I’m going to be honest. I’ve had a blog before. Except it was back before we called them “blogs” and back when “’blog” was spelled with the apostrophe in the front. It was a hard-scrabble time in the world of online writing, and I, while never a star on the Lucha Libre circuit of great online journals, I did have my fair share of attention. I credit to liberally peppering every other sentence with the f-bomb. People love to read swear words. It’s amazing the kind of replacement they can be for actual original thought.
I stopped writing my journal because I ran out of things to say. I felt a strong pressure to continue to be “funny” and when I didn’t update I felt guilty, and when I did, I felt like I was phoning it in, especially when I thought the best part of what I did tended to be the most unpopular, but you post one time about politics and use words like “assmonkey” and suddenly you are a brief celebrity with an actual honest-to-god flamewar in your comments section.
So let’s make this a little about me (well, a lot about me, in reality, because what is more narcissistic than a blog or journal or whatever this is) - I’m a woman who lives in a suburb of a medium-sized city in the United States of America. I have a husband, two cats, and no children. Our house is too big for us, and we belong to a country club. I am not blonde, I am not skinny, I was not popular in high school, and I am pretty sure that I have no idea what the rest of the women in my tranquilly-named development are like.
There was a time, when I was young, when I was in the “scene.” I used to go see punk bands and do terrible things to my body in the name of rebellion, and in general, considered myself very, very cool. Of course, in retrospect, I was not, in fact, cool, but just as self-obsessed as I am now, and had the advantage of having cool friends who liked having a friend whose mom paid for her car and apartment.
I was raised in a relatively wealthy environment, to which I never felt like I belonged (see above with the lack of blonde, skinny, popular, etc.). I was a stridently earnest child who felt like the worst thing in the world I had ever seen was racism, and that the clear solution was to write earnest, terrible, rhyming poems with rainbow metaphors in the “can’t we all just get along” vein. I was constantly praised by teachers and parents for being incredibly brilliant, because a girl of slightly above average intelligence was, apparently, some sort of marvel of nature. I guess the fact that I could tie my shoes and read before the age of seven set me apart.
I have, since the onset of adulthood, felt like one of those about-to-drown polar bears that Al Gore keeps guilt-tripping us with (as I reside in a 3000+ square foot house for two people) – one foot trapped on a piece of ice that is flowing one way and the other that is flowing the other way, and I’m windmilling my arms and trying to figure out what, exactly, it is that I want.
I am, depending on the hour, a shallow, craven, materialistic bitch with fantasies of playing tennis and drinking Pimm’s Cups with other Country Club© wives, or a self-loathing, hardcore feminist who fantasizes about lighting my house on fire and walking away from the rubble. And then I remember that I have all that stuff in there, and the cycle begins again.
The point of this “blog” or “journal” is not to brag about my life. I don’t really feel braggy, especially when I am pretty sure that my German car is going to run out of gas on the way home tonight because some poor financial planning has resulted in my seriously considering changing out $6.35 in pennies I have accumulated over a year in order to actually be able to come to work tomorrow. I don’t live a fabulous lifestyle; I am a spendthrift and a psycho and here I am, living in June Cleaver land, struggling with the dichotomy between loving it and hating it.
No, no, the point of all of this is to make you, dear reader, feel better if you are not living in suburban hell, since clearly, you made the right decision, and if you are, well, take solace in the company of others.
