Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Does your URL say Dooce.com?

Yeah...I didn't think so.

I made a detrimentally huge mistake today.

So I’m perusing Facebook, as is my nightly ritual...peel an orange, pop in a season of Friends (as disc 1 of Arrested Development is tragically MIA), grab the Macbook and stalk. Oh stop it, you do it too.

But as Facebook has recently decided to be a Big Fat Failure and Twitterfy it’s homepage, I find it increasingly uneventful to stalk in this forum. So after several minutes of out-loud-to-myself complaining about the newandimproved Lamebook, I decided to take my stalkery in a new direction.

I decided to read other people’s blogs.

This will probably seem quite hypocritical (ahem, narcissistic) to you, but for the most part I’m not a blog consumer. I have a few close friends who blog in a manner I can tolerate; they’re adept writers, and they talk about familiar things/people so I that I feel like an unspoken VIP when reading their posts. I’m also a faithful follower of Dooce.com, as she makes me laugh about some of the more pathetic aspects of being a female. Better than crying about them I suppose. But beyond that, I view most blogs as the mindless prattle of people who couldn’t (and shouldn’t) construct a written sentence if it weren’t for the ease of the keyboard.

And today that view was entirely and painfully justified.

My first mistake was browsing the Facebook profiles of former college acquaintances. Perhaps the term “acquaintance” isn’t poignant enough; these were the people who were not necessarily my enemies, but who did for reasons yet unknown vandalize my apartment 12 times in one semester (and this was at a religious school, but we won’t get into that mess of weeds). So when I say “acquaintances,” I mean people who I secretly wish great misfortune upon. Kidding, only kidding…(but really only kidding a little bit).

Mistake 1: stalking people whose very existence seems to me like a waste of perfectly good oxygen.

Mistake 2: following the Queen Bee of My Loathed College Peers’ link to her blog. Ohh, how I wish I hadn’t done that…

For it was like opening the very gates to my own personal Hell.

Something you need know about my college frenemies: they all, ALL went to university for the sole purpose of receiving their MRS degrees. And now that many of them have achieved it (thank you Jesus! Old Maid Syndrome is evaded once more!), they’ve moved onto ultimate life goal #2.

Reproduction.

Don’t get me wrong - I think marriage and child-rearing is all well and good, and I plan to do it myself one day if I can manage to get my act together. But some things about being a wife and mother should absolutely-without-question be left to the imagination. Example:

In a matter of mere moments I knew all about one girl’s, uhh…well, period. I can’t figure out a way to make that more discrete. I knew when it was and how it affected her relationship with her husband, and I also knew about her new baby’s diaper deposits – frequency, consistency, color and smell.

I am not kidding.

Then another blogger informed THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE of her massively unreasonable mood-swings, and how she cries 4 or 5 times a day. Sad, yes. Postpartum depression is a bitch I’m sure, and I feel for anyone who has to endure it. But ON YOUR BLOG? REALLY? Then she too described her baby’s bathroom habits, and concluded with a description of her after-baby-jelly-belly.

This kind of offensive exchange continued for blog after blog after blog after blog…it was like being sucked into a vacuum-world of people whose entire lives revolve around the digestive habits of another human being. And truthfully, that’s a pretty accurate description of early motherhood.

I spent several hours this weekend holding/feeding/burping (I masterfully avoided changing) an 8-week-old baby. He was CU-U-UTE, and it was fun to play caretaker…but new babies seriously don’t do a whole lot. At one point he started gurgling in his sleep, which prompted me to have a minor freak-out that I was inadvertently drowning him in his own baby-spit (I wasn’t, thank God). But besides that brief outburst of involuntary noise-making, he essentially just laid there.

Point being, I understand that new Momdom must get pretty monotonous, and I can’t imagine the sleep-deprivation and the hormonal tidal waves. I sympathize…really, I do. But if I still have this blog when I get overconfident enough to procreate, this is my solemn vow: you will NEVER read about my mini-me’s dirty diapers on God Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise. I care about you, and I'd never do that to your delicate psyche.

So to my college frenemies I address this plea: you are not Heather Armstrong (and I’m not either, although I’m a damn bit closer as I know the difference between YOUR and YOU’RE). If you want to talk about your uber personal bodily issues, that’s your prerogative…but do it through an email. Do it by phone, do it by text. Hell I don’t care if you do it via Facebook note, as long as I’m not tagged in it. Just leave it out of the PUBLIC FORUM that is your blog, where innocent eyes can be unwillingly traumatized by the detailed account of your issues with breast-feeding. Discretion, people. It’s a beautiful thing.

I know that karma will probably come back to haunt me for this post, and when it is my time to birth a baby I’ll be the next Octomom in all the tabloids. That would be just my luck. But it’s alright, because I’ve got a plan…if that happens, I’ll sell the suckers on eBay (and as I’ll have cute kids, people will definitely want to buy them.) Then I’ll be so bloody rich I’ll purchase blogger.com…

And shut down my frenemies’ failed attempts at Mommy Blogging.

Much love.

3 comments:

  1. I'm glad someone else out there doesn't enjoy reading about periods and baby poop. :) I am with you on that one, I will not be posting about such personal matters when I have kids.

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  2. That's really funny. Yeah, it gets really hard for Lacey to talk about anything else, because her whole life revolves around the baby (and there's another one coming...maybe we'll learn this time!) But she's pretty good about avoiding talk of discharge and diaper stew.

    Anyway, good writing. You need a column...just send some of this stuff to the Daily, I bet they'd run some of it. Anywho...

    Oh, and if you go to my blog, be warned...no bodily function discussed in depth, but I write about pretty dorky stuff.

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  3. Your plan is flawless (Octomom auction and purchase of blogger.com). More power to you. I always found it difficult to blog about my baby. He was essentially a lump (a cute lump, but a lump nonetheless). I felt that breast feeding and poopy diapers were things my own husband didn't want to hear about, so why would anyone else!? I stopped blogging (bye bye, Xanga) and started taking pictures. And I usually only posted some of the best on Facebook and the rest were for me. So, I agree, sometimes things are better left unshared.

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