Is 40 the new 30?

Remember when "middle aged" meant mom jeans and dickies and station wagons and appliances in god-awful colors like mustard and avocado? When it meant Ogilvie home perms and noodle casseroles and Christmas sweaters and truly enormous glasses with decorative gold rims? It was stirrup pants and cat sweatshirts and Jello salad and the easy listening station and Matlock.

Well, not anymore. I'm 33, and a good handful of my friends are edging into middle age and they are savvy and stylish and switched on and Jesus H. Christ I'm going to be middle aged in not too terribly long and I've done approximately nothing with my life. Fuck.

Which brings me to Nanny Goats in Panties, my reviewee for the day, and a self-professed middle ager. She's a working professional with no kids and a dishy (I suspect -- she doesn't talk about him much, but I like to imagine he's twelve kinds of hot) husband, so she's living my dream at least. She's also bi-cityal. Wait. That can't be right. Bi-citurnal? Bi-citified? Either way, she lives in two cities, which seems both excessive and completely awesome. She says, "I'm a non-conformist. Just like everybody else."

The blog is white, white, white with more white for good measure. Now, I'm a fan of simplicity in general, and white space in particular, but it could stand some jazzing up. It's your standard tweaked Blogger template with random changes in font size and barely passable functionality. The banner, though, is nice. But where are the panties?

Her sidebar is way too cluttered. NGIP, you've obviously got the hang of adding pages to your blog, since you have an "About" page, so why not corral those other bits and bobs into separate pages? Pull all your writing links onto one page, especially. Having your blogroll with links to the most recent post by the blogrolled is overkill. And I don't really get why people want to have recent comments emblazoned on their sidebars. Someone explain? Also, roll up your archives. The MyBlogLog rollover crap is tres annoying, just like randomly using French.

NGIP has been blogging for a while, and I've read all of 2008 thus far -- that's got to be a good sign. She's dry and silly and self-deprecating; I can relate and she makes me laugh. Ms. Kendrick could learn a thing or two. Oh, there's some filler, but it's generally funny filler. This is a humor blog, for the most part, but there's some depth here, too. Most of the time I prefer personal blogs that happen to be funny rather than blogs where getting laughs is their raison d'etre (there goes that annoying French again). I like a little more back story, a little more exposure, a little more grit. I want to be entertained, but I also want to feel like I'm snooping. Is that so wrong?

There is quite a bit of shameless self-promotion going on, an open quest for readership and linkage and numbers and rankings, which makes me uncomfortable. Yes, I know, that's kind of the whole point of a blog -- exposure -- and heaven knows I want all that, too. It just seems... tawdry? This from a woman who blew her fiance in a parking lot the night she met him, but I can't blow my own horn. I should speak to a shrink about that, shouldn't I? That and the oral fixation.

But back to Nanny Goats in Panties (How much do I love that title? Kind of a lot.), I gotta say I dig it. She's talented and she makes me laugh and she writes well with little humorous interjections and asides. I wish I knew more about her, though. I wish I knew if her husband really is dishy, if she likes reruns of CHiPs or Magnum PI, if she wishes Glen Beck would fall off the face of the earth or contract a virulent strain of laryngitis rendering him permanently mute. I just want to know more. Also, sex please. Come on, people. Do I have to ask all the time? I need you all to endeavor to write about sex at least once a week, k?

Nany Goats in Panties (there, I wrote it again) gets three stars from me. I might fucking love her if she'd clean up her blog, get a better design, stop the pimping, and scratch the surface a little more. That may not be what she wants her blog to be, but it's what I want, and for the purposes of this review what I want is all that matters.

Maybe that's just the way I read it*

Jesus, I missed this place, with it's blood red walls and grim reaper hovering in a corner, and you lot just slavering away, dripping wit and sarcasm and vitriol like the beasts from hell you are. Group hug?

Sorry I had to leave you for a while. The first week of my absence I can blame on hitting the mother fucking wall. The second week was entirely my mother's fault -- she whisked me way out west and we gallivanted around like Thelma and Louise without the sexy hitchhikers or suicide or vigilantism. And now I'm back from outer space and ready to roll up my sleeves and get back into the nitty gritty of reviewing those festering boils on the butt of humanity known as our submitters.

