‘In order to qualify for the shit pub crawl, the bar has to be filled with shitty people, but not so shitty that upon entering it you will be immediately stabbed by a toothless drunk.’ So pronounced Floppy Jackass [FJ], a likeable, lanky, and often impressively inebriated man. Last Monday I was at a bar less than two blocks from my condo with five male members of my partner’s pool team, planning for an exciting Saturday night that would be filled with cultural awakening and learning opportunities. Each of us was tasked with selecting a crappy bar near our current location. Another man, aptly named Drink and Touch [DAT]—if you thought he was affectionate before downing a few beer, just wait—suggested that we start at the Econolodge, and my partner called dibs on a slum hole creatively titled ‘Pizza and Steak.’ All week I wracked my brain for another venue, finally choosing a seedy casino. In the end, however, I learned that fun-filled lads who drink can also be quite lazy. Once settled in at the usual haunt, playing pool and hurling taunts at each other, they were loathe to shift. So the pub crawl has been postponed, leaving me with an empty paragraph in this post, which I had optimistically labelled ‘put funny story here’ before any events had unfolded. Sucks to be you.  

In lieu of a saucy tale that cleverly calls attention to gendered dynamics and highlights the ambivalence of class identity even as it drips with sexual innuendo, you are stuck reading another boring ass blog about the tiresome life of a dull individual; so this blog is now just like most other blogs. ‘What did she say?’ I imagine my imagined audience asking. ‘Isn’t FFG an active member of the blogosphere, an avid reader of online material, a recent recipient of Canada’s Best Feminist Blog award for 2011?’ Yes and no. Yes FFG has won awards—including Best Law Blog which kind of throws a damper on the whole affair, don’t you think?—but I rarely read other blogs because most of them irk the fucking shit out of me. There, I said it. I do not care what your cute kids did today, or about how to save money on the matching sheet sets for their themed bedrooms. I eschew your advice about how to relax, slow down, and take care of myself. I am at first intrigued and then disappointed by your happy housekeeping tips. And by the way, your gratuitious use of clip-art images is seriously ennervating. God save you from my wrath if you recount banal daily activities in run-on sentences, offering the usual self-help slogans instead of critiquing your normalizing impulses and necessary repetition of pre-existing identity formations. [By the way I cooked a wine-infused pot roast this weekend, it is delicious, looking forward to leftovers]. What’s more, I hereby make a solemn oath: I promise to find and kill you if you provide tips for academics to ‘balance the demands of teaching and research.’ Double fuck you for that. Wait, I’m not done. In case you are one of those serious blogging types, I want to let you know that I am already well aware of the rules of left-wing citizenship—after all, I went to graduate school in the heyday-of-theory 1990s!!—and have learned what I am supposed to be outraged about. I am indeed enraged enough without your superficial commentary and exclamation points annoying me further. Enough with the cute pets. And please, please, please spare me from the worst offender of all: that pompous know-it-all type who blathers on and on, appearing to avoid repetition by using a thesaurus to replace such four-letter words as ‘bore’ …. [Sorry gentle readers but you voted with your left clicks, feeding my ego and turning me into the monster that I am today. You really have only yourselves to blame when I try to gratify your desires].

So now it is Monday morning and I am all sunshine and chatty light, instead of the lady-rager that I was when constructing the first two paragraphs. I can now admit that there are numerous wonderfully informative and delightfully intelligent blogs out there. Since I have yet to discover most of them, send me the urls asap. Of course I do already read a few of them on an intermittent, taking-a-break-from-my-own-work kind of way. I often peruse various baking and cooking sites, cutting and pasting their recipes while for the most part failing to read the helpful tips offered by master chefs. I never follow any instructions, a primary reason for my utter lack of technical ability and know how. My other favourite time waster involves dipping into fitness blogs, gathering advice on a need to know basis, like when I want to construct a full body medicine ball workout or teach PDDs a special lesson in leg abuse. See you at the gym tonight bitch! My main bone to pick with most of these sites, and I am going to sound like a professor here, is that they are not well written. Many include grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and sentence fragments—and not in a purposeful literary experiment style, like when I do it. Writing is a rare skill requiring years of education, practice, and copious amounts of reading. I am not talking about skimming corporate manuals, or taking a thirty-minute seminar on ‘how to engage your audience’ from an otherwise unemployed author at an under-credentialed college or overpriced conference. Ready for me to sound like an old pissy art historian? I furthermore decry the second-thought and simplistic use of images by bloggers, who insert visual representations and video clips as obligatory eye candy. That is both lazy and insulting to readers who deserve more.

Get a load of my new poker boots!

According to my half-assed research, blogs are meant to be short, quickly written accounts that gather up and deliver information in an easily digestible, scheduled manner; they regularly provide topical data and/or entertainment, disregarding both gatekeepers and traditional authority figures. Some critics argue that blogs have developed a new style of writing, and promote a new form of learning. As usual, that is an overstatement because even during the early modern period funny, weird stories and current events were abridged in printed sheets or disseminated around the globe, orally, by regular people. Still, current technologies of blogging have their defenders, including Andrea Doucet (www.andreadoucet.com). She claims that academic writing is a tortoise while standard blogging is a hare. I tend to agree but am not sure that the tortoise will win this time. That is why I hereby declare a slow blog movement, kind of like the slow food revolution that rocks my world. Let’s put an end to cheaply produced and easily consumed digital fare! Oh. So much for my originality. I quickly googled the term ‘slow blogging’ and discovered that it has already been established by a Canadian man named Todd Sieling (http://toddsieling.com/slowblog/?page_id=10). He only blogs when he happens to feel like it. I like his style. See you next week, lazy ass procrastinators, or not!

ps. Look at the Muffalo Solider interrupting my pre-pub physio session. Is that adorable or what?