Awesome Sauce: Now With Less Awesome

Dear LiLu,

I am conflicted about your blog. Granted, I'm molded from fluxing confliction anyway, which is why I am so fucking charming, so this was expected. But still.

I started at the beginning.

At first, I liked you. You were honest and conversational and relateable and perfectly inappropriate, with refreshing self-assurance and offering unique views on common subjects. You displayed personality and good humor which made you, in many ways, uncommon. Stories were long-winded but interesting, everything dripped attitude.

I was semi-entranced. How is this possible that people like you exist outside of sitcoms and romantic comedies? You live in the world of Friends, and I live in MST3K. Seriously, it's all cheesy movies and sardonic robots up here on the Satellite o' Love.

Eventually you began doing TMI Thursdays and Shiz My Boyfriend Says and Stupid Fugly Things and Other Abbreviated Memes I Don't Care About. You and your boyfriend are entertaining and cute, I'll give you that. I skipped the others on principle. Why, internets, must there be a day set aside for telling the fucking truth? Shouldn't we always be boldly oversharing? The answer is yes, yes we should. Then recently, you ended them. I applaud your decision to un-limit yourself. You're best when you're uninhibited.

Oh, but you, like, stopped being cool.

All of a sudden your life wasn't your own and became a collection of catchphrases of FAIL and AWESOME SAUCE! and bold letters and....waaaaaaaaait for it....witty asides! I mean, you like things that are funny and can be funny yourself, in a non-threatening OMG-I-am-so-gross-in-the-cutest-manner-I-can-muster-exclamation-point! AWESOME SAUCE. Clever pawned internet slogan! Spelling words like they sound instead of how they're spelled (ON PURPOSE). Must-see Youtube video! ANOTHER clever internet slogan! Awesome sauce! It's annoying. But it's AAWWWWWESOOOOOOOMMMMME SAAAAAAUCE! Plus, I read "Firefly" and I think Malcolm Reynolds, and you just choke the joy out of my fucking world.

Then I read this regarding finding your "e-voice," and immediately morphed into sore snobbasaurus. Before I was irked. Now I'm pissed off.

You didn't tell them anything substantial, LiLu. No guidance, nothing. I thought you were fucking better than that. To quote you quoting Inigo Montoya: let me sum up.

Essentially your advice was, "I was boring in seventh grade. I know. I KNOW! And then I started talking to people and I took a risk! Now I have an e-voice and you can too!" You are not helping people find their voice, you are telling them how to be heard.

A voice, my friend, is not measurable by internet buddies and memes. We measure voices with decibels, which, as everyone knows, are the referential sliding scale points used to quantify the intensity of sound. Duh. Dumbass. Sound, and consequently voice, is a slippery, discordant tramp of a thing made of invisible particles and temperamental waves and shit. There are obstacles to fight through until it becomes clear.

You might think you've found your "e-voice," but stop fucking gimmicking. Write unplugged. Dude, that is a fucking brilliant phrase that I totally just invented, but probably read somewhere and subconsciously suppressed. Seriously LiLu, I cannot support the logic behind correlating your individual voice with how well you successfully woo goddamn internet friends. That's just a desperation to be popular.

Which is your goal, I guess. You're making friends and you got a bajillion fans. I can tell because your sidebar is a jumbly-wumbly anneurysm of advertisements, admiration, and Bootleg Awards (whatever those are). There's a quirky, darkly adorable header image that looks like a Threadless t-shirt and a quirky, darkly adorable About Me that reads like a personal ad, explaining, " I have come to classify myself as a 'South-i-fied Masshole'… all the fun of a Northerner, now with the grace of a Southern belle!"

Please fix your fourteen feet of sidebar tags. Just copy and paste it onto a post and shove it up there on your tabs in between "Roll Call" and "Subscribe." I really don't like that grid of posts beneath your first two entries. Mouse-clicking is a complicated task, and you are forcing me to make a decision between O'Douls and Sharps, when before you were serving up Stella and sometimes La Fin Du Monde.

It's frustrating, because I really, really just don't understand you. Maybe the blog became too much work. You claim to be boring. But the best thing about you early on was your attitude and uncompromising sense of self. Lately, you're still nice, and you're still cute, but you sound just like everyone else.

Regards,

Shinerpunch




For the early years.







For losing it.