Where Everybody Doesn't Know Your Name

At my local watering hole, there are two old man barflies whom we avoid at all costs. They are nice, sweet old coots, but are of the type to babble endlessly about random shit. The times we have felt friendly toward them, they've ended up sitting at our table with us for hours, but don't even recognize us the next time we come in.

"Pops" is an 80-year-old veteran, who drives a taxi and collects old coins, keeping several on his person. He has shown them to me and talked about each for at least 20 minutes, in a semi-incoherent manner. I am unsure if it was because he is old and senile, or because he's probably been drinking non-stop for over 60 years. Before he left the bar for the night (whether he was driving his taxi for personal or business reasons is unknown to me), the bar staff knew to bring him a shot of half and half, his "immediate-sober-up" cure.

The other is someone whom we've dubbed "Old Hippie Man", because of his permanent smile and obvious overuse of acid back in the day. I can't remember anything about our unintelligible conversation. He does, however, continually and randomly say, "Carry On!" while making an "Airplane Taking Off" motion with his hand. Even when he gets caught in the middle of bar fights.

Talking to these two, is what it was like for me to read this blog. If the old man barflies were emo Indian girls, that is.

Sheetal rambles on about her feelings and all the wisdom she's gained in all her 23 years. It reads like a journal she's keeping as personal therapy, but it would be better for her to just buy an actual journal, than to expose us all to this shit by submitting here.

You want to know how incoherent and boring this blog is? I have read (maybe skimmed) every single post of every other blog I've reviewed, but I couldn't even get through one of Sheetal's posts. This is why I can't even give links for examples.

She talks about people who haven't been introduced in the blog, as if I'm supposed to figure it out on my own and give a shit about them. Hell, I have no clue about who Sheetal is at all, because there is no "About Me", and I cannot glean anything about her from her posts for the life of me. I mean, I'm assuming Sheetal is female, simply because "she" writes about meeting boys. That may just be coming from my heterocentric view though.

The blog is filled with run-on sentences, misspellings, and huge slabs of meandering, uninteresting paragraphs, which is frightening because apparently, she's a journalist. I fervently pray to Ganesha that her profession doesn't include writing in English, because she has a mediocre grasp of it.

She doesn't post regularly and only has 66 posts for the past 4 years, which I don't even mind, because that means less pollution of the internet.

My advice to Sheetal: Start a new blog, and write stories from your life. Funny memories, sad memories, angry memories, all of it. Readers want to read the blog of someone who puts themselves out there, which means writing about things that make you uncomfortable, not writing down every little emo thought in your little emo head.

Until then, I'm giving you:







For making it feel like I was listening to drunken, brain-fried, old men yammering on about shit no one cares about. Without the luxury of having a beer in my hand.

What would people think, when they hear that I'm a Jesus Freak?*

I'm pretty sure Shiner saved this one special, just for me. To hope for an unbiased, issue-free review is a futile effort.

I grew up going to church every Sunday. I was heavily involved in my youth group in junior high and high school. The first two years of my adulthood were spent at a small, private Christian college. Yes, shockingly enough, I was one of those kids.

However, I never quite fit in. Even at the age of 13, I felt like an outsider. And I was viewed as a bad Christian, simply because I rebelled against Christian culture*. I refused to live in the bubble*, and they didn't like it.

But Halee is someone they would like. She's so steeped in Christian culture, Tyndale House* could publish books from her used Kleenex. She's set up shop so far in her bubble, I really believe she thought this was a Christian blog review site because our name quotes John 16:24*. Obviously, she didn't read the URL.

Nevertheless, this is my assignment, and I've never been one for shirking my duties.

Halee's blog template is cute, her title is cliched and banal ("My Life and Thoughts"), and she has too much distracting and meaningless crap in her sidebar.

Halee's writing comes across as uneducated. It's filled with incorrect spelling, grammar, spacing, and capitalization, and rife with run-on sentences and paragraphs. Also, an abundance of dreaded exclamation points, making the blog come across as one written by a middle school girl, instead of a married, college-educated woman.

