For example, my friend the other Lina was great blog material for a while. It was great having a foil--a blond, Swedish version of myself. But after I hired male strippers for Lina's college graduation party, she finally (was) revolted. She accused me of deliberately posting unattractive pictures of her, for one. And perhaps more shockingly, she suggested that one of the main reasons I had hired strippers for her party was for blog material. This stung, partially because it was probably true. But the valuable lesson I learned from this incident is that it's better not to tell your friends that you have a blog so you can post as many unflattering pictures of them as you want and tell all the weird stories about their fucked up sexual experiences and they will never get mad at you.

My mother has also gotten irritated with me because of my blog. She doesn't like how I portray her as a caricature of herself. I tried pointing out that I don't like how she behaves like a caricature of herself, but to no avail. She decided that she didn't like it when I posted little vignettes about her shrieking "big black cock" without mentioning once how she cooked for the local soup kitchen. Or if I do write about how she works for the local soup kitchen, but imply that she blows everyone that comes in, that bothers her too. There's no winning with some people.

One of my friends who has one of those really personal type blogs, like, she talks about her feelings and every time she is within spitting distance of a penis, told me that she feels really weird reading my blog because it's so personal. I don't get this. I think it's really hard to read my blog because it's so fucking boring--I never post about anything really interesting and personal because I'm too scared about the fallout. I don't want my dad to think I'm a slut and I don't want my mom to bitch at me about calling her a slut, so there's not a lot left to say, is there?

I can't write about any of my friends that know about my blog, which eliminates most of them. And I've gotten so paranoid that I don't write about the ones that don't know about it, because I'm certain they will find out and whine. And I can't write about my job, because I work at a company with a "blogging policy." And I don't like writing about how badly my dating life is going, because my ex-boyfriend that's stalking me (still) reads it and I don't want him to think that our relationship failure was like, my fault or something. And I don't write about my past, because I'm scared that it will come back to haunt me. And I don't want to write about how precisely I'm completely wasting my life, except in the vaguest terms, because it makes me feel like a complete asshole. Mainly because I'm entering middle age and living my life like a 19-year-old with a trust fund. I'm basically a fat, aged version of an American Apparel ad campaign and I have no idea how it happened.

I've been writing about music all over the place lately and am in the process of writing a bunch of articles right now, including one about the Egyptian Lover. I'm really excited about this one because he's so fat and amazing. Writing articles is a lot easier than editing my novel, which is basically just like flossing. I'm sure in the long run it's worthwhile but it just seems really tedious and bloody whenever I try it. I really hate editing which is why I like blogging. This is basically because I'm a lazy, slovenly person at heart. I'd signed up to take a food journalism class because my other big hobby lately, other than music writing, has been gaining weight. Over the last two days I've made bahn mi every two hours or so because I got an entire loaf of bread and didn't want it to go stale. Sigh.

All I want to do with my life is travel around Asia and get fatter and fatter. But what am I supposed to do when the money runs out? Haven't figured that one out, so am staying put for the summer, I guess. I guess I can handle one summer here if I at least get to go to Malaysia and eat a boatload of laksa at some point in the middle.

In other news, I moved out of my last flat. So I am on my fourth flat in six months. This time, I'm living with my favorite person. Me. I will never live with another human being as long as I live. Granted, moving in with a failed child star and a failed model was destined to, well, fail, but it was seriously demoralizing. I guess I'll have to give a whole post over to the two of them, but I'm still too exhausted by the ordeal. At least I'm alone again.

...read the rest at Italo Hammers: 10 Bad-Boy Gems of Italian Disco on Splice Today.

Lina, do you ever read a piece of writing and feel that your soul has become just a little bit emptier? It's exactly that feeling that makes your writing so unique.

For this, she is the shutitdown commenter of note. Thanks, Brandy, you always brighten up my day.

My latest piece is up on Splice Today: Searching for Jesse Camp. The true story of my first forays into stalking.

When faced with two unpleasant things--say, going to the gym or writing--it seems likely that I will choose the path of laziest resistance. I'm going to end up fatter and and flabbier, but I might just write something other then self-indulgent blog posts. Like self-indulgent novels or self-indulgent articles or self-indulgent resignation letters.

For those of you faithful shutitdown readers (are there any of you left??), it's a re-write of a blog post from years ago. I knew I'd be able to mine this material someday. Read it here.

A lot of people I know that didn't go to college like to point out incorrect uses of "literally" and "ironic." They like to say that Alanis Morrisette's song wasn't actually about irony. Rain on your wedding day, they say, is just bad luck. This did not occur to these people on their own, most of them heard it on talk radio during morning show drive time. Morning show hosts are exactly the sort of people that love to talk about this sort of thing. I like belittling morning show hosts because they are more successful than me. I like writing things on my blog about how dumb other people are because it makes me feel smart. Literally.

Right now, I'm working on my teen novel and decided that I couldn't really get in the mood unless I listened to all of the dumb albums I was listening to when I was 17, so I spent the better part of the last hour looking for my ex-boyfriend's record "Hell Bent for Rehab" and Let Them Eat Jellybeans, an album that would be described as seminal by some, and semenal by others. Other things I've decided I need to listen to before I can even begin considering writing another word: Pixies - Doolittle, Surfer Rosa and Bossanova, Fang - Landshark and Where the Wild Things Are, Skinny Puppy - Rabies, Bad Religion - Suffer, Jane's Addiction, GG Allin - Hated, TSOL - Code Blue, and sad to say it, Rancid - Let's Go. What am I forgetting, guys?

