Fri 19 Sep 2008
For those of you who aren’t following along on Twitter, my first TVgasm recap is up. Much to my relief, I get to do a show that I love (House), something with a bit of brains, instead of some knockoff reality show that I’m not interested in. Don’t worry, it’ll still be a snarkfest.
Check out the recap here. It would seem I also picked up my first critic already, in the comments. Sweet. Now I just need my first rejection, and I’ll be a real live writer…
Thu 18 Sep 2008
Yes, I’m pimping Copyblogger again, but I couldn’t resist this guest post from “Writer Dad” Sean Platt:
Sean, you’re now on my RSS short list. I’ve wasted a lot of time over the last couple of years pussyfooting around wondering if I was good enough or “meant ” to be doing this. Thanks for the wake-up call.
Fri 12 Sep 2008
I normally stay away from writing about politics. I’ll give you two reasons.
However, I don’t really consider this a political post. Because American politics is no longer political, it’s cultural.
For your consideration, here are a few snippets of so-called political discourse culled from Twitter in the last couple of days:
“Please keep coming back to Philadelphia, jackhole”(in reference to McCain)
“…if Obama was white, he would have been laughed out of the primary runoff.”
“Talking Barbie said ‘Math is Hard.’ Talking Caribou Barbie says ‘Foreign Policy is Hard.’”
What is wrong with you people? What is wrong with all of us?
Why do we act like soccer hooligans when it comes to politics? There is no civility any more, no critical thinking. Both sides see in black and white. Listen to the pundits on TV or read the bloggers. They cannot say a single good word about someone on the other side. The “strategists” have an excuse; spin is their job. But for the rest of us: has our diet of sound bites made us so intellectually lazy that we just swallow all that?
Everyone on the left is a hippie, a terrorist, or an anarchist. Everyone on the right is evil, stupid, a hypocrite, or just plain out of touch. Are we that different from each other?
Or are we just preaching to our own choirs in our own echo chambers, having forgotten how to have intelligent discourse with someone who doesn’t think just like us? We hide in our red-state or blue-state tribes, and we have lost the ability to relate to people outside of our little boxes. The ideals of those on the other side are lunacy to us, because we don’t know anyone who thinks like that.
We surround ourselves with people who think like us, talk like us, look like us. Thanks to the Internet, if we don’t live near anyone just like us, we can still be friends with them on Facebook. We don’t have to talk to the neighbors next door if we don’t like their bumper sticker. But on Twitter, or the blogs, we can be pretty certain that we’re among “friends” and everyone’s going to agree with everything we say. If not, well, it’s easy to call people names with a keyboard.
So much for the marketplace of ideas.
I promised you two reasons I don’t like to write about politics, didn’t I?
The problem is, I have a few too many Red Tribe values that, as far as I can tell, aren’t shared by the leader of the Blue Tribe.
But you know what? Who cares?
In truth, I’d take either candidate at this point. All four people in the race are amazing human beings with admirable qualities: courage, dignity, wisdom, spunk. Or do you have so little faith in our political system that you think only one side of the machine turns out decent products? George Bush is the worst president ever. No wait, Bill Clinton was. No, I’m pretty sure it’s the next guy, whichever one it turns out to be.
Besides, this country is not a dictatorship (no, not even after the last eight years). One President does not make or break the country. People complain that it’s hard to get things done in Washington. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s why I hold my nose and cheer for the two-party system.
America needs people that stand up for the little guy and make sure everyone gets their fair shot at the dream. America also needs people that want the government to get out of the way so that individuals can achieve the dream.
I swear it’s a coincidence that I started writing this post on September 11, but God help us if it takes another one of those to put us all back on the same side of the fence.
Wed 10 Sep 2008
I was recently tagged to do a “Six things” blog post. I understand that the point is to be more real to your audience — get naked as it were — but with all due respect to my good friends who have done one of these, I think this idea embodies a lot of what’s wrong with blogging. As a writer, everything I write is biographical in some respect — but it’s not going to resonate with you, dear reader, unless you find something about yourself in there as well. Otherwise, I may as well tell you six things about my dog.
So I’m going to turn this thing inside out, and write six random things about you. You may be astonished at my profound insight, or you may roll your eyes and call me a pretentious dork. Either way, I’m going to have fun with this. So here we go.
You’re a genius. There’s at least one thing that you’re brilliant at, something that no one else you know can do half as well. If you don’t know what that thing is, go find out.
You care. You don’t want to just pay the bills or get by. You want to give back, live the dream, do something meaningful with your life, all that stuff.
You’re distracted. You spend half the day answering emails and apologizing to people for not responding sooner. You follow 100 people you don’t know on Twitter. If it takes you ten seconds to read a post from each one — assuming there are no links to click on! — and each person posts several times a day… well, you do the math.
You’re on the fence. You don’t know if you’re good enough to succeed at doing what you’re really good at, so you go on devoting less mindshare to the things that could really make a difference — to yourself and others. But you do need to pay those bills, and you may even have a family to support. You’re afraid it would take too much work and time to do both right.
You’re a hypocrite. It’s OK, admit it. Everyone is. We can’t live up to our own standards, and that eats us up. Society loves to hate hypocrisy, so it’s easier not to even try.
You suck. There, I said it. Thanks to #3-5, you aren’t doing your best at whatever it is you’re great at. You’re probably using less than 50% of your potential, and you know it. You’re sometimes plagued by self-doubt. The people who are successful at doing what you want to do must have more talent, right?
Did I get it right?
Or did I tell you six things about me after all?
Instead of ending this with a list of six random bloggers I know, I’m going to “tag” six superstars whose ideas I ripped off who inspired the above, and stated those points much better than I could. If you’re looking for solutions to the dilemma presented herein, go check them out.
Tue 2 Sep 2008
I’m thrilled to announce that TVgasm’s fall recapper auditions are over, and I made the cut. That’s right! This fall, I’ll be ripping into some poor, unsuspecting TV show on a weekly basis. I don’t know which one yet, but I’ll keep you posted.
Huge piles of thanks to all of you who voted for me. This is my first honest-to-goodness writing gig (unless you count the AskSpace thing a couple of years ago). It’s unpaid, but I should pick up some readers, and I’ll get to find out if I can produce under a deadline. Besides, now I can sit in front of the TV and say it’s for my writing career.
Stay tuned!
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