Most of the blog is written like a journal, for her friends to catch up on her life. Completely boring for a stranger. She also seems mildly obsessed with weddings and babies, which is par for the course with most Christian girls. It was also one of the reasons why I only spent 2 years at the Christian college, before transferring to a state school. I didn't go to school to get my MRS. degree, thank you very much.

In the rest of her blog, she spews Conservative Christian propaganda, which only appeals to people who have those same beliefs. I get the feeling that Halee is just regurgitating what her parents and her church have told her, without thinking for herself. I also get the feeling she's trying to witness to the world*, from her blog. But again, no one's going to read this blog unless they come from the same background as Halee, so it's pointless.

I was all set to give her a "Meh" and an "Abercrombie", and tell her to start an anonymous blog, where she can write about real things, without feeling like everyone in her bubble is watching. . . until I got to these posts:

1) Here, she talks about how she's annoyed with being asked to give money for Haiti relief, because our government spends our tax money irresponsibly.
2) Here, she talks about how she has a hard time feeling sympathy for the homeless, because the ONE TIME she has seen a homeless person, he was rude to her.

Let's see what Jesus has to say about this, shall we Halee?

Matthew 22:37-39* - The "love your neighbor as yourself" verse.

Luke 6:30-31* - The Golden Rule, AKA the "do unto others" verse.

Matthew 25:31-36* - The Parable of the Sheep and Goats, AKA the "whatever you did for the least of these" verse.

Did you notice how I didn't need to explain what the verses were, other than their nicknames? That's because people with limited knowledge of the Bible have heard of them. And when Christians fail miserably at those basic commandments, it makes them look really bad. That's why people say, "All Christians are hypocrites", Halee.

Also readers, have you noticed how clean my language has been in this post? That's because I've been saving it for this:

How the FUCK have you only seen one homeless person in your life?

I grew up in a small backwater town too, but I spent time with my church family, sorting clothes and serving food at the local homeless shelter WHEN I WAS 10.

In high school, I spent the springtime running fundraisers to earn money to travel to Mexico, the Arizona Navajo reservation, and inner-city LA. You know what I did there? I built houses for the homeless, worked in missions, and delivered food to AIDS shut-ins. I also ran camps for Mexican and Navajo street children, as well as the younger siblings of the Grape Street Crips in Watts.

Jesus didn't go to VBS* or Awanas*, Halee. He spent his time with the poor, the crippled, and the sick. He even hung out with prostitutes. Get off your High Jesus Horse, please.

NOW, I award you:


from the Father





from the Son





from the Holy Ghost.




May God have mercy on my soul.

*links for the unchurched heathens

Patsy Cline is Waiting to Kick Your Ass in Three Acts

Act I:

Folks, I do believe that it is time to bust out the razor studded cluebat, as today’s lucky contestant is in desperate need of some (ahem) correction.

For starters, Jacki Trew’s delightful little blog is titled "Insanity Now Has a Website" and the URL is JackiIsCrazy.blogspot.com. When you are 15 years old, calling yourself CRAZY or INSANE feels like a logical choice. You feel like you don’t fit in. You feel weird all the time. Maybe you’re moody. Maybe you’re filled with rage. Maybe you are really unpredictable. And yeah, that feels pretty crazy at the time.

But then months pass and soon you realize that this is normal – everyone feels this way – and you are no more crazy than the next very average student treading the halls of your school. And by the time you’re 16 or so, you no longer think it’s cool to call yourself Crazy or Insane.

Insanity Now Has a Website? I don't fucking think so.

You see, Insanity already has had tons of websites: the APA, CharlieManson.com, theflatearthsociety.org, scientology.org, peta.org, etc. What you bring to the table is not insanity. It is impulsiveness. It is occasionally inappropriateness. It is a disregard for some of society's norms. It is an obsession with reality television. But it is not insanity or craziness.

And by the time you are 21, you should know better.

Real crazy and real insane is actually scary and dangerous. Not fun. Real crazy is hanging off the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge or hearing voices that aren’t there telling you to kill John Lennon. And calling yourself crazy when you actually aren't isn't actually cute.

