Speaking of kicking anthills.

Now, I get that there’s no one right way to blog and people can write whatever they want to. In practice it seems like this ends up meaning that people mostly write about themselves, with varying amounts of other stuff they’re interested in. One could argue that the extent to which the author assumes their life will be interesting to others is a measure of self-centeredness; I don’t think it’s an absolute measure but a correlation seems likely. This would explain why most teenagers blog.

However, even aside from the issue of self-centeredness, how do people decide which things about them are important enough to blog? Scanning my own blog quickly for something to go off of, I see a bit of religion, a gas price that doesn’t look that bad any more, my car going crazy, more political commentary than I’d like but it is that year (%@#*&), some overdue housecleaning and how much better it would be with a helicopter, a lolcat, something that looks like a D&D session, an obnoxious test, my rant on taxes and the economy, some blathering about the meaning of life or something, a triscuit, and a series of posts involving my stolen cell phone. That’s not an exhaustive list; it’s more like the low-hanging fruit. So basically, I notice a lot of stuff to rant about, and a lot of quirky stuff. Other people would probably say that noticing funny stuff and going off on annoying stuff are reasonably typical of me. So, within certain limits, the stuff I think and talk about becomes the stuff I blog about.

Here’s where the anthill comes in.

My sister got married about a week ago. I can’t point you at it in her blog because she hasn’t posted anything about it. Her haircut, however, got two posts. Maybe this is just my crazy idea, but I’m pretty sure that getting married should be at least as important as a haircut. I hereby present this as evidence that society’s values are fracked.

(Full disclosure: Yes, I did once blog a haircut. Once. And I haven’t gone and gotten married.)

If a person accidentally books an extra connection, even if the booking company could make money by changing it, even if the airline could make money by changing it, no one will touch it. If this makes sense to you, you might be Expedia. I mean, I get that the rules are what they are, but simple dollargrabbing self-interest ought to kick in on this.

Check out the theme on my cousin’s blog, then my sister’s. Let me add that, although I’m hosting them, I didn’t inflict my design taste on them. I did help my cousin dig through the main WordPress themes database but the did the actual choosing stuff. All I did was point my sister at the themes database since she was all about wanting to do it herself.

So yeah…it’s like we’re related or something.

When we were all teenagers, four of us–me, my sister, our cousin Teresa, and her friend Julie–agreed on one thing in particular: we were definitely not going to “grow up.”

Well, it seems like Julie did, possibly something to do with having three kids (she’s only a year older than I am…yikes…). Rianna’s on the edge. And Teresa and I…it’s not easy, but we’re fighting back, and trying to “rescue” the other two by dragging them along with us. Most notably we’re working on WARP again; see Teresa’s post for more details on that.

Is it a little bit silly? Well…yeah…no sillier than the idea of paying someone to talk to you for an hour about how crazy you are though. The thing is, all this responsible adult crap pretty much sucks…I like teaching, I’d do it for free if I didn’t have bills, but having to be anywhere and do anything on someone else’s schedule, well, let’s face it, no one feels like it every day. So, I figure, I can either have a full-on “is this really the dream I signed up to chase OMG get me a freaking refund immediately with sprinkles” quarterlife crisis, or I can trade my Responsible Adult character sheet in for an elvish mage or something now and then.

Playing with a MySpace profile made my sister think she knew web coding, when she didn’t even know what I meant by FTP.  She’s on the real internet now, let the reeducation begin.

I’m thankful for my family, who raised me with values about what’s important in life so that I didn’t turn out to be a wannabe Child of iPrivilege (not a typo).

I’m thankful that some of my students are really nice kids.

I’m thankful that I work with such nice people that I had two Thanksgiving invitations to juggle as well as enough leftovers sent home with me that I haven’t had to cook all day.

I’m thankful that if I had to cook today, I’ve got stuff on the shelves and money in the bank so that I can get whatever I need.

I’m thankful that I have a job that I don’t hate, that pays the bills and gives me a way to help people.

I’m thankful that I live in a country where I, as a woman, am free to have that job, to own what I earn from it, to vote, to write this blog, to live on my own, to drive a car, and to be a friend to a few of the people in line to keep it that way.  I’m especially thankful for those friends.

I’m thankful that my brain cells and wacky hobbies let me make myself useful, for example to another friend just a little while ago, even if it takes a while for stuff to work.

I’m thankful that I’m healthy, my cats are healthy, insurance is about to make my teeth healthy (over time, of course, because these things take time), and life is generally OK.

I mean, I appreciate the use of my uncle’s laptop while mine is in the shop for a fried power jack.  I really do.  It’s going to make stuff so much less evil (i.e. I won’t have to do everything from The Old Dell aka PIECE OF CRAP).  BUT…I’m typing this from IE7 (not impressed) and Vista.  Is it an operating system or a video game?

Everything I’ve figured out how to do, everything I’ve clawed my way out of and up from, everything I had to basically make up from scratch because no one who knew could manage to care…and I get lectured for half an hour in a 3-way conference, about clothes and hairstyles. I thought I was dressing more professionally…shows what I know. And as for my hair, I know how to do exactly two things to it when it’s this length, let it just sit there or tie it back, and tying it back looks worse by the end of the day because it’s not all one length and half my hair gets out of the tie.

“Dress professionally.” What the heck does that mean, aside from the list of things it’s not, and how am I supposed to do that without dropping another $200 that I don’t have on clothes? Find a saleslady who knows what’s on sale and stuff, they say, but the thought of going up to someone and talking about what I need…I can’t even stand to think about clothes stuff unless I absolutely have to. It’s hard to explain…

For some reason, my sister’s wardrobe was important when we were kids, and mine wasn’t. She could change clothes at random because she felt like it during the day; I had to go to school in clothes that were too tight because I’d outgrown them. She got clothes whenever she asked; I had to literally run out of pants, by extremely outgrowing or wearing holes in bad places, in order to get a trip to Value Village for a few new pairs of pants, and then got yelled at because of what I could find with a half-off tag–they sort of fit because they were stretchy material, but only went down about to the middle of my calves. No doubt Mom resented losing a few days’ cigarette money too.

And then there was the time when Mom said to have whatever we might want to take with us packed up because she didn’t know when but she could be getting us out of our rooms some night to take us away from Dad, so I gathered up all my clothes into a backpack…and…waited…I don’t remember how long I kept re-wearing what I was wearing that day, in order to keep everything packed, but I know that I kept doing that for a long time. It was the only way I could think of to protect myself from ending up with nothing.

Some things just don’t leave a person. Somehow, I turned out almost normal, I’m only screwed up about a few things, it’s just that those are doozies.

So out of all the things to be “improvements for me to make,” it had to be clothes.

Last night, I set my cousin up on a WordPress blog, since she mentioned she liked the way I had mine set up. Livejournal makes exporting journal entries a pain–single-month files, it won’t take a range. I knew I was glad I didn’t use them. Anyway, she’s up and running now and even picked a theme. And I’ve fixed the theme in a few little places, that being pretty normal. Take a look!