But sometimes it makes sense to be honest about your devil-child. Or poke fun at the little Asian database administrator. Maybe publicly torment Mormons. Oh, and probably the people that care about whether their chicken broth is made from free range chicken or not.
Being called a “well rested self-entitled ho bag” might actually feel great.
This title was affectionately given to Heather B. Armstrong, professional blogger, the 35-year-old stay-at-home-mom allowed to wear pajamas to work.
Armstrong started her blog, Dooce, in 2001 with a poem about Carnation milk, rants against organized religion and an honesty springing from a life of feeling repressed under long skirts and frizzy hair.
After growing up in Mormon-ville, Tennessee, learning about porn (and English) at BYU and teaching herself HTML, Armstrong was hired by a web designing firm in L.A.
“I worked as a web designer for drug-addicted executives and discovered what life was like as a recovering Mormon. Meaning life was filled with PowerPoint templates and lethal amounts of tequila,” Armstrong said.
Dooce, pronounced like deuce and a subtle tribute to her inability to type “dude” over IM, was Armstrong’s hobby until an anonymous co-worker complained about her sarcasm. She was fired in 2002, sparking a fierce debate about privacy issues on the web. After the apologies to the Asian database administrator that Armstrong mercilessly ridiculed, Dooce gained the loyalty of readers, now averaging about 300,000 a day.
She told BBC News: "Blogging is an easy and powerful form of personal expression. It's a way of communicating with friends and with becoming part of a community."
The emotional meltdowns, her husband, two children and two dogs are all source material for this web blog. The advertising revenue allowed her the free time to publish two books, including, It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita.
Armstrong lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with the “charming geek” in her life, Jon, writing, photographing and blogging daily about her life. Armstrong was voted by Forbes number 26 on their list of Most Influential Women in Media.
According to the blog, “Dooce chronicles my life from a time when I was single and making a lot of money as a web designer in Los Angeles, to when I was dating the man who would become my husband, to when I lost my job and lived life as an unemployed drunk, to when I married my husband and moved to my mother's basement in Utah, to when I became pregnant, to when I threw up and became unbearably swollen during the pregnancy, to the birth, to the aftermath, to the postpartum depression that landed me in a psyche ward. I'm better now,” Armstrong said.
The irreverent, liberal, caustic and insightful style of Dooce boosted it into the top American blog of 2009, according to The Weblog Awards (Bloggies) http://2008.bloggi.es/
The result is a lot of hate mail, said Armstrong. Her response is to give the critics exactly what they are looking for: more exaggerated sarcasm.
“When you call the Department of Children and Family Services, please get the story straight. Not only do I leave her [daughter, Marlo] alone with paper towels, I set her in the middle of a flea-infested floor and surround her with sharp objects and porn. Then I turn on a wood-burning stove in the corner of the room and seal all the windows. Before I leave the room and lock the door, I stick a bottle full of vodka in her mouth to muffle the screaming,” Armstrong wrote.
Armstrong eventually took down some of her religious-bashing scorn in preference of a decent relationship with her parents. Although the honesty in her blog is refreshing and surprising, the monotony of evil children and religion-hate can sometimes seem extreme. Then again, as Armstrong points out, motherhood is a hell some of us have yet to experience.
The hodgepodge of child crises, butts, feeling guilty, believing that her daughter might actually be a little boy in disguise and the guy that talks like Elmo during sex, Armstrong ventures into a territory few bother to explore: scathing and witty unselfconscious writing.
For more entertainment, visit http://www.dooce.com
She sounds very interesting, though the link should be in the column so it can be clicked on.
ReplyDeleteA couple of questions:
The quotes in the column? Did they come from an interview or published sources?
Does she actually work for someone (a newspapers, magazine, website)?
How old is she?
Where does she live?
And: "Armstrong was voted the number seven web celeb and Dooce became the sole source of income for the Armstrongs."
Who voted her number seven of anything?
Inquiring minds want to know...