Act II:

Allow me to read aloud from the Hard and Fast Rules section of the Book of AAYSR:

"5. NO AUTOPLAY MUSIC. NEVER, EVER, EVER. UGH."

Jacki – did you read the FAQ before you submitted? Did it occur to you at all that THIS:

just might have been what the fuck we were talking about? I mean, autoplay music is never good, but Kylie Minogue? Really? What fucking decade is this anyway?

So right now, based on what I have seen, you are getting one big fat assed You’re Doing It Wrong from me.

As soon as you have finished reading this sentence, go to your blog and remove the autoplay music. Did you do it? If I go and check right now, will I see autoplay music in your sidebar? I am not above hopping a flight to Sydney and tracking you down and kicking the teeth right out of your head if I have to. Sure, it’ll cost me a fortune and I’ll probably be arrested for assault, but I will have done humanity a favor.

As for the crazy thing – child, please. Be your own person. Stop writing in this extended Facebook status update and start fresh and new in a new blog that doesn’t have crazy or insane in the title or URL. Or in the content, unless you actually go on anti-depressants or something. Mmmkay?

Act III:

Alrighty then. Now that my pet peeves have been dispatched, let’s roll up our sleeves on what we actually do have here.

Jacki has been doing this a long time. And, as I alluded to above, she started this in 2004, when I assume that she was 14 or 15 years old. So, it is reasonable to assume that there would be a lot of shit in the beginning and in the middle that’s all: “So and so is a big poopyhead” and “I hate my school” and all of that teen angst bullshit. And you would be right. Don’t bother with that. Especially since early on, she was doing the whole experimenting with multiple colored text thing. And for a while settled on gray text, which probably would have worked well, if her background color weren’t black. But it is, and so it doesn’t.

At some point along the way she found a voice. Sure, that voice talks way too much about things I don’t give a rat’s ass about – reality TV, actors over whom she is swooning, being a semi-responsible adult, etc. – but it is still an amusing voice at times. A slightly skewed perspective on her life, which is pretty normal and ordinary, and that skewed perspective takes the boring and mundane and makes it somewhat worth reading about.

If only she would drop the immature adolescent references to “crazy”. So, for the autoplay music and the near constant references to crazy and insane:



But because I am not a complete dick, I give you this for making me smile on occasion:

Unless you have four fingers on your right hand, there's no excuse for you

Listen, I don't have much time today, and less to read thick, carcass-like slabs of text which suggest that I am to read without breathing.

Today's lesson will be to the point, omitting the mind-numbingly repetitive part about why I hate fugly ass templates with stupid ads about ulcers and 6 feet long sidebars with no proper About Me page.

That shit's a given.

Ed, your blog about being a dad and about your son’s ear deformity and partial deafness is an excruciating goddamn test of perseverance that I failed very quickly for one simple reason.

It is not because you can’t write and you’re not funny and you haven’t made me care about your kid; you can write and you are funny and you have made me care about Ethan. You made my hard heart laugh and you even made me happy that your kid can hear better now. You’re foul mouthed and full of attitude and introspective and your self-deprecating nature is the only thing keeping me from wanting to beat you senseless with my keyboard. You can write a decent sentence, I'll give you that.

Your problem is that you offer up solid, unappetizing hunks of visually suffocating, time-annihilating texts where I cannot discern where one mangled thought-juggernaut stops and another begins. Are you missing your right pinkie by chance? Why do you refuse to hit ENTER to help the reader visually? Do you not ever click on "View post" and see that your blog is a slop of grey matter filled with soul sucking skyscrapers of unending words? This, for example, was the blogging equivalent of someone on coke at two in the morning that won't shut up long enough to let the people being aurally trespassed upon make a lick of sense out of the jabbering.

Here's some advice:

Relax. Inhale. Exhale. Come down off of whatever it is you’re on that makes you litter your blog with parenthetical side notes in italics every ten words (which are seemingly arbitrarily thrown all over your posts and due to overuse retain none of their intended effect whatsofuckingever). Slow your hair-trigger thoughts down to a moderate hurricane, finish a thought, and then hit the motherfucking ENTER key before starting a new one.