The writing class is a bizarre place. The writing class goads people into writing if only by giving them material in the form of absolutely ridiculous classmates. Thus far, I've held myself back from blogging about these things, because I'm always too much of a pansy to write about current events in my life for fear of discovery. I have a paranoid suspicion that everyone I know secretly reads my blog, despite 99% of the humans I interact with having no idea that it even exists. This is much like the problem I developed around the age of thirteen, when I was convinced that this boy that I had a crush on could see me all of the time, no matter where I was or what I was doing. This served to make bathtime especially uncomfortable, but got me to stop picking my nose.

In college, one of my classmates in a writing class was so unbelievably uncomfortable-making that words defied me at the time to describe her here. The class was young adult novel writing, and we were all writing very thinly-veiled books about ourselves. Hers, however, was painful in its obviousness, as it was about a girl of mixed race with a learning disorder, same as the author, as she had been proud to explain to the class on her first day. She was one of those people who you could just tell would spend way too much time in the gym locker room naked. Like, fixing her makeup and hair before she had gotten dressed and not bothering to cover herself with a towel because we're all women here, right? But at the same, you could just tell that she was secretly hoping someone would say something to her so that she could be indignant about how badly she was being treated. Her writing was sort of like that too.

The quality of the prose I'm willing to write off to the learning disability, but the content was sort of jaw-dropping in its narcissism. The main character was a younger version of my classmate in all aspects, except better looking. "Ayana was not fat, nor was she thin. She was just right." Ayana's creator, however, was sort of a fatty, but you could tell it was the sort of thing that she fixedly would refuse to admit because she was "just right." This is, let me emphasize, completely different than the I've-got-a-few-extra-pounds-but-go-fuck-yourself attitude that I myself sometimes adopt and which I believe is completely acceptable. This sort of personality type relies on stating the world is one way, a way that they are really good looking and never at fault, when the rest of us can so clearly see that the world is not that way. Then they sit around and wait for one of us to finally say something, to finally get to the point where we just cannot go on listening to how the earth or flat or how the sky is red and to point out how the world really is, so that they can use it as more proof of how horrible people treat them.

The character in her tales, Ayana, suffered persecution at the hands of her un-understanding classmates, a martyr for mixed race children with learning disabilities everywhere. And that's why I really shouldn't be blogging about was absolute drivel this girl was forcing me to read, because it's sort of horrible to be abusing this poor, self-satisfied girl who probably has been given a lot of grief in her life for being different and so obviously proud of that fact. Were her character fat, I think, I could have forgiven a lot more.

My current class has one of the same type in it. He's writing a book about his struggle with bipolar disorder, which if I'm being honest, is exactly the sort of book I like to read. Of course he's managed to take all of the fun out of it, and made what should be an interesting and terrifying life story completely uninteresting. He's a huge, angry looking man, who cutely refers to himself, and all sufferers of the disorder, as "polar bears." Last week he came into class and, having decided that writing a novel was too hard--keep in mind that this is a class entitled "Finishing Your Novel"--that he would write an instructional manual instead, based on a pamphlet that he had picked up at a doctor's office that he kindly provided us with. As the only person in the class capable of either giving or receiving constructive criticism, I questioned the purpose of re-writing a pamphlet but including no new content. The information is already out there, I said, everyone already knows how to find it. What they don't know is your story, and that's probably more interesting for everyone to read. The polar bear nearly blew a gasket and, shaking the binder he had so neatly organized and numbered over the past few weeks, shrieked like a petulant child "But I've worked so hard on this!"

A week later, he came back with a personal essay that he was going to include in his polar bear manual. The personal essay was interesting, in the way that people writing about how shitty their lives are is always interesting, at least, that's what I bank on here, but the overall tone was so irritating that for once, I was actually forced into silence. The point of his essay was that he was a victim of this disorder, and that most everything he did and does should be excused for it. This is exactly the sort of thing that were he writing "fiction" like the rest of us, one of us would finally raise our hands and say "Is it intentional that your character is coming off as a selfish, self-absorbed fucktard? Because, like, if that's intentional, you've done a really great job."

However irritating I find this guy and his subsequent angry comments on my work--he clearly has not forgiven me yet--I can't help but hear that high-pitched screech "But I've worked so hard on this!" as I'm absorbed in my work. I've finished the first draft of my novel and am now in the tedious process of re-writing it, trying to force it into some semblance of order and narrative. There are things in it that I know don't work, but I'd rather try and find a way to write around them rather than just scrap them completely. My re-write has become about just adding more and more, and taking nothing away. I can't cut that paragraph or scene, I've worked too hard on it, my inner polar bear rages. So now I'm trying to learn to let go, both in my book and my life.

"Tonight Lina and I were talking about the old, old days when girls weren't taught to read, and she said, 'I'd die if I couldn't read! Reading's the best thing there is! If there weren't any books in the world I'd write a thousand pages!'"

--Garrison Keillor in a review of 'Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy' by Eric G Wilson .

This got a chuckle out of me--just substitute the word blog for book and we've got a winner. If I updated more often would you visit more?