I keep trying to squeeze in some writing here and there. For example, when I put 10 month-old (already?!) Pringles in the high chair, I tap out a few paragraphs if I can focus. The result is many half-finished drafts on various subjects. Baby led weaning (BLW) is all the rage in the Mommy Community, so I’m trying it, but also doing some old-fashioned feeding. I can sometimes drop some finger foods onto her tray and work, but more frequently she wants my undivided attention in a game of spoon tug-o-war. She’s more tolerant of me reading than writing.
I finished Jenny Lawson’s book “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened” last week and enjoyed it as much as I thought I would. She is what I love: a hilarious, talented, original writer. Her bizarre rural childhood triggered bad feelings for me, so I had to deal with that. To me, her dad was not quirky. He was scary, abusive, and mentally unstable.
I don’t think I could write about my family while everyone is still alive. Anne Lamott wrote on Twitter the other day, “Write like your parents are already dead,” and I found that so freeing. “What if my mom/dad reads this?” is a thought that can be death to creativity. It has been a big week for family shit, but I’m not writing about it here. Can you imagine? Think of all that goes down in your family, including in-laws. We don’t have any “wake the kids up in the middle of the night with dead squirrel puppets” in our family, but we have scary, abusive, and mentally unstable covered.
Whenever my father got another series, he always called his mom, a single parent, to tell her the great news. “It’s not another one of those damned sitcoms, is it?” was her inevitable response. Of course it was. Those “damned sitcoms” were what my father wrote. It was never good enough for his mom, though. She really liked that Angela Lansberry. Why couldn’t he do a show like “Murder She Wrote”? Now THAT was a quality show, she insisted. But this is the same woman who told me my short story was crap. I was eight.
Just like I stay until the end credits of a movie out of respect for the people who made the film, I read the acknowledgements in a book. I was surprised to see Lawson thanked Heather (Dooce) Armstrong. I didn’t know they knew each other, so I did a bit of internet research and got my mind blown.
At Blog Her 2008, Jenny Lawson pulled a stunt that got her noticed in a big way. I was completely unaware. At that time, I was not even part of the blogging world and had never heard of either one of them. I still haven’t gathered all the information I need to fully understand this event and its significance. Suffice it to say that I feel let down. Even the so-called misfits are playing the game. Do a Google search and you’ll find everything you need to know about the drunk Bloggess Dooce showdown. Even Jon Armstrong Blurbomatted about it. He felt the need to defend his wife. Read what he wrote here http://blurbomat.com/2008/08/06/thoughts-on-blogher-08/ . Jon writing about Heather with love and admiration hurts a bit, as do the comments where readers praise them and their strong marriage. He wrote a few months back that he’d been “doing it wrong” for years http://youtu.be/fKkZhubwt04. Apparently the “Jon Armstrong Method” wasn’t what Dooce wanted, but she kept that to herself. If you believe his implications (as I interpreted them, Ms. Armstrong, don’t sue me). South to drop off, moron.
I was fired up all weekend to write about what he said about women and bloggers, as well as the incident itself, but I don’t have anything new to add. And it’s all old news anyway.
And as for bullying vs criticism, that too is the topic du jour. Whether it’s Anna Viele vs Dooce, The Bloggess vs Dooce, Mrs. Odie vs Kelle Hampton, or GOMI vs Messica What I Wore, none of this is new territory. And I’m bored.
It’s all a big game about money. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, they say, but I wonder if Tiger Woods agrees. Some would say it’s his behavior that hurt his career, but look at Kim Kardashian. The latter is like the patron saint of turning pee in the face lemons into lemonade.
This is one of those half-finished, half-conceived posts that I wrote in between nursing, rocking, feeding, diapering, and playing with my daughter. You have my permission to half read it.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