Buckle in boy, and don't forget your helmet and when you get off you can pick up these for somehow managing to entertain the hell out of me despite your birdbrained way of presenting text:

Wandering? I'll Show You Wandering.

I fucking do not understand. Please, explain to me why this poor little girl would submit her blog here. It's not even fair.

It's just...everything is presented so basely, so numb and uncomplicated, and readers are given the impression that she finds these ideas and opinions freshly inspiring...I feel sorry for her. This little fucking goblin makes me feel sorry for her because she has a lame blog about stale observations coupled with the audacity to imply she wants to be a writer and does so without a speck of pretension, and I have to ask: is this blog a joke?

There is no way a trilingual woman with an advanced degree in software engineering could think that something like this served as radical expository when it reminds me of exchanges with my junior high pen pal from Senegal, who was assigned to me in Social Studies and all of our letters were graded essays on "what I learned in class" and "things about my country" and all that bullshit. No one in class really cared; we were a bunch of little racist American brats that wanted to see pictures of bone-necklaced tribespeople riding giant hyenas or ripping roasted zebra meat from the bone. Then one time, between letters, while we were waiting for a picture of school life in Dakar, fucking Nancy Baumgarten asked our teacher if they had cameras in Africa. That, my friends, taught me two significant life-changing lies: I hate blazing ignorance and I am better than other people because of it.

This blog reminds me of that unwarranted superiority. Every word she writes elicits this reaction:

1. I judge her simplicity and unfairly blame it on Mauritania.
2. I remember that she is from Mauritius, not Mauritania, and they are two very different countries.
   
3. I am comforted by my lofty acceptance of our cultural differences.
4. I imagine people judging her for cultural differences.
5. I realize am better than other people. Because of the lofty acceptance.
6. I realize that acceptance is not the same thing as caring.
7. I feel guilty for my lack of emotional connection with the blog, even when she opens up.
8. I get angry, because that shit's not my fault. It's the fault of the wandering mind (change the title, it's horribly misleading) that never really wanders much farther than the tip of her own fingers.
9. I am such a fucking self-important douchebag for reacting this way.
   

So I feel superior to her as well as all of those hypothetical bullies that I created in my brain, and then I feel like a dick. Basically this blog made me think about me and not at all about the blogger.

Is that still the sign of a good blog? No. No it's not, I've decided.

She made me analyze myself being such a fucking simpleton that I wanted to just give her a piece of my brain to help with mental indigestion. HOW DOES THIS MAKE YOU FEEL? DO YOU FEEL ANYTHING? DO I FEEL ANYTHING? How can we relate as human beings when there are all these insipid fences everywhere that aren't even fun to climb over?








This is extremely frustrating. I hate you because you make me hate myself. And to the readers: I'm sorry you had to sit through this review.

Introduction to Arithmetic

Okay kids. Instead of sitting at your desks with me at the front of the class and you looking at me with blank, depressing stares waiting for me to enlighten you, let's do something different. Let's move our desks out of the way and all sit around in a circle, mkay?

As you can see, I am an open minded educator and I like to think outside the box and apply unorthodox learning models in an effort to steer my pupils away from douchebagification. I'm an envelope pushing maverick. And, based on some inspiration from our latest reviewee, Maggie, I've decided to do things a bit differently today.

My source of inspiration was the following sentence she wrote here:

"Whatever--everyone knows bloggers are so busy furiously expressing themselves that they can't be bothered with editing or proofing."

When I saw this sentence, I hadn't even had the chance to finish lacing up my asshole-annihilating boots and was caught off guard. Remembering my non-traditional approach to instruction, I decided to take a deep breath, count to ten and come up with an alternative to telling Maggie to go get fingerbanged without further ado. So I decided to give her an a priori grade on fucking principle, dammit, for explicitly condoning everything that is wrong about the blogging world.

So here you go, Maggie; you're initial score:





At that point, I made a deal in my mind with our Maggie for the prolongation of my reading -- which may be very short-lived if she sucks as bad as she promises to. The deal is that for every post she gives me that doesn't in some way make me want to shove my TI-84 calculator forcibly into the first puckered brown eye I see, a flaming finger will be subtracted from the score; and we will go from there. It was up to Maggie to solve this word problem and work her shitty rating off before I cried for mercy.

