Look for me on either this fancy new blogger map or this one. And then add your own site so I can stalk you back. BECAUSE YOU’RE PRETTY.

Dear Dairy, my bestest friend Michael is in town and we are going to the wedding of Third Grade Diary Amy tomorrow! Signend, Wendy.

p.s. We’re doing tumbling in gym.

I forgot to post something for Friday of Meta Week. But I guess I still can, because Blogger now has this “Change Time & Date” feature for posts, and just my talking about it makes it totally meta, right? So there you go. Now it looks like I couldn’t wait to start my day to tell you this.

And also, I needed to say this, too: nobody thinks you’re as thin as your Weather Pixie.

When you find yourself writing something like, “Look, you people think you know me or something but you don’t! Okay?! You don’t fucking know me AT ALL!!” it’s a pretty good indication that something has gone spectacularly wrong with your online endeavor.

for anyone who has ever wanted to start an online journal but has little nagging questions about what kind of stuff is appropriate to write. Are you worried you’re going to write something online that you’ll regret later? Or, worse, that you’ll post some “deliciously naughty” little anecdote about your own perky tits only to discover that oh my God some creep did a majorly pervo Google search and is reading your site eeeeeuuuwwwwww. That really is unfortunate. So when you’re struck with the impulse to tell everyone about your new vibrator, try this test:

Imagine you are riding public transportation. Let’s say it’s a bus. It’s near rush hour and the bus is crowded but not packed. You have several stops to go before you get off. At the next stop a crazy person gets on. He or she may be carrying an old vacuum cleaner hose or a plastic bag full of crumpled phone book pages or a filthy doll wrapped in toilet paper to clearly indicate his or her crazy status. Everyone tries to ignore the crazy person as he or she stomps up and down the aisle, muttering to him or herself. Suddenly, Crazy Person stops and screams, “YOU!” Everyone looks up. The crazy is pointing directly at you. Everyone is turned around in their seats and staring. They can see the crazy person is looking you right in the eye. It’s as if Crazy can suddenly see into your soul. Crazy squares his or her shoulders and takes a deep breath and is about to shout; Crazy has something to say to everyone, and it’s the very thing you were just thinking about putting online.

So do you really want it to be about what you did with your Kegel muscles the other night? Are you okay with that? Are you? Good.

I’m really glad that someone’s noticed the really alarming overuse of terms like random in weblog descriptions and that at least one other person has pointed out what a weird convention it is. Really, if words could stalk each other on Google there’d need to be a restraining order to keep “random” the fuck away from “blog.”

I suppose there was a time when online writing was such an unfamiliar concept that every site came with a standard kit of helpful title words to keep handy in case the wacky non-continuous first-person narrative made readers confused and dizzy and short of breath. But we’re kind of past that now, right? It’s like how the title pages of eighteenth-century novels needed all kinds of explanatory crap like Being An Account of The Youth & Schooling of Elias Suttcluffle & His Sundry Adventures Thereafter. Except not even as charming as that.

And while I think people ought to lay off the random just a little, I really think it’s high time the we purged the following words from blog titles, subtitles, tag lines and slogans: “musings,” “rantings,” “blatherings,” “meanderings,” “ponderings,” “thoughts” (when “random”), “snippets,” and, for Christ’s sake, “tidbits.”