Month: February 2010

Intravenous Online Gambling in Florida

I was starting to get lots of spam posted in the comments section.  And although I appreciated being offered Accutane, Florida health insurance, Cialis, online gambling, and intravenous Tramadol, all in one convenient spam, it was getting kind of annoying to have to delete sometimes 200 comments a day.  So my BOYFRIEND set up a recaptcha thing—you know, where you have to type in a couple of curvy words before you post a comment to prove that you’re a real person.  If you’re a frequent commenter (Hi, Margo! Hi, Deborah!) and that’s annoying to you, let me know and I’ll have my BOYFRIEND uninstall it.

My BOYFRIEND also set up some analytic stuff, so I can see how many people are visiting the site.  (Turns out, I already had some analytic stuff that I could look at, but I didn’t know what it was.  And anyway, the stuff he installed is better.)  For example, I now know that I’ve had 517 unique visitors this month for a total of 2,119 visits, and the average visit is 290 seconds long.  It’s also telling me something about 7,679 pages and 13,141 hits in February…I don’t know what that means.  But how exciting, right?  Pretty bar and line graphs!

So, anyway, what’s new with you?

Me, I have a boyfriend.

The Moment Said Smack You

I started a second facebook account. See, a bunch of my former students kept trying to friend me, and, eh, I wasn’t entirely sure I felt like having them all up in my bidness.  So now I have a teacher account and a regular person account.

These kids are in sixth, seventh, eighth grades, and I’ve noticed a couple things about them.  They don’t post many status updates.  But they do become fans.  And how.

I mean, I’m a fan.  I’m a fan of Patty Griffin, and the Daily Show, and Roy Williams, and the Monti, and the Patisserie.  You know, people you can see and places you can go and shows you can watch.

Well, my kids are fans of profiles.  Profiles with titles like:

HURRY UP AND PASS OUT THE TEST BEFORE I FORGET EVERYTHING!

Why do we have to be quiet during a fire drill? Will the fire hear us?

The teacher says work with a partner, I look at my friend, we both nod

I look at my cell phone during awkward situations

Telling inanimate objects to STAY when they look like they’re going to fall

I say ” I was like” instead of “I said.”

When I Say “Yeah Buddy”, Someone Just HAS to say, “Rolling Like A Big Shot.”

Profiles rife with spelling and grammar errors like:

Parents call it “Back Talk” we call it “explaining why their wrong”

Its funny how sitting “boy girl boy girl” used to be a punishment…

No. Your wrong. So just sit there in your wrongness and be wrong.

I have at least one song on my ipod which i have to explain why i have it

Profiles with conversations as titles:

“Sit down, class isn’t over yet”. No, but my attention span is.

“OH, SO LET ME TELL YOU THIS STORY…” “Dude, I was there with you.” “Oh.”

“Sorry.” “STOP SAYING SORRY!” “….Sorry.”

Profiles with incomprehensible titles:

Keep yo hands off my momma, Keep yo hands off my Doritos!!

Why did you smack me? was in the moment and the moment said smack you!! :)

As far as I could see, not much happens on these profiles.  The people who set them up just brag in their status updates about how many fans they have.  And they have millions of fans.  Literally.  That one about the fire drill—over 1.5 million fans.  The “back talk” one—1.7 million.

I really didn’t get it.  And then I got back on my regular person facebook account and saw that a friend of mine had become a fan of a profile called When I was younger I would record my favorite songs off the radio onto tape.

Aw!  I used to do that!

What’s Crazy?

I definitely had OCD tendencies when I was a kid.  For years, if the right side of my head itched and I scratched it, I also had to scratch the left side.  If my left thigh brushed against the arm of the couch as I was walking by, I would have to turn around and brush the right one.  That fixed it.  If I didn’t create a tactile mirror image, I felt off-balance.

And I can’t even actually say that, because I never didn’t fix it.  I guess I should say, if I hadn’t, I knew that I would have felt off-balance.  (I was self-conscious enough to know this behavior was weird, and I didn’t share it with anyone until a year or two ago.)

And then one day, I made a choice to stop.  Just like when I chose to like bananas because they were the only fruit you could reliably find in NYC bodegas.  Or when I decided to stop hating the guitar lick in “The Pina Colada Song” because I liked the rest of the song so much and I wanted to listen to it all the time.

Yeah, I just said to myself, “Self, this balance shit is a mite crazy.  You gotta quit it.”

Sure wish I could do that with the other aspects of my insanity.

Anybody want to share their particular brand of nuttiness?