All About the Bling*

A couple years ago I befriended a co-worker, a 21-year-old "woman" who was married to a 40-year-old "man". The quotes are an implication about their maturity levels, rather than their genders.

After I picked the wife up from the side of the road at 3am one night, she asked me to drive her to the hospital. She felt like the only way to get away from her physically and mentally abusive husband was by killing herself. She wanted to be admitted to the hospital to be put on suicide watch. I stayed with her there until her husband figured out where she was and texted that he was coming to get her. At that point, she told me to leave, "so he won't get angry that I'm spreading our business all over the place".

This was the start of my involvement in their dysfunctional relationship. She'd call me crying about once a week, stoned out of her gourd on opiates, to bitch about some new shit he'd pulled. I'd tell her to leave his ass and move back home to her parents. But she wouldn't leave him. "It's different when you're married," she told me. "You wouldn't know what that's like."

Several weeks later she called me in tears, because her husband had stolen the inheritance money she'd received from her late uncle for her education. She didn't know what he'd spent it on until several weeks after that, when he ended up in jail for possession of crack cocaine and solicitation of a prostitute. She still didn't leave him.

After the crack and whores bit (possibly crackwhores), I was done. I couldn't invest any more of myself in the situation without wanting to smack her around myself. I avoided her calls and avoided talking to her at work. In the end, she showed up to work (with a black eye) to tell the managers that she was finally moving back to her parents.

Am I a bad friend because I refused to enable her dysfunction and self-destruction? Am I hyper-judgmental and overly opinionated, to the detriment of most of my friendships?

Possibly yes, but that's also probably why I was asked to review for this site.

The Blog O' the Day is "Long Distance Love Affair". Do not click this link if your computer is more than a year old -OR- you're using internet that is slower than fiber optic. It's not worth crashing your computer.

I say that because I counted no less than 13 widgets and doodads. It's like accidentally stumbling onto someone's Myspace profile circa 2004, complete with that fucking music player smack dab in the middle of the blog, those awful flashing blingy things people used to leave as comments and an extensive use of text and chat speak, with different font colors and sizes.

How many fucking times do we have to bitch about people not reading the FAQ before submitting? Shit.

I'm not even gonna get into the grammar and spelling because "Miss Innocent's" first language is not English. If you've gambled and clicked the link, you can see a blatant affront in the sub-title.

Now onto the content. Miss Innocent is a spoiled Filipina princess, "on vacation" in California because she's followed her boyfriend from Manila. She's still not living in the same town as "her future husband", hence "a long distance love affair".

She spends the majority of her blogging time obsessing about her controlling boyfriend who's most likely cheating on her, and throwing temper tantrums over trivial matters. Randomly interspersed blog entries include her repeated use of her daddy's credit card to go on shopping sprees, and her adoption of desirable American traits, like eating shitty, unhealthy food.

I've already told a story about how I give the fuck up on people who bitch about their dysfunctional and abusive relationships but don't do anything to change the situation. Why the hell would I read a blog about one?

There's only one post in the whole blog where Miss Innocent gets down to the nitty gritty and actually does SOME self-reflection. I don't know if I kind of liked this post because of my current situation and the fact I've been having a quarter-life crisis for the past 5 years, but I did. I would have liked to see more of this.

My suggestion for Miss Innocent is to start a whole new blog, where the main focus ISN'T her fucked up relationship with her boyfriend. She says she's on a mission to find herself. That would be WAY more interesting to her readers than the shit going on now.

But for a co-dependent person, finding oneself sometimes requires one to be single. Unfortunately, I think that's easier said than done for Little Miss Innocent.

For the WORST blog template I've ever seen and the asinine blog subject:







For wanting to be reviewed, even after the site admin asked you if you were being serious:







* Since we'd already traveled back in time to 2004 and all.