Scarleteen is gearing up for their end-of-the-year fundraiser and I would really very much like to send some of my readers over to help out. Click the image below to find out how — hey, it can even be tax-deductible! Go now, and please spread the word about this very worthy organization.
Nov 252011
Nov 232011
Having not written here for over a week I gotta say how undeniably splendid not-writing-here feels. I know this makes me a bad blogger as well as a loathsome human being. I’m not sure that I care.
Right now my brain feels all private and self-contained, and while I’m absolutely certain that soon enough I’ll be back in 100% overshare mode, for now I’m just going to continue being quiet except to wish my USian readers a lovely Thanksgiving.
Nov 142011
So last week someone got upset and threatened to sue me for defamation of character. After an hour of hand-wringing, during which my emotions ranged from extreme annoyance to abject terror, I contacted my very own legal counsel, who happens to be wise in the ways of the ‘net as he is also a blogger.
With his permission I am republishing a part of his advice, which you might also find to be helpful:
That’s a fake lawyer threat if I ever saw one. Anybody who thinks “Legal Counsel” needs capital letters, doesn’t have a lawyer, much less a lawyer on retainer. Second of all, the truth is an absolute defense in all charges of defamation. That wouldn’t stop a nutcase from suing you (nothing can stop that) but it should stop any lawyer from doing more than blustering, as long as you don’t say anything about [person] that’s untrue — which you haven’t and won’t.
[Person] writes like a desperate failing sex toy white label owner who has no *clue* why ze’s not making money the way the fast-talking franchise salesman said ze would, so the universe is punishing hir stupidity far worse than you ever could. Third, since you didn’t identify the store in the tweet, there’s utterly no grounds for concern based on what you’ve said so far.
If you haven’t already responded to hir about the ad space refund, I’d refuse that too. All of my ad sales are for blocks of time that are prepaid; the advertiser is free to put up whatever image I’ll approve. But I don’t refund because they are unhappy with the traffic or the conversions or my body odor or that I didn’t fellate them as vigorously as expected. Or, to date, for any other reason whatsoever. At my house and I expect at yours, that money was long ago spent on tomatoes or tangerines or toilet paper; and you’ve done nothing wrong that ze should demand it back. I’d refuse the refund, as politely as I could manage, which would be not very:
Dear [Person]–
I’m sorry you no longer wish to do business with me. Given your unreasonable expectations with regard to web traffic and review-writing, I’m content with your decision to terminate our business relationship.
However, all advertising sales are prepaid in advance for a set period of time, final, and non-refundable. If you choose not to run advertising for the complete term you paid for, that’s your prerogative. In that case, please confirm that you would like the ad removed. Alternatively, I’m just as happy to continue running your existing ad until the paid-for period is done. Just let me know.
Thanks for the advice, lawyer-blogger friend. I owe you at least a full crate of clementines for the help and commiseration. And for making me laugh, which I desperately needed after this ridonkulous little episode.
To my blogger friends who are accepting toys for review and/or allowing ads on your websites: If you haven’t already taken the time to write up some terms and conditions for these services, what’s stopping you? Please allow my experience be an example of what can happen when you’re not beyond abundantly clear about your expectations.
I’d love to know what you come up with. Post a link below or email me, okay?
Nov 112011
“You desire to know the art of living, my friend?
It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.”
– Henri Frederic Amiel
A person with less of a philosophical bent (or one less effectively medicated) might tend to see the events of the past week as cause for tears to be shed into the evening’s glass of wine, or tooth-gnashing, or hand-wringing, or fist-shaking toward the silent, pitiless heavens. But in this eleventh month of two-thousand-eleven, a time that finds me in terms of work, family, finance and fuckery almost shockingly content, I perceive this misfortune as nothing more than the barely audible whinge of the universe’s tiniest midge, ineffectually circling my head before scurrying off to try, with what I hope is the same degree of success, to make someone else’s life miserable.
My goal, once past the first stunned shock of moral outrage, is to transmogrify suffering into art; to make my own small tragedies and minor tempests into something useful — even beautiful — for myself and others. This little episode therefore becomes the impetus to perform some tasks that I should have completed months and months if not years and years ago. I will start small, with this brief group of statements to be produced when advertising dollars, website creation fees, or items for review change hands, and which by all rights I should have codified when the very first offer to be gifted with some delightful piece of sexual equipage wafted into my email box:
Want to send me something? Awesome. Here’s some information you might find useful:
Items sent to me become my property forever. I will neither return the item1, pay for it, nor provide reimbursement in any other way.
My acceptance of a product in no way guarantees that I will write a positive review or in fact any review at all. I may write a post with many words about the product or only a few. I may include an image or not. Please understand that if I choose not to write about a product, it is probably because what I would write would be so unflattering that it is to everyone’s best interests that I say nothing at all.
Advertising on my website is pre-paid, final, and non-refundable for any reason, including but not limited to an advertiser’s perception of the amount of clicks and/or sales the ad in question generated. In no case shall my positive, negative, neutral, delayed or incomplete review affect in any way a previously negotiated advertising arrangement.
I reserve the right to publish via website, Twitter and/or Facebook part or all of emails sent to me that verge upon an abusive, ridiculous, nonsensical or illogical nature. If a missive contains multitudinous spelling and grammatical errors, crude references to sexual behavior, uninvited images of genitalia, threats to consult a Legal Counsel on retainer or to sue for Defamation of Character, please expect to see that correspondence mocked and derided electronically and (possibly) physically set aflame in my own personal backyard.
Perhaps you can extrapolate some of the events which have lead to the creation of this document?
Do you have terms and conditions for receiving toys for review purposes? What am I missing from mine? Suggestions and expressions of commiseration are welcome in the comments below.
- Yes this has been asked of me. Yes it was gross. [↩]
Nov 032011
An extra-early drop-off for my eldest and a week so packed with classes and other activities that I’d not been able to squeeze in a visit to the grocery store meant that today my Diet Coke supply was tragically depleted and without a trip to the drive-through, someone — or possibly two someones — would have faced my uncaffeinated wrath. It felt very much, I thought while pulling away, like five years ago when each day I deposited a second-grader at school before heading home for a long hours alone with nine-month and two-year-old babies, hours which I could survive only after fortification from the kind of caffeination available in a big plasticky cup.
In those days their favorite thing was discovered quite by accident: I seated straw into cup in preparation for the day’s first healing gulp and it made an amusing noise. They were enchanted. “Again,” demanded the older baby, while the younger baby chortled. Of course I did it again (and again and again and again). Anything that kept them amused and marginally out of trouble for five minutes was worth the trouble, and so it became our routine to drive home to the sounds of rhythmic soda straw squeaks and little people’s laughter.
Do you remember when you used to love this sound, I asked today, demonstrating on my cup as we waited for the light to change. Neither the just-turned-seven-year-old nor her almost-six brother claimed to, although they both politely chuckled when I pointed out that it used to send them into gales of hysterics.
“I don’t remember being a baby,” said the girl.
“I don’t either,” said the boy.
I do, I said. You both pooped a lot. Poop is pretty much the ne plus ultra of humor topics these days.
“I did not!” said the boy, aghast.
“You still do,” said the girl.
“I wish I could be a baby again,” said the boy, and I’d have to agree with him. Even for a day — even for an hour! — I’d like to be mother to their baby-selves, in no small part because I’d like to believe I’d do it better a second time. I’d be more patient with carrot-colored walls and elbows that smell like bacon. I’d appreciate more that I could fight by proxy, that the sun brought on laughter, that the beloved wank-couch still lived. If I could do it again I would endeavor to yearn less.
And I’m certain I could succeed.
