The Break Up

Dear Blog,

I think it's time for us to face reality. We've hardly seen each other in months, and to be honest, I haven't missed you. Yes, we've had a lot of good times over the past few years, but I'm at a different point in my life now. I've moved on, and I think it's time for you to move on too.

Before you jump to conclusions, no, there isn't someone else. I won't lie to you--I've been on a few dates with Facebook and have flirted off and on with Goodreads (well, actually, Goodreads has done most of the flirting). I've checked out Twitter and Google Buzz from afar, but I don't see anything serious happening with either. I just don't want to be in any serious online social networking relationship right now.

Really, it's not you, it's me.

So it's time to end our relationship. You go your way, I'll go mine. I imagine our mutual friends will all decide for themselves whether to continue being my friend, your friend, or both. I just hope that you and I can continue to be friends, or at the very least be civil when we run into each other at parties and reunions. I bear you no ill will, and I hope you feel the same.

So goodbye, my dear Blog. Thank you for nearly five years of memories. I assure you, whenever I read a book or do something mundane with my kids or have a superficially profound thought and wonder, "How will I blog about this?," I'll remember you.

With love,

Mr. Fob

I Only Posted Twice in November

Take that, NaBloPoMo!

And I didn't write any novels, either.

But I did write a chapter about intersex classification for an anthology on LGBTIQ library service. And I read several great books. And FoxyJ and I celebrated our eighth anniversary. All in all, it was a good month. I just didn't tell you about it. But rest assured, I love you anyway.

By the way

I'm missing the middle part of my background image. I think it's because my UW account expired. I'll fix that one of these days, once I feel like I'm not playing catch-up with the rest of my life.

Dodging Another Bullet

I am not one of the Top 11 Lamest Blogs.

Compartmentalizing

Because I have things to say that very few people who read this blog care about and because some other things I have to say can potentially do more good if said elsewhere, I've expanded my blogging venues. I've started a blog about comics and related geeky goodness which I don't anticipate anyone here will be interested in but I hope will find an audience elsewhere, and I've begun contributing to the Isocrat.org blog, which is where the majority of my LGBT-related thoughts will now be going. The blog is just one part of Isocrat.org, a massive site of LGBT resources that Scot is putting together with a little help from me and a few other friends. I've been working (slowly) on helping to organize the library of articles Scot has put together, and this morning I published my first post on the blog. Among other things, the post explains a small change I've just made to the About Me text in the sidebar here. -->

The Fobcave, meanwhile, won't change much. It will be the repository of all the "everything else" things I feel like blogging about, which is pretty much what it's always been.

Sadly,

no one asked me yesterday about the huge pressure bandage on my forehead. I was ready with a story about how I had this huge zit, and then when I popped it...

But alas.



Innocent Child: Daddy, where do lame jokes go when they die before they're told?

Daddy: (Patting child on the head) The Fobcave, honey. They go to the Fobcave.

My New Year's Resolution

(As opposed to my goals, including the one that looks like a resolution.)

I am going to respond to every comment made on this blog. I know of a few bloggers who seem to reply to every comment made on their blog, and I like that. It makes me want to comment on their blogs more often (to give them more work, of course) and fosters an environment of friendly discussion. Since I enjoy getting comments, it's only fair that I give those comments the respect of a reply.

Feel free to test me on this--but be warned, I'm not above doing mass replies that say simply "Thanks for your comments." Though I suppose in those cases I ought to at least name commenters individually.

Warm Fuzzies* and Cold Pricklies

Tonight S-Boogie showed me a pink ball of fur she'd found in the toy box. She explained that it was a warm fuzzy, and that she'd gotten it from school. I vaguely remember hearing something about discussions they'd had at her school about warm fuzzies, and their archnemeses, cold pricklies, but I'd forgotten that she'd actually brought a warm fuzzy home.

On an intellectual level, I understand that there are many serious problems in the world that will not be solved with warm fuzzies. Sometimes cold pricklies are called for. On an emotional level, though, I can't handle the prickliness. Contention makes me feel sick to my stomach and it makes me intensely uncomfortable to see anger in others or in myself. Nevertheless, a passion for principles and causes that tend to be controversial together with an ego that demands to be seen as right get me into confrontations increasingly. The problem is that I am simply not equipped to handle negative emotions. I don't know what to do with them.

