Black Sheep of My Blog Family

In my opening entry for this blog I recapped what I claimed were my past three blogs. No one called me out on it, but I have had far more than three blogs since I started down this path. While three of my blogs seemed to be popular (the highlight of my popularity occurring when I went out for drinks with friends a few weeks ago and one friend tried to woo another peer to come by saying "yea...Marianna's here...right, the one with the blog" Best moment of my life), there were three that died shortly after their arrival. It's sad, because those three each had what the other blogs so severely lacked...a point. Clearly my readers prefer my incoherent ramblings. I can't complain, maintaining a blog of ramblings is far easier than maintaining one with a point. Let's take a look back and see if we can pinpoint where these blogs went wrong....

Lies I Told Today

Eh, it's pretty easy to see where this one went wrong, actually. People don't like it when you lie, and they REALLY don't like finding out that you lied to them when they read your blog later in the day. This was supposed to be my summer blog and after only a few entries it got to the point where people were trying to pick out my lies. Sadly, this went against the whole point of the blog which was to document accidental lies. Slip-ups. Word vomit. Such as the time I told the woman on the train that I understood how hard it was to travel with a baby. Lie. Total lie. But it just sort of came out. I wouldn't even think of documenting intentional lies, I keep those to myself! I'm pretty ok with letting this one go down the tubes. In the end, it was for the best.

Werner Herzog Fan Club

The problem with this one was that it was a group blog. The idea was that each week we would have a prompt and everyone would write in their thoughts. We covered possible holiday dinner ideas and hottest presidents. In the grand scheme of my unsuccessful blogs, this one was pretty successful for a few weeks. While I know my friends are funny (hence, why I picked them, so I could steal their jokes) they surprised me with their level of commitment to the blog. Then one day they just stopped. I guess I'm to blame as I wrote the last prompt and in looking over it it was pretty crappy (something about pants and Bette Midler). In my defense I had just finished my thesis. I'm still going to go ahead and blame my friend P-Saf for the failure on this one. She's always an easy target.

Among Enemies

This is my biggest regret. I had grand plans for this blog. Let's start with a little background. During my final semester of college I heard about this project that the Haverford students were doing called "Among Friends" in which they actually paid "artists" to come to their school and lead "activities". These are in quotes because it was complete bullshit. One of the "activities" was a tour of Wal-Mart. Another person sewed felt beanbags. Even better, they blogged about it. Apparently their mission was to build a better community or something of that sort. I don't know, I just assumed that was the case. That's always the case in these sort of enrichment opportunities. In related news, Haverford apparently lost 35.5% of their endowment last year.

Anyway, I decided to create Among Enemies as a response. I came up with the goal of breaking my friends apart by graduation. The blog was going to "document" my quest. The problem came when some friends thought I was seriously trying to break us apart. My bad. My other problem came when I couldn't decide whether I was actually going to stage these events or lie about them. All and all it became far to confusing for myself and my readers and I gave up after three entries. I assure you, though, if it had worked out how I had wanted it to, it would have been hilarious. But, as my friend Nicky says, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas. This might have actually been one of the first things she ever said to me and I distinctly remember thinking she was crazy. It's now my favorite saying.

Moral of the story? Don't expect a blog with a point from me anytime soon.