Love'n These Times. I don't get it. What's with the 'n? Is it "Love In These Times"? "Love And These Times"? "Loving These Times"? Whichever, that apostrophe makes me want to drill holes in this blog with a jackhammer and then spit in the cavities. And I'm the "nice one."

The design is innocuous and bland, but not eye-gouging. It is terribly, cloyingly sweet, though, and I like fairies. The archives button doesn't work. Helpful. Crystal is not a frequent blogger. It looks like she moved from a different blog, although there are no archives before May and there are only around 50 posts. Each one more empty than the last.

Look, before I get into the reaming, I just have to preface this with the fact that it seems like Crystal is a nice girl with a nice rack and good intentions. I get where she's coming from, curvy, hopeless romantic that I am. She even kinda looks like me. So, Crystal, just a little pep talk from your pal Calamity: don't stop, don't cave, don't take it personally, and DO listen carefully. Here goes...

First, privacy, people! Take your names off your blog. If you're published or famous or getting paid for it, fine: leave your name. But otherwise? Asking for trouble.

Poetry. Ah fuck. Rhyming poetry. It's amateurish, Hallmark card-y, and without grace. Poetry, to me, is about a love of words and how they twist and tumble together, it's nuance and meter and voice and soul and motion. These are just limp words on a screen, struggling off the page like lepers, leaving noses and bits of skin in their wake, flaccid and empty. Check out Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Mary Karr, May Swenson. Step away from the country music lyrics, and start reading the good stuff.

Fiction. "She had many male admirers who admired her for her buttocks and curved breasts." Did they really? Fascinating. And what do admirers do? They admire. Awesome. "Having no family or relatives had made her homeless and being homeless had made her strong." Hi, logic? Have we met? Didn't think so. It's plodding, nonsensical, presumptive, and scattered. You tell, tell, tell, and don't show a darn thing: "Residents lived in tiny houses and cleanliness was not of the utmost importance." Well, thanks for the info, but I can't picture it at all. Not of the utmost importance? Can you vague that up for me a little bit?

Listen. I know. Truly, I do. I've read my share of Anne Rice (and her alter ego, A. N. Roquelaure), Alice Borchardt, Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, Kelley Armstrong, and the rest of the dark/goth/werewolf/vampire/occult/witch/mystery/erotica/shapeshifter/horror bunch and loved it. Really. I can admit it. I also suspect you've delved into that magical, wonderful world of the trashy romance novel, and I'm here to tell you there's nothing wrong with that. Not a goddamn thing. Give me harems and pirates and blue stockings and half-Comanche outlaws and heaving bosoms and moist folds and turgid members and I'm all yours.

But your writing? It's just not there yet. I don't know your background, and I don't know how much experience you've had, and maybe it doesn't matter. Thing is, I don't want to discourage you from writing because it's obvious you enjoy it and you're cranking out the words and there's something to be said for that. It's just that you need some fire, some focus, some flavor. It's bland, there's no heat, no lyricism, no gotcha! Keep reading, join a writing group, workshop, edit, edit, edit.

Crystal and her blog seem sappy, mushy, young, earnest, hopeful, and sweet. But she doesn't have a lot to say about anything other than her boyfriend, her work, and her poetry/writing. She admits she doesn't put a lot into the blog, and it shows. There's not a lot here, and I think I heard an echo. To me, this stands firmly on the side of personal diary rather than blog. There doesn't seem to be any interaction in the comments, there's no blogroll so I don't know who she reads, and most of the time it seems like she's just scribbling away in a journal, regardless of whether anyone is watching. There's a place for that, and it's a pink fuzzy notebook with pictures of unicorns. At least mine is.

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up: get personal, delve more, get involved, commit to the blog or leave it behind. With your writing, do the exact same thing.








*"Workshop," Billy Collins

I don't know how I managed to work Thelma and Louise, Gloria Gaynor, and The Princess Bride references into one post.