Several unrelated events of the past month, most of which I've already talked about here, have left me feeling vulnerable and irrationally scared. I got up from the computer earlier this evening and felt momentarily terrified at the realization that the blinds were open. I quickly closed all the blinds in the apartment. (Perhaps I was worried a bicycle would come flying through?) My compulsion to check my email as frequently as possible now butts heads with a constant fear of getting another comment in some blog comment war I've been part of. I could simply unsubscribe from the comment feeds so they don't show up in my email, but then I wouldn't know what people are saying and I fear the uncertainty would be worse.

The worst part, at least in so far as one specific incident is concerned, is the implication that the verbal attacks against me and my family are my own damn fault for putting aspects of our private life out where people can see and therefore debate. This stings particularly in the context of the several warnings I received two years ago, that I would regret making myself and my family so vulnerable. When considering the possible ramifications of putting ourselves in the married gay Mormon spotlight, FoxyJ and I took these warnings into account, but decided that the potential for good outweighed the potential for bad. I will also be the first to admit that my motivations for publishing essays and appearing in news media and blogging were not purely altruistic; as I've admitted before, I like attention. But I am self-aware enough and self-repressing enough to not allow myself to do something if I know my only reasons are ego-driven. I allowed myself to speak publicly and FoxyJ supported me in this, despite the fact that she does not share in my need for public approval, because we wanted to open up the discussion. I have seen evidence to suggest this has indeed been the result--not just the people who have contacted us to thank us or the people who say nice things about us, because as wonderful as that is a bunch of folks agreeing with me and telling me how wonderful I am isn't discussion. It's warm fuzzies. As much as it hurts me emotionally, on an intellectual level I am happy to see that people are saying my arguments are crap and that gay men who marry women are misogynists and that no ethical gay man would even think about subjecting a woman to such a life of misery and hey why isn't anyone talking about gay women? I'm happy to see this because that means people are talking. This was not the case five years ago. I certainly don't take full responsibility for the fact that mixed-orientation marriages and all the complicated issues they involve are being discussed more now than they ever were before, but I do think I've had a part in that, at least in the Mormon sphere.

So yeah, it hurts, but for the moment I'm going to fight the impulse to run away and hide from the internet, because I believe there's value--for myself and for others--in continuing to engage in discussions about marriage, sexuality, religion, parenting, politics, and above all, avocado. I will, however, keep away from the living room window.

Thanks to everyone who's left me warm fuzzies over the last month, either publicly on this and other blogs or privately via email.




*Which I accidentally mispelled at first as warm fuxxies, which is an entirely different way of making someone feel loved.

With Apologies to Undergraduates

Get a Cash Advance

I wish I knew what all the options on the scale are, and where they lie. Is College better or worse than Genius? This is important, folks. I need to know whether I should improve my vocabulary or dumb myself down.

Booga Basement Ban

If you are in the habit of reading S-Boogie and Little Dude's blog, send me or FoxyJ an email so we can invite you to continue reading it. We've decided to limit access to people we know (either in real life or in the blog world). Sorry, I know this means it won't show up automatically in readers, but we've decided there are enough psychos in the world that we don't want to regularly share pictures of our children with.

Possible Topics of This Post

• How neglecting to blog and to reply to emails has the positive effect of giving me more time to write but also the negative effect of making my inbox feel lonely.
• How I realized tonight that Dean Cain was miscast as Superman; he'd make a much better Captain Marvel.
• How UW is dedicating a new building to me. Really. It's called Ben Hall. (If I could, I'd link to the ads all over campus that say "Ben Who?")
  
• Okay, not really.
• How I've started my own religion.
• How I've been sick now for a month, at least, and even antibiotics didn't cure it.
  
• How after I finish authority training next week I'll become master of the universe. Well, at least the bibliographic universe of name authority records.
• How I'm falling asleep writing this because of the prescription cough medicine I
  

Meet the Newest Fobs!

The observant among you will notice that I've updated my sidebar. There are new honorary fobs on the list and a few honorary fobs who have dropped off the list. Remember the rules, folks: comment at least once a month if you want to be on the list. There's no room here for fobs who don't pull their weight--this blog doesn't comment on itself! (And by the way, I've tried not to link to anyone who doesn't have their blog listed on their Blogger profile, even if I know your secret link; if I've accidentally linked to someone who doesn't want to be linked to, just let me know.)