So let's see her progress at contesting her initial suckedness.

First of all, this lifeless, pea green, failure of a template is more overused than the school custodian's right hand when he thinks about me handcuffing him to the monkey bars. Her sidebar is unnecessarily crammed full of crap. As to the content, my findings indicate that there are some main themes visited throughout the blog and they include the following:

1). Posts about not blogging; a metric shit ton of them, infecting her entire blog with the disease of superfluity.

2). Repeated statements on her lack of inspiration, general boredom, and inability to think of anything to say. Her blog is corroded with this shit. She actually titles her posts things like "Tired", "Not feeling it" and "Not feeling it" (Yes, she has two posts titled that way).

3). Mention of her other blog, which according to her, is more interesting than this blog. I cannot see how that's possible since a) it is written by the same person and b) on her other blog she ONLY writes about Twitter and Facebook. (I didn't check out the other blog because I only have time for one trainwreck at a time, and frankly, I can only handle so much WTFuckery in one day).

4). More Twitter and Facebook talk as if dedicating an entire other blog to it weren't enough.

5). Posts about other bloggers, mainly in the form of criticism, leaving a nasty taste in my mouth (I may be one to talk, but she did solicit this criticism, and I consider it community service).

6). Posts recapping books she's reading, rendering completely redundant the bookshelf widgetry bullshit in her sidebar irritating my corneas.

7). Other media she consumes in a dead stare from her colorless couch in the pictureless, windowless living room of her uneventful life.

Before completely giving up, and nearly becoming infected by Maggies' outlook on life (namely that there is nothing to say and that life is boring), I read her most recent post. While hardly poetic, it at least turns one of the flaming fingers into a MEH. If I can even give this blogger a clue as to a starting point to reformulate her conceptual notion of what a blog should be, it would begin with this haphazardly written and moth-eaten post.

Maggie has the toolbox to be able to write. There were no major problems with spelling, punctuation or grammar. She even occasionally throws in some funny one liners. But I reckon that she has never once looked back at her content before hitting publish and asked herself if anyone on god's green earth would give a flying thumb fuck about what she's writing. Indeed she has been "so busy furiously expressing" the square root of sweet blubbering nothing to be "bothered with editing or proofing."

Maggie, if you are not as bored with life as you portray yourself to be, you should ask yourself why you blog like you are. If you are actually that bored, wake the fuck up, cause you only get one shot at life, and contrary to what you may believe, life is hilarious and ironic and agonizing and tender and twisted and fascinating and seductive and everywhere you look there is a tale to be told. And if we don't agree at least on that, you will never, ever capture me as a reader.

Alright, class. Can we help Maggie with some arithmetic?











Class dismissed for recess. Just stay away from the monkey bars please; they're going to be, um, occupied all afternoon.

The Dangers of Natural Juices. Or, FFS--what were you thinking?

Sometimes, people submit to us, and it just makes me tired. I get tired of saying the same damn things, over and over again. Do you ever get tired of reading the same reviews, over and over again?

FFS, what were you thinking, Pear? Your review is going to consist of the same routine stuff we harp about, week after week, day after day.

Sometimes I feel like people just aren't getting it. Sometimes I KNOW people aren't getting it.

1. Very Very Strange Title. Anyone who reads this blog regularly should realize that there is an almost infinite level of perversity that can be drawn from the phrase "In Natural Juice." If you question this, just ask Keywork. FFS, what were you thinking when you chose this title for your blog?

2. Fugly template. This template is based upon myspace tables, which makes it too narrow (see all the wasted space on each side of your computer screen?). It's a black background with lavendar text (No. Seriously, just say no to templates that make it harder to read your stuff). It has no connection to pears. FFS, what were you thinking when you chose this design, which looks like it was developed by a moody 13-year-old hot topic girl?

