The I Hate My Message Board Manifesto

Or, my genius lies in finding great ideas to borrow

My friend Alisa Bowman always has the best ideas so when I read her Project: Happily Ever After® Manifesto today I knew it was an idea worth borrowing and making my own. Alisa wrote about what makes her blog unique and her beliefs regarding writing about marriage.

This blog doesn’t fit neatly into any category. Perhaps hodge podge or grab bag but those are so rarely offered as options. I do have some guiding philosophies towards my writing on this blog and I’d like to share them with you.

For those wanting to learn what makes I Hate My Message Board stand out, I present the I Hate My Message Board Manifesto:

1. I believe that everybody has something to say and that everyone deserves a safe place to say it. Sometimes one’s friends and family get sick of hearing it, so one does the logical thing and starts a blog. It will take a long ass time to bore the entire internet!
2. If you can’t find joy in finding strange foodstuffs and opening it and taking pictures and making everyone look at it, then what can you find joy in?
3. To be irked by other people is human, to be irked and then start a blog so that you can go on at length about why you are irked and your justification for same is possibly a bit pathetic, but the good kind of pathetic that other people want to participate in.
4. You are the casting director of the movie of your life. Think about it. Just think about it.
5. There is a place for well researched facts and careful, thoughtful reporting. Then there are places for idle speculation that came out of your ass. This place is the latter.
6. It’s okay to admit that you always have to Google to remember which is the former and with is the latter.
7. Somewhere, somebody is itching to tell us all which is the former and which is the latter in a not un-smarmy way. Our policy towards those people is to bless their pedantic little hearts.
8. Sophisticated, wordly, intelligent women of great accomplishment can love Air Supply, unironically.
9. Pretty much everything I needed to know about life I learned from 1980s sitcom theme songs. For the rest I have Life Coach Tim.
10. Your past is a rich source of past petty grudges and disappointments that can be written about at length. You could get over it or you could mine it for material. I know what I’m choosing!
11. You’ll never be able to say all that there is to say about donuts and if you do, say it again because who could get tired of donuts?
12. It makes me feel good when people take the time to comment, especially if they share a story with me. That’s what it’s all about really, sharing stories.
13. It’s perfectly normal to get so excited you have to jump out of your seat and stomp your feet to let some of the energy out lest you explode.
14. Why wouldn’t somebody want attention and admiration? If you’ve got something to share, swing for the fences.
15. We’re all going to make mistakes. Some of us will learn from them and laugh about them. I want to surround myself with the laughers and learners.
16. There is a lot of just plain weird crap out there and I’d like to explore it and it would be cool if you wanted to join me.
17. It’s not the subject, it’s how you discuss it.
18. Life is more fun when you have a healthy sense of the absurd.
19. Knowing things is good but being able to think up entirely new things is better.
20. Snark must always be balanced with self deprecation.
21. You don’t have to like Spam, you just have to respect that I do.
22. This isn’t a read religiously every day type deal, this is a hey, when you have a chance and think of it drop in and say hi kind of joint.
23. I live in a house with five boys and a husband. All the pink stays.
24. Pretty much it’s all about celebrating this crazy world we live in and the wonderfully weird way our minds work.

Do you have a manifesto for your blog or life? What philosophies or beliefs guide what you do? I’d love it if you shared in the comments or on even on your own blog and dropped the link here.