All writing will be in earnest

I hate blogging already. The word "blog" makes me think of a toy based on suction cups, like a green rubber frog that climbs the walls and then turns sticky and dumb.
I just made the mistake of revisiting a few of the blogs I used to read compulsively, like Que Sera Sera, then made the bigger mistake of clicking on their links lists, which led to an endless spiral of shame and despair. So many hip, uber-ironic people out there, with web-design skills and the catalogic knowledge necessary to riff on celebrities, fashion, underground writers (I guess), and items like the Roomba -- whatever consumer good is the newest thing that's cool to covet or ridicule. I don't even know if the word "cool" is still used to mean "cool" in the same way as it was in the late 90s, when my awareness, and hence ability to be post-post-post-modern, fell into its deep and eternal sleep. Now I know how adults in the 80s felt when "bad" really meant "good!" Ack!

What I'm trying to say is: I am a dork. Not in the cool way in which it was (in the late 90s, at least) cool to be a self-aware dork. I'm a Jean Teasdale dork (see "Ack!" above). In the sense that I have not turned my dorkre into lucre by becoming a programmer or graphic designer or wry social critic, or one of those people who talk on "I Love the 80s." In the sense that I know it was recently cool to address inanimate objects or institutions in essays ("Dear Retail Clothing Industry, get a clue," "Bath poufs, you're the best"), but I don't know what the current mutation of that is, or where to go to find it. In the sense that I enjoy watching Access Hollywood, and adopt the opinions of Salon.com as my own because they feel so right.

Ben was right: I am lazy. I lack the wherewithal to calibrate the proportion of irony, ennui, and ripped-off street slang presently in vogue.

So I hereby announce that I will do away with all meta-commentary, and blog in earnest. My lady friend Lucrecia knows what I mean. Earnestness has served me well, and I will trust it. This blog will be strewn with adorable photos of my nephew, Theo; crooked self-portraits of Ben and I arm in arm at sunset, holding cans of Coors Light (in our other arms); hand-wringing over real estate prices and the constant, creeping decay of the tropics; and trite anecdotes about work and family that will be interesting because they're about me.
I hope that's okay.