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speak now
12/24/2007 = 09:57 AM

There's a full hour-power Podcrapular podcast up today, and it'll be a while before there's another, because Andy is On the Road.

This is the time of year when I usually hunt around for a bunch of past posts to do a meme, and this year is no exception.

I'm not sure this is a meme. I think it's an original idea, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if I saw it somewhere else and took it without permission. If I did, I apologize, and I'll be happy to link back to you if you can prove you thought of it first.

My Most-Commented-Upon Posts of 2007

January: wooden you — in which I talk about quite a lot of brain confetti and push in a mention of my fifth wedding anniversary, which generated eighteen comments, most of which were of the happy anniversary type, and I will take those quite happily, because it meant that the other brain confetti was gotten out of my system without causing too much trauma to anyone else.

February: getting to know your friends, again — this was an unabashed meme, and I got twelve comments on it, ten being about different questions I answered in the meme, two being about agreeing with me that bacon can, in fact, improve a peanut butter and jam sandwich.

March: mórán cainte ar bheagán cúise — this (the title is Gaelic for "much talk for little cause") was a vague discourse on why I still like St. Patrick's Day even though I'm not Irish. I got twelve comments on that post, but I think at least half of them were cheering for the Mom. Not that I blame them ... I feel like cheering for her most of the time myself.

April: who's sorry now — beating my birthday post in comments by eight, this post, a rant in which I petulantly demanded apologies from everyone in the universe who was chafing my chard at the time (including my alleged BFF, who had time to mess around with surveys, quizzies, Facebook, and MySpace, but had no time to send me even a half-arsed little email wishing me a Happy Birthday), generated twenty-six comments from about twenty-six people wishing to apologize to me, none of whom had done a damned thing to piss me off, and approximately zero comments from anyone who actually owed me an apology. Such is my life.

May: cha-cha-cha — this was a reposted rant from July of 2006, because, yet again, a bunch of my friends from Diaryland were having trouble with Diaryland, and I wanted to illustrate the fact that I had pointed all of this out to them nearly a year ago, and Diarylandrew had done less-than-nothing to resolve anyone's issues and was, in fact, beginning to ignore everyone else just as fiercely as he had always ignored me. I got a total of thirty-two comments for this post, of which none from the Diaryland users had any defense for Diarylandrew whatsoever. Diarylandrew himself whined on the home site around this time that he was doing everything himself, which begged the question, "But you charge so much money for services that other sites give their users for free ... where's that money going if you're not hiring and paying assistants with it?"

June: daddy's little girl — I wrote this on Father's Day, and it's not as good as another essay I wrote about my father (which you can read, if you missed it the first time around, in my book Getting My Think On, available on Amazon and makes a swell holiday gift), where I talk about not only how painful it is that he is not the same man with whom I grew up, but how painful it was that, while he was always a good father and took care of me my whole life, he never adored me as much as I adored him. This produced an outpouring of twenty-four very supportive comments that touched my heart tremendously and made me feel less guilty about being so ungrateful as to expect adoration from my father when he'd been such a wonderful parent in every other respect.

July: rock — the bad part about this post was that I had received a Rockin' Girl Blogger Award. Getting awards should feel good, and this did, I assure you, but it was bittersweet, because the rules stated that I must pass the award on to no more than five of my own favorite female bloggers. Not only do I, obviously, have more than five people whose writing gets me Every Damned Time, but many of those are not girls. The good parts about this post were that I did get to talk about five of my favorites and why I think they rock, I made another award of my own for everyone who didn't get the oh-so-elite Rockin' Girl Blogger Award because of these silly, restrictive, sexist rules, and, best of all, the eighteen comments generated by this post still managed to beat out, by one comment, the post I had written later in the month about Neil LaBute, who thinks he is The Shit and is right, except for the definite article "the."

August: writer's idea part 1 — this was a repost from a piece I had written in January of 2006. I had originally written it not so much to shame the horrible woman who manipulated everyone into believing she was a little girl with cancer, as to illustrate that one can be awed by another person's creativity whilst simultaneously losing all respect for that person. I also wrote it, at the time, because I was still getting a lot of questions asking for my perspective of the entire debacle, even though I wasn't as hard-touched by it as others. I chose to repost it in August because a real little boy had died, and Sahara Aldridge, a real little girl, was very sick at the time and would pass away herself later this year. I got a total of twenty-nine comments about this post, and we discussed everything from truth on the Internet to creative writing to cancer. I don't think the entry was as powerful as the conversation it inspired. I felt I learned a lot about my readers from having written it, and that made me feel really good.

September: i don't dance — also one of the most visited entries of the year, but only because it contained the words "naked," "pictures," "of," "Vanessa," and "Hudgens" in a single phrase. Furthermore, it holds the distinction of having been voted by Prince Gomolvilas as Best. Post. EVER, but he's probably changed his mind by now. Anyway, I talked about finally watching High School Musical 2, just to see what all my gorgeous little gay boyfriends were on about, and receiving twenty-one comments finding that, while the gay boyfriends love the hell out of Zac Efron, my magnificent straight girlfriends, like me, get turned on more by Bart Johnson, the relatively unknown but delicious gentleman who plays (cue old-person music) the main character's father.

October: hard realizations — started out as a meme, but I repurposed it into an essay so no one would feel obligated to do any work or be under the impression they were reading my homework assignments or something. Overall, the twenty-four comments praised my introspection, which was not quite what I was looking for, but felt so damned good I didn't care to look said gift horse in the mouth.

November: snagged and tagged — in which I got tagged with the ubiquitous "seven random facts" meme, and I had already done so many versions of that bloody thing that I changed it to "seven guilty pleasures," which still fit the criteria pretty well. It led to a twenty-six comment discussion of, I think, every single one of my guilty pleasures, most of which were kind enough not to tell me how stupid I was to enjoy any of them. Furthermore, there are a lot more Spaghetti-O lovers out there than I would have guessed. Hello, my people, represent.

December: dreaming my little dreamy dreams — in which the main talk is about an unnerving dream I had starring Sandra Lee, provoking twenty-one comments ranging from discussion of my latest podcast, the incomprehensibility of Steve Miller, weird dreams other people have had, my cousin's book club meeting, Clamato, and a whole lot of people who, like me, are wondering what makes Sandra Lee so damned special. (I was recently reminded, by an email from an old friend, that Sandra Lee is the same dippy blond who used to make infomercials with Mrs. Brady and sell those special little metal things to help you drape curtains. My then-roommate and I used to laugh our asses off at the poor souls who would rather spend good money, plus shipping, on her special little metal things than to fold a friggin curtain, iron a few pleats, possibly baste in a stitch or two to hold the ends in position, and stuff it with pillowcases or shopping bags to make it floofy.)

And now, having read this, you are obligated to beat the current comment record of thirty-two (for May of 2007) by commenting on this post, so I can feel like Lewis Black did when he realized he had already finished and aired Last Laugh 2007 about three weeks before Jamie Lynn Spears announced her pregnancy. I'll leave it up through the 31st to be fair.

Tags: meme

drinking: hawaiian punch. red flavor. shut up
listening to: Ani DeFranco, Wishin' and Hopin' (Dusty Springfield cover)
skin status: death valley