The especially observant among you will notice that one honorary fob has moved up on the sidebar to Fobs by Blood or Marriage. When my brother Svoid started dating Yodame* a while back, I wasn't sure where to put her in my sidebar. I didn't want her to feel like she wasn't welcome in the Fob family, but I also didn't want her to feel like I was prematurely forcing her into the family by the sealing power of the Fobcave sidebar. I opted to list her as an honorary fob because there was technically neither blood nor marriage involved, but I am happy to report that now there are both blood and marriage making Yodame a True Fob. FoxyJ and I were lucky enough to attend Svoid and Yodame's ultra-private (we were the only guests there) wedding ceremony on Cannon Beach last weekend, and Yodame is currently carrying Fob blood in the form of the niece or nephew of mine in her womb. Not only is Cannon Beach one of the most beautiful locations you could possibly choose to have a wedding at, but it is also the place where Goonies was filmed. How can you go wrong with Goonies? At any rate, welcome to the family, Yodame. I hope you enjoy your new place on my sidebar.


(Better pictures are available at Svoid's blog, conveniently linked from my sidebar.)

*They both use their real names on their own blogs, but I'm all about preserving secret identities here at the Fobcave... which is why my full name is prominently featured at the top of the sidebar.

Funniest Ever Google Search Leading to the Fobcave

gaycave men

Traffic

One of the many things I obsess over is the number of people who visit my blog each day. Yesterday I had 156 hits, which is about one-and-a-half times as many hits as I usually get on Mondays through Thursdays and about twice as much as I usually get on Fridays. My hits over the last few weeks have been a bit higher than usual, actually. This is due, I think, to a number of factors, all of which have to do with FoxyJ. Last week, Foxy included a link to my blog on a comment she left on a post about homosexuality over at Feminist Mormon Housewives. The week before that, she wrote a guest post at Northern Lights, which brought to her blog not only NL's regular readers, but also readers of Times & Seasons and Exponent II, where her guest post and blog were noted by admirers, and many of these readers ended up hopping from her blog to mine. In general, though, I think a lot of the rise in hits has come from the vague and untraceable Big News effect that caused my hits to spike when we announced the separation in April, surpassing even last August's numbers, when the Fobcave was linked to from the Salt Lake Tribune. Our reconciliation has not caused so dramatic a rise in numbers, but there do appear to be curious people checking in. Which, I'll be honest, I'm happy to have people checking in for any reason. I'm vain like that.

The 156 hits yesterday has little to do with all of that, though. As it turns out, about half of those visitors came from a search engine query for simpsonizing. Right now I'm fourth on Google's results for that query, but yesterday I was third. Simpsonizing, as it turns out, is not a very commonly used word, and Google doesn't appear to stem the word to search for simpsonize, which yields 50 times as many results and actually gets you the site you're probably looking for. And the cool thing is that I don't even use the word Simpsonizing in the post that's showing up on the results page. But the thing is, that's not how search engines work. They don't care so much about the words you use as the words people linking to you use. And it so happens that FoxyJ wrote a post the other day in which she used the word Simpsonizing to link to my post about Simpsonizing.

So thank you, FoxyJ, not only for sending readers my way, but for helping them to find what they're really looking for--and ultimately, what we're all looking for--a way to make ourselves look like famous animated people.

No More Fishing for Compliments

I really didn't mean to write yet another post about why you should comment on my blog in order to boost my self-esteem. I started out writing a post about how I like to think of myself as this open-minded sort of person who loves a good discussion when in actuality I just want people to agree with me, but then somehow it turned into another post wherein I beg for comments. Really, I have no right to beg because (a) I get plenty of comments, and (b) I hardly ever comment on other people's blogs. So my new non-Lenten vow is not to fish for compliments anymore.

Except when I feel really needy.

A Confession

It is not because I want to have lively discussions about my thoughts that I put them on my blog. I realize that many people do blog for precisely this reason, and I kind of like the idea of lively discussions, but mainly I put my thoughts on my blog so people will say, "Mr. Fob, you are so brilliant!" or "Wow, I wish my thoughts were as innovative and awe-inspiring as yours."

I also enjoy--though not quite so much--an honest "Hm. Interesting. I'm not sure I agree," followed by a post on the commenter's blog wherein she or he shares her or his own awe-inspiring thoughts on the matter.

I enjoy to an even lesser degree comments that say, "I think you are wrong because...." This has something to do with my aversion to confrontation, but even more to do with my aversion to being wrong.

That said, my least favorite kind of comment is no comment at all, mainly because I assume that silence equals disagreement (or worse, boredom), which in turn equals contempt for me and everything I represent. So if you have thoughts in response to mine, whether they're the kind of thoughts I want to hear or not, please do share them. I'm listening.

Fobheadings OR The Extent of My Geekiness

The