belief-o-matic, a little web quiz that enticingly offered to diagnose you based on the results of your beliefs. I was rooting for Jewish, but I got stuck with Secular Humanist, with Quaker a distant second. I grabbed it as an occasional tagline, and nowadays it lives at the top of my sidebar. Here there be Secular Humanist Assholes.