It's hard to come to terms with the possibility that your relatives (or co-religionists) have committed heinous crimes. I suppose it's worse when they claim that they did it because God told them to. The truth hurts. But if there's ever going to be progress in the Middle East, Muslims have to come to terms with the idea that some religiously committed Muslims think it's OK to blow stuff (and people) up. Alas, the CIA isn't to blame for everything.

When you create an account on facebook, myspace, orkut, friendster, or any other of the ego-stroking 'look at all of my totally zomg awesome friends!' websites (and I can't judge too harshly, I have some too), the world does not need the big pronouncement of how low you've fallen, how you've totally caved now and bought into the hype and look at all the same crap you're now hosting on yet another website, obnoxious forwarded messages included, and quite honestly, we don't care, because if we really wanted to find you on one of those sites, we'd either email you asking if you had a profile or do a very simple, very easy search on your name/username/email accounts and check for ourselves.

You're not the first person to have a presence on the internet, you won't be the last, and you know what? There's no bloody prize for joining or abstaining. I don't care if you're there or not, I don't care what your reasons are or aren't, and I don't need to hear all about how awesome you find it, how exciting it is to suddenly find all of these old high school, elementary school, or fellow hooker-ass-cocaine-snorting friends you've suddenly gotten back in touch with after all these years.

I don't care. I seriously doubt the rest of us do either, and if you're so stupid as to put so much of your information online already, then I don't know what to tell you aside from asking for your bank account information so I can share the wealth this Nigerian prince wants me to hide off-shore for him.

Sincerely,
jen x (and yes, that so totally is my real last name, how'd you know?!)

Now, I like men, I really do, and anyone who's been to my 'other' site can attest to this fact. Hell, anyone who's spent any time in person with me for any length of time can also attest to this, and probably wishes I would stop.

However, every now and then I meet guys who make me long for what my mind assumes would be sapphic bliss.

So here goes the guidance from your elders. You take an event in your life, or a tendency or something you've seen, like a strange Arab man loading sundry meats into the trunk of his car. Or even a wacky item plucked from the news. Whatever it is, you make a mockery of it. Adhere to the old Seinfeld mantra, no hugging, no learning. Do not get all political. Title it with a song lyric. Relevance optional. Hit save. Wait an hour while sites are pinged. For example:

And speaking of sucking, I am vacuuming as we speak. Yes my robotic Roomba is zipping around the living room, sucking every last piece of dust from my carpet. It does a more thorough job than the excellent Panasonic upright I gushed about in my very first foray into blog posting. Mainly because no human would devote an hour to vacuuming two modest-sized rooms.

Man, those actual pix are harder to find than the Pam Anderson-Tommy Lee tryst or the Paris Hilton video. Then again maybe it's just me. Everyone else would grin knowingly when those came up on the net. But whenever I tried to take a gander I just wound up in this weird porn maze that threatened to shut my PC down.