The Experiment

I blogged Monday-Friday every week in July, just to see if it could be done without me going crazy. I think we all know the inevitable outcome of that although to be fair I didn't have far to go.

I really don’t do enough to justify five days a week of boring people to death. Unless you want to hear about the new Rowenta iron I bought yesterday. After all, you read through the torturously mind-numbing acquisition of my Ralph Lauren sunglasses in Malibu, where I couldn’t get a fucking bag to save my life. Maybe in my second year of blogging I'll be spilling my personal drama on a daily basis but so far I'm as closeted as Tom Cruise.

I’m also an anal-retentive, hyper-vigilant person who re-writes a post about a thousand times before I upload it to Blogger. I am always working on anywhere from 15-20 pieces at any given time. And yet I refuse to make my bed every day because I just mess it up every night and what kind of a waste of my precious sitting-around time is that?

I always go back into my blog and rewrite. Sometimes weeks later. I’ll find a more concise word, a funnier tag. While I’m working on one piece, I’ll look something up in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and will go back into my archives because it has suddenly dawned on me that I used an incorrect word back in October of 2006, a word like meaningful, which S&W defines as a ‘bankrupt adjective.’ And like Monica on Friends, who can’t sleep knowing there’s a pair of sneakers in the living room that haven’t been put away, I will rush back into my archives to fix it. This could be why I don’t have a boyfriend.

The most legendary example of this syndrome is Larry Gelbart, the writer of practically the entire TV series M.A.S.H., which was on the air from 1972 to 1983. He was at a comedy conference in Aspen in the early part of the 00's and Bill Maher asked him if he could relate to the renowned ‘A writer doesn’t write; he re-writes.’ And Gelbart responded without missing a beat, “I’m still re-writing episodes of M.A.S.H.”

He made me feel less dirty.

Sidebar: Main Entry: side·bar Function: noun

1 a: a short news story or graphic accompanying and presenting sidelights of a major story b: something incidental: SIDELIGHT.

2: a conference between the judge, the lawyers, and sometimes the parties to a case that the jury does not hear.

In the world of Blogs I have no idea why that list over there on the right (or sometimes left) is referred to as a sidebar. It is used INCORRECTLY. I’ve been writing for twenty years and shit like that makes me crazy. And don’t get me started on spell check. I’ll go right out a window and take you with me.

I'm not a perfect writer. My spell check is constantly reminding me that I write in fragments and wouldn't recognize a comma if it French-kissed me. Whatever, dude.

I'm going back to my normal posting schedule which p.s. I never had.

End of rewritten-at-least-30-times chat.