3. No back story, which means I have difficulty getting and keeping an interest in you and your writing. I don't know who you are, I don't know why you're blogging, and I don't get the point of it all. There is no introduction to the main characters (that I could find). Do those things, and link to them in your sidebar, if you plan to be a blogger.

4. Boring content. I don't know who you are, I don't know why you're writing, and your story is not compelling. I don't know how to say it any clearer than that. This is a journal, something to keep on your desk or under your bed. There is nothing here for someone who doesn't know you. FFS, what were you thinking, submitting this to us?

Let me give you a taste of the content:

Something that made me warm and fuzzy was when we were making dinner. We had peeled the vegetables, and the meat was on.. while the veg was steaming away, I asked M-moo if he wanted his hair cut.. "What, tonight?" "Yeh, come on!" So he came back into the kitchen, we turned the radio on and I did a little trim of his hair. M-moo's hair is starting to get the helmet thing going, so I thought I'd try and blend in the sides a little to the rest of his hair. I didn't stress out too much over it, just remembered some of the tricks I saw online, and gave it a quick go. It turned out pretty good considering I'm no hairdresser!

Another nice thing is making the desert - it's basically a tin of pears (in natural juice, of course) with a cake on the top, baked in the oven. The cake is gluten free and pretty easy, just a little messy. I've done it so many times now, I don't really have to read the recipe anymore.

Picking carrots from the garden is just brilliant. We havn't brought carrots from the supermarket for months now. Today was great, I got one orange, one purple, and one yellow variety that must have been a stowaway seed - since I didn't order any yellow ones! It tasted really quite nice, and I think I'll be ordering some of those next time. Lovely surprise.

M-moo will be home soon, and we'll eat hot yummy desert. We plan on going to bed early because we have a long drive tomorrow.. and going to bed early adds to the chance that good things will happen. ;)

It certainly beats going to bed late, being grumpy as hell and definitely not making love.. *sigh*

It's like Pear's gluten-free diet has been translated into content-free content.

Who would possibly be interested in reading this? Pear, are you actually thinking about what you're writing here? "Picking carrots from the garden is just brilliant." FFS. You didn't even give us the recipe for the dessert. And I'm not mentioning the spelling issues, ahem. Also, is M-moo your granny? Auntie? Child? Lover? Not clear, at all.

A blog is about telling stories. You're not telling your story here, you are giving a rote recitation of the day's events. The only person on the planet who cares about this stuff is your mother, and based upon this post, you two don't get along.

You have 79 total posts and have been blogging since October of 2008. That's about ten posts per month. Each of them reads something like the one above. Except the ones that are even more depressing:

Now I have what I always wanted and waited for.. a husband and a house. It sounds tacky, but it's true. Now that I have it, it's a lot different than I imagined. That's becoming the standard thought since moving-in 3 months ago. Nothing seems to be what I expected. Perhaps its everything that's going on now that is bringing out all these mood swings. Stress, change - I don't like change - responsibility, challenge.. there have even been times when I've wished we could go back to simpler times - even times and places I've disliked in the past - just because it was simpler.

This is a diary entry of a lonely 20-something. You need friends. You need a life. You need something to write about. Please get out and do some stuff, and then write about it. Or, take a concept like the one above, and flesh it out, into a story. Why did you want those things? When did you want them? What did you imagine they would be like? You don't give us any meat here. It's all very superficial. "I feel this." "I'm moody." You don't describe anything or suck us in. These words keep us at a distance and are completely unapproachable.

Your comment function is also buggered. If you change templates back to blogger standard, that might fix it as I'm pretty sure it is a problem in the code of the template you've chosen.

Pear: You list us as one of your favorite blogs. And, I'll be truthful. I don't want to beat you up, because you seem like a sweet, and rather fragile--verging on the depressed side of things--girl. I don't want you to slit your wrists, and after spending an hour or so on your blog, I don't put it past you.

Clearly your blog serves some purpose for you, for venting, or speaking your mind, or whatever. But, it doesn't serve any purpose at all for me, as a reader, and I doubt it will appeal to any of the Ask readers, either. Reading your blog, at present, is not a pleasurable experience.

So, blog away. But, ffs, what were you thinking submitting here?


p.s. Heh.