My own worst nightmare

It's the luck of the draw around here. The often imitated but never duplicated Love Bites reaches into her bag of tricks, shoves aside the tubes of lube, lipstick, and Lifesavers, and pulls out the blogs for us to review. It's completely random.

But this time, I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster had something to do with it. Because my hapless little reviewee got me -- a pro-choice agnostic with pagan tendencies who is a queer friendly, pro-gay marriage, anti-religious establishment, foul-mouthed sex fiend feminist liberal elitist.

Angi from Sleep for Dreaming, on the other hand, is not. Way not.

Let me just get the design critique out of the way, as it's about the only part of this site that didn't make me want to spit nails. It's actually very easy on the eyes. I can dig the gray and red. It's uncluttered and well-organized. There is, however, a section for Who's Who with nothing in it and you could stand to beef up your About page with more details.

Now, for the rest of the blog: I have absolutely nothing in common with this person. Nada. She is the antithesis of me, and it was often physically painful for me to read her blog. She's religious in the "first and foremost" sense. There's a lot of God talk, which I get enough of from my mother the priest, thank you very much. She's a conservative cat person; I'm a liberal dog person. And fuck me sideways she links to Ann Coulter.

There are a glut of posts of the pointless, interesting to no one variety, like this. And this. And, holy lord, this. Otherwise, she's got issues. There are acres and acres of angsty, self-discovery posts that really should be relegated to her bedside devotional journal. She thinks that lesbians are icky, women over 5o should pack it in, and red lipstick is from the devil (ok, I made that last part up). Oh, and side note? Scaramouche is a character, not a thing. Angie doesn't like swearing, which makes me wonder (for the zillionth time since beginning this review) why she decided to submit her site to a bunch of foul-mouthed little bastards like us.

The writing is often naive, unfocused, bland, and frankly boring but at least well-punctuated and generally grammatically correct. For me, it lacked humor, style, an engaging voice, and, of course, an author I could relate to. This post about sums it up for me: "I’ve dabbled and chicken-scratched a bit since then, but haven’t really written anything of any significance." Nothing in this blog resonated with me. But that's probably my liberal elitism showing. I always forget to tuck that in like a nice girl.

Look, I try to be objective. I try to find common ground, and I look for the magic mushrooms in the piles of dung. I tried not to let my politics -- nor the influx of my family's right wing propaganda in my inbox -- cloud my reviewing sensibilities. I am, after all, the "nice one." But this blog? Sigh. She's probably a nice person. I bet she helps little old ladies down the street and lets people cut in front of her in line if they have just one thing to buy. It's just, nothing on her blog makes me want to sit next to her on a long road trip while we hash out our differences or engage in philosophical debate. I pretty much just want to close the window and walk away. And that's probably ok with Angi, because I'm decidedly not her audience.

Finally, because I try to give constructive criticism even when my dander is up and I'm all kinds of huffy, some tips:

1. Angi, you imply some knowledge of hard times and difficulties and challenges surmounted but you never share that information. If it's too personal, I understand, but that was where you got me a little interested in your story. It might help readers get to know you (and not knee-jerk react to your politics, like me) if you give us more insight into who you are. Other than your politics and religious views and your love for song lyrics and photography, I feel like I don't know that much about you. Even though I cringed at your reasons, the Why I Could Never Be Friends With... posts revealed more about you than many others.

2. Lay off the "I did this, then I did this" weekend roundups. Unless something interesting happened, leave it out.

3. Generate discussion in your comments. Ask questions. Generate feedback and conversation.

4. There are no revelations about relationships with anyone, romantic or otherwise. Who are the people in your life? Write about them.

And I'm spent.

My first inclination is to give you about eleventy-nine million of these.






But, in retrospect, that might be letting the terrorists win.

Instead you get this, because I suspect I might be a little biased: