Best of the Blog: Year One

One year ago today, I wrote an innocuous blog entry on LiveJournal after creating a user account. It read:

“I’m not sure how often I’ll use this LiveJournal platform, but it’s an interesting form of media I might explore. I’m basically just posting this to see what my journal will look like.”

190 posts later (67 on LiveJournal, 123 on Blogger), I can say with confidence that I enjoy blogging. As I’ve said, I enjoy the instant satisfaction of having people read something I’ve written. I’m not the type of person to journal in secret and never share my work. I want people to read what I write, and I want to improve how I write. In my opinion, there’s no better way to do that than write.

As a result, I’ve written more creatively—not counting the blog—in the past year than ever before. I’ve written 6 short stories in the past year, with one more in the works, and a healthy chunk of a novel. I had feared that I would write less after I started blogging, but the truth is that I actually write more.

Yesterday I clicked through every single one of my blog entries to find the highlights, the classics. I was seriously surprised at the sheer amount of content I’ve written. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way at all. If you were around for Irruminibbles (or if not, check out the first such entry here), you know that many of my entries were quite lengthy, and they presented multiple topics in one long list. In hindsight, I wish I had spread out that content a little bit. It’s one thing for a reader to digest a long blog entry, but for them to read through a long blog entry discussing 8 different topics…that’s a lot to ask.

That being said, I think I wrote some good stuff on LiveJournal that shouldn’t be overlooked (I also wrote, and will continue to write, a lot of crap). Thus, in today’s entry, I’m going to quote some of that classic content. I’ll continue to do so over the next few days, in no real particular order, but probably ending with the best Blogger entries. I’ll post links to all of the classic entries from LiveJournal as well, including My Greatest Shame, Pepsi Ice Cucumber, a list of bathroom considerations that should be posted in every workplace bathroom, and the originator of the Caroline Vault, the Disney Vault.

(Note that the follow quotes are just excerpts—if you want the full entry, click on the title.)

I Will Carry Your Baby

“I think that most women out there want to have babies. Babies are cute, they give you the chance to put something living into the world, and they give you something to talk about when all the other women are having babies (that’s my rudimentary understanding of females). However, I think that most women don’t want to actually carry babies and give birth. Sure, there’s the joy of nurturing a life inside of you for nine months, but if there were another way, would you consider it? Say you got pregnant, and after a few weeks you could have the baby taken out of you via an unobtrusive surgical procedure involving lasers (why do surgeries involving lasers seem so much better and safer? They’re friggin’ beams of light that can cut through anything! I’m getting my kitten declawed in a few weeks, and I was all worried that it’s really going to hurt the cat. Then someone told me that the vet will probably use lasers, and I was like, oh, cool, no problem.). Then your embryo is placed in a futuristic, translucent pod-incubator where you can watch it grow for the next nine months. Like The Matrix, but without the evil robots. Would you choose that instead of lugging around a giant placenta for almost a year, followed by up to 48 hours of excruciating pain before you can push out the baby? Sure you would.

But there are no futuristic pods, no uncannily safe laser surgeries. So I’m here to present you with another option: I will carry your baby.”

(This was a three-entry blog, concluding with the best blog entry title ever, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Me to Carry Your Baby”)

The Original Discussion of an Experience-Based Job-Search Engine

“So my question is, are there any reputable job search engines that allow you to filter for years of experience so you can avoid senior-level positions for which you’re not qualified? It would be helpful to be able to eliminate jobs that have qualifications that you can’t meet as you search instead of as you’re looking through the jobs.

In fact, wouldn’t that be the ideal way of looking for a job? A lot of people don’t know what they want to do. I definitely don’t. I could work as a publishing project manager again, but there are plenty of other interesting jobs out there. So is there a job search engine that lets you put in your qualifications—not desired-job keywords—and it’ll create a list of applicable jobs? You input yourself, basically (4-year degree in International Business, 4 years experience in publishing/project management, above-average at using Microsoft Office and technology in general, 5’10”, sweats only at night, good hair, tiny hands, rarely splices commas, runs a 4.7-s 40, easily aroused by Asian women and well-constructed Excel spreadsheets, makes a mean garlic bread, fading comprehension of Japanese, etc.), and you get a list of applicable results.”

Also included in this entry was a classic Jamey rant about sweet tea at restaurants:

“Waiters and waitresses of the world, if your restaurant doesn’t serve sweet tea, the answer to the question “Do you have sweet ice tea?” is NO. It’s very simple. If you have it, you say yes. If you don’t, you say no. I know there’s sugar on the table. If I wanted to add that sugar to my tea, I wouldn’t be asking if you serve sweet tea. Pointing out that there’s sugar on the table is like pointing out that you serve food. It’s an insult to the customer.”

Random Irruminibble

“I’m considering starting a pyramid scheme that involves actually building a pyramid.”

Jamey Wears Caroline’s Pants

“I spent an hour of my day today wearing a soaking wet pair of Caroline’s jeans around the condo. Long story short, I had accidentally put these jeans—her favorite, most comfortable pair—in the dryer on high heat, and they shrunk at the waist and in the legs. To reverse this error, I soaked the jeans in warm water, rung them out, and then put them on, stuffing extra pairs of boxers around the waist to make it stretch as much as possible. After an hour, I took off the jeans and weighted down the waist and the legs to stretch them back to their original length. I’m not sure if it worked, but I’m crossing my fingers. Otherwise I’ll have a very angry lady sleeping in my bed.”

The Court Reporter for My Life

“It would be awesome to have someone follow me around all day and record everything I said and everything that was said to me. The transcript would be extremely useful for playing back conversations between Caroline and me so that we could know who was right or wrong: “May I refer to June 13, 2006, when you stated—with no intended sarcasm or irony—that if you ‘ever don’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign,’
you’ll ‘sever your own arm and give yourself the finger.’”

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