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.)

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

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.

I also have no problem with Taco Bell. Heck, this post is happening because I went to Taco Bell.

I just have a problem with…ridiculousness.

Usually I go through the drive-through and eat in my car, listening to my own radio instead of Taco Bell’s, but because the drive-through line was long and the dining room was empty, I ate in the dining room today. During that time, I happened to look up, through the window on the other side of which was the drive-through line.

In the drive-through line, a woman was reading a book on her steering wheel…which would have been fine, except…it was something about a Fiber Diet. This led me to consider the fiber content of most of what Taco Bell offers. While I don’t happen to have memorized the nutrition facts of everything, I know that there can’t be much in, say, the nacho cheese sauce. I would guess that she would’ve gotten more fiber by eating the book instead of reading it at Taco Bell.

I have nothing against healthy stuff and nothing against Taco Bell, but the two, when juxtaposed, are laughable.

If you keep tailgating, I’ll slow down 5 MPH. It’s called leaving enough stopping distance to not be middle car in a pileup if the car in front of me has to stop.

If you keep tailgating more so that the grill of your Compensator is the only thing in my rear view mirror, I’ll slow down another 5 MPH. I can do that all day. Obviously it bothers you more than me.

If you pass me as soon as the lane splits and makes a passing lane, you might not believe this but I really have no problem with that. Unlike you, I have nothing to prove as long as you’re not trying to push me around.

If you have your front passenger give me the bird, I’ll roll my eyes. Good for you, you have a finger.

If it happens again, I’ll do the exact same thing. If you drive like a normal human being, on the other hand, we can both drive with the flow of traffic. You pick; my car has air and a radio, so I don’t care which.

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.

Overcommercialized Christmas is a given. My main childhood Christmas tradition was three hours of frantic shopping on Christmas Eve, another one of wrapping (once one is allowed to do one’s own wrapping, which was a lot older than it should’ve been because it took Mom that long to give up on wanting everything perfect), and half an hour of unwrapping on Christmas morning. One of my more vivid Christmas-related memories is a Christmas list my sister started in September and kept adding to. I’m tempted to say I didn’t pick up on the emphasis on “stuff” to the same degree because of being a kid, but even so, it seems like it’s getting worse.

I stopped caring much about Christmas when I was 12 or 13. My parents were having Problems and my dad wasn’t around that day; I’m not sure where he went. Probably somewhere with friends from work. I get it, my mom was a more serious pain to be around than usual during that time, and he was raising the bar on parenting compared to previous generations, but it still torpedoed Christmas for us kids. Would that have happened if the people involved were focused on making Christmas a nice time for each other, rather than getting stuff and impressing others with how much stuff they buy? Probably not, I think.

My good Christmas memories rarely involve shopping. Snow was good, when it applied. The few that involved spending money in any direction were things like the card exchange last year, in which we all had would have had to buy stamps and either cards or the stuff to make cards but shopping wasn’t the point, and the giving tree at Chemeketa (in which some of us spoiled other students’ kids).

And yet, people can’t seem to figure it out, to the point where it’s worth it for stores to have “holiday price wars,” some people don’t think twice about whether they need “Christmas loans,” and last year’s Christmas spending predictions came in at numbers such as $795.86 and $907 per person.

When I read the holiday price wars article, I was ready to boycott Wal-Mart. Two things stopped me. The most obvious is, I already don’t shop at Volde-Mart, but I think the other is more important: they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work. They’re trying to get into people’s wallets, which wouldn’t work if people weren’t willing to get that wallet out. $800-$900 per person for Christmas shopping can’t all be at Wal-Mart anyway.

So, instead, maybe I’ll boycott people.

However, a friend of mine posted “Ten signs you spend too much time in internet forums” a few weeks ago, and seven of the ten signs apply to me. No, I’m not going to say which seven. The list does seem to be based somewhat on our group’s quirks and traditions, so I’m not sure how much that affects how many of them apply to me.

According to Wikipedia, on the other hand, internet addiction doesn’t actually exist–people spend too much time on the internet but it’s not a separate mental disorder or addiction. We do, of course, know that Wikipedia’s always right. But on the off chance that it’s not, here’s my Top 10 Signs You Might be an Internet Addict.

1. You’ve taken this quiz at Blogthings either out of actual curiosity or in hopes of being an addict.
2. You not only know what a lolcat is, you’ve made one or two at some point, you celebrate Caturday, and when you see something wacky in real life you think “that could be a lolcat/loldog/lolcar/lolcousin/etc.”
3. Your friends are from the internet, even if you’ve met them in real life.
4. You have a list of the people you know online, with other information such as their ages, pets, obsessions, etc.
5. Even if you know your friends’ offline names, you frequently give them new online names.
6. Even your friends who weren’t from the internet now use the internet to stay in touch with you.
7. If you made a list of people you really trust, it would contain more people from online than offline.
8. You know why “Wikipedia’s always right” is an ironic statement, but you use it anyway.
9. You not only have a blog, but you have a blog spam problem, and a strategy for fighting it.
10. You make top 10 lists about the internet in that blog.