Why did you start a blog?
I talk to myself pretty much non-stop, mostly out loud, and I have an English degree that I’m just barely using. These combined powers resulted in a series of deeply shameful spiral notebooks, stockpiled for archaeologists of the distant future to reconstruct our society as a frothing mass of mildly obsessive-compulsive ice cream junkies with short attention spans and inflated senses of self importance.
Then a friend forwarded me a link to Hyperbole and a Half, where I learned two life-changing lessons:
- Blogs don’t need a theme beyond “I thought of this”
- Pictures are good
Do you really wear that green shirt all the time?
I do own this shirt, but it mostly stays in the bottom of my dresser drawer due to a combination of excessive wear and an identity crisis it once caused.
You wrote about me, but you got my name wrong. How could you!?
I make up uncreative pseudonyms for everyone I write about, just in case people don’t want to be associated with the stories I happen to remember. If you are one of these people and don’t mind being publically identified, just let me know and I’ll be happy to use your real name. Then your next prospective employer can Google you and start the interview with, “So I hear you used to throw M&Ms at an unpopular possessed girl.”
Why do you draw in Paint when it is such a cheesy program?
I imagine that people with actual artistic abilities find Paint limiting and frustrating. For me, though, it opens up a magical galaxy of powers I’ve never had, like drawing lines that are all the same thickness or spending less than an hour getting a circle to look round. My face almost exploded with rapture the day I realized that I could just flip images to make things perfectly symmetrical.
You know that’s not how you spell “Clarification,” right?
When I was little, I thought my dad had invented the word “clarify” to mean “to do things Clara’s way.” Eventually I learned to spell it and realized that some elements of my environment did not revolve around me. There’s also “declaration,” of course, but I’m concerned that that one sounds a little like removing my influence, as in, “This report contains too much discussion of ice cream and needs to undergo declaration.”
How do you come up with post ideas?
Two or three months after starting this blog, I worried about what would happen when I ran out of personal failings and neuroses to catalog. Then I remembered that I’m dipping into an unlimited well.
About half the time, I’m working on one idea when a better one sneaks up and reroutes the whole train of thought. I’ll be thinking about how to draw all the kinds of cake I want to devour, and then suddenly I’ll have something in my eye and start thinking of things to say about the fluid party on my face. Then I’ll remember that no one wants to hear me talk about mucus in real life, so I’ll go spread it around online instead.
Sometimes I go back and write the original idea later, but more often it was stupid and I’m glad that I got rescued from myself.
Didn’t you flunk out of Teach For America? Why don’t you write about that?
I probably will write about TFA at some point. So far, a lot of those experiences still aren’t funny yet.
I’m also concerned that any drawings I make might potentially be construed as racist. I taught in rural south Louisiana, and all but one of my students were African-American. This fact has nothing to do with the children being insatiable banshees crazed with bloodlust—that was 97% due to my total inability to exercise authority—but I’m afraid people might draw unappealing conclusions if I illustrate a swarm of razor-toothed black kids bludgeoning my self-worth to death. A mob of violent white six-year-olds seems somehow less offensive, but drawing my class as white would be dishonest and probably still politically incorrect, and potentially making people think I’m racist in any way is devastating to a self-image highly dependent on believing that I’m a good person.
How do I make my blog wildly popular and profitable so that I never have to work at a real job and can spend all day devising whimsical cheese recipes?
My current strategy is to make sporadic and haphazard attempts to publicize myself, and I now reach tens of people per month. If you hit on something better, I enjoy Stilton and Gouda.
UPDATE: Inspired by a question from an actual person other than myself!
Can I share this blog with everyone I know, whether or not I like them, and make it explode all over the internet in a cataclysm of glory?
By all means. Please be sure to credit me and/or link back here, but otherwise share to your heart’s content. Thank you in advance.
UPDATE: Inspired by a desire to avoid breaching my employer’s social media policy!
Do the views expressed on this site reflect those of any organization with which you may be affiliated or employed? Similarly, are you speaking as a representative of any organization?
Thank you for asking that important question using such official and legally protective language! No, nothing on this site should be construed as representing anyone’s opinion but my own. I usually avoid even using the real names of my employers and various other entities (though they can’t be difficult to figure out), because making up pseudonyms is more fun.
