If you can read this, you’re a better man than me, because when I google this site I get a blank page, a warning, or some Japanese text.

I had malware removed but still. I have spent countless hours on the phone with real and robotic tech support. One guy yesterday told me his life story including his height and weight. You’ll be glad to know he bought a high-end Nikon camera for a fraction of its worth! Yay, him!

I have received lists of problems with this website, few of which make any sense to me as a civilian and not a coder.

I NEED A GOD DAMN CODER!

If you are a web developer or know a good one, please hook me up, to put me out of my misery. I can’t take any more frustration. Helplessness is bad for the human organs and nervous system. My cortisone is at a deadly level.

Hell is not other people, it is WordPress.

Oh good, I just uploaded this picture of me in the emergency room last month, admiring my socks, only to see that all my images have disappeared!

Wait, they’re back. Whew.

Please either help me or kill me, your choice.

A few days ago, I was at the mall, drinking coffee and talking to a young woman I will call Mary. Mary had started the conversation, which I was enjoying, because who else wants to talk to me? She was 22, but looked much younger. She told me that she tries to look after her 12 year old sister, who is getting interested in boys and fashion.

I’m always interested in young people who have grown up with social media. I wonder how it affects their lives, or if they even think of the internet as something separate from their lives. So I asked her if she spent a lot of time scrolling through shit on her phone, like I do. She seemed at once casually grown up and sweetly naive.

I started going on about how sad I was for young people, who would never know innocence, who would see hundreds or thousands of naked bodies and sex acts before they ever had a relationship. I deplored the lack of mystery that is now a fact of life for young people. I asked her if this worried her, and she said, Not really.

Then, because it’s one of my favorite stories, I told her about the time my kid brought a new friend home for a play-date, and they disappeared into his room. They were probably around 13 at the time, and my kid was already a prodigious coder.  After around three hours, the friend’s mom called to see how things were going. She then advised me to supervise the kids’ computer use, because her son had recently been caught looking at bestiality.

The punchline of the story is me going, “WHAT??? YOU’RE TELLING ME NOW, AFTER THREE HOURS?”

So I finished my story, expecting Mary to laugh. Instead, she looked confused, and said. “What’s  bestiality?”

Shit, I thought, oh no! I didn’t think I could just say, Never mind, now that I’d said the word. So, very sadly, I explained, “It’s when people have sex with animals.” Her eyes bugged out and her hands flew up to her face. “But how would they do that?”

Suddenly, my husband appeared, as we had planned to meet outside the coffee bar. Overcome with guilt and relief, I blurted out, “Hi honey, this is Mary. I’ve just destroyed her innocence!” Mary laughed but I still felt mortified.

As my husband and I walked to the car, he joked about me picking up kids at the mall. I told him that in fact, she had picked me up. Then I remembered reading that the men who get caught having sex with horses always blame it on the horse. “The horse came on to me, it wasn’t my idea!”

Just kill me.

*the knife in my stomach. Honk if he’s giving you an ulcer, too.

He will dismantle public education, health care, environmental protection, voting rights, public housing, and then he will blow up the whole world!

Great choice, republicans.

Now, we can duck and cover, take to the streets, call for impeachment, pray he has a fatal heart attack or pretend this is all a dream.

Moving to Canada won’t help.

Every day, all day long, what a fucking cunt.

Follow the corruption here.

I think I know the answer! Because I’m on the brink of one!

Haven’t you always wondered what people meant by the outmoded term “nervous breakdown”? I used to picture someone in a padded cell, just lying on a bed, maybe trembling, probably unable to speak, disheveled, with vacant eyes.

I’ve even wished I could have a nervous breakdown, because then someone would take care of everything while I just drooled quietly in a nice sanitarium somewhere.

And then at some point in my life, I decided that I was out of luck, I just couldn’t break down even if I longed for it, it just wasn’t in the cards for me. I’m not the type, I would explain bitterly when discussing someone else’s mental hospital experience.

Well, I have news to report. After enough days of struggling with my website and talking to IT guys who all sound slightly stoned and none too bright, after listening to all these Richards and Darrens and Ethans giving conflicting theories and reasons why things should be working now or not working now, I am a mess.

The sense of powerless multiplied by anxiety and frustration is truly debilitating.

The only relief came in the form of Lauren, an angel who knows all about WordPress blogs and so much more I can’t begin to tell you. She knows about Juggalos, for fucksake. She knows about everything, believe me.

So she agreed to bring my blog back from the Invisible White Screen of Death.

Meanwhile, perhaps sniffing out my anxiety all the way from Arizona  (or tipped off by the IT guys at Bluehost) my web security service, SiteLock, alerts me that I have some malware that urgently needs to be removed. If I don’t remove it, Google will hate me, everyone will hate me and my whole world will end.

However, despite having paid $500 for a year of their security service, they want $300 to remove the malware.

Now, the best/worst part of this is a person names “Sean” at SiteLock. Sean will come out of the gate yelling at you like an angry husband you dared to question about his poker buddies.

Sean seethes with contempt for your ignorance and rage for your audacity in bringing up that $500. He compares the extraction of malware to surgery. Actual surgery. He tells you how careless you’ve been in using plug-ins.  And Sean never backs down. He is aggression personified.

Sean seems like the devil Himself.

But that’s because you have yet to encounter STEVEN, in billing.

There is nothing worse than feeling powerless.

Mothers always believe they have the power to make things okay for their children. If they scrape a knee, you know how to make it better. If they have a fever, you know how to lower it. If it’s something worse, you know how to go to the emergency room. If they hate a teacher, you arrange a meeting.   If someone steals their bike, you get it back. Whatever the problem is, you solve it.

If your child jumps of a cliff, you vow to make sure he’ll survive. If he’s not breathing, you still believe you can blow life into his lungs and bring him back.

Then, you keep pretending you have the power to punish the negligent or to force an apology or to find a grief group or to sleep soundly, or to hang on to your friends, or to get anything done that needs doing. But you are powerless.

Then after six months you ask the ex-husband if you can have some of your child’s belongings from before he got hurt but the ex says No, sorry.   BUT, you say to him, but this but that, but I’m the Mother! No, he’s not ready because he’s too busy because he doesn’t trust you and   anyway he’s going away for Christmas, just No. Sorry, but no, he simply can’t.   He’ll “look through” the stuff but not now and not with you.

A hundred years ago, I married a rigid controlling person who was wrong for me in every way except for the fact of our beautful son, and now I am powerless against his need to say no to me.

This is why I could never accomplish Step One. I can’t accept that I have no power, even when it’s so painfully and irrevocably obvious.

Refinery 29 just launched a Los Angeles-based blog and here is part of today’s post about redheads, written by the editor:

Maybe all the brunettes are lightening up for summer or maybe there’s something appealing about standing out in the So-Cal sea of blonde-and-bronze, but we think this is a hair trend that’s catching on like, well, wild fire. So, when we saw this insanely beautiful new fashion shoot (sent to us by our dear friend, Hamish), we nearly flipped our lid. The editorial, shot in London by expert lens-woman, Kate Cox, captures the photographer’s redheaded friends, and somehow has a totally hippie-esque L.A.-in-the-’70s-vibe to it. We’ve included a few of Kate’s red-hot shots and asked a local go-to hue aficionado to shed some light on how to keep your scarlet locks looking good if you should opt for red trademark tresses–and, trend alert!–you def should!

A local go-to hue aficionado?! Lens-woman?! Scarlet locks?!

Is this why I can’t get a new writing job? Why don’t I just kill myself!

If anyone can write a worse paragraph about redheads, I will devote a post to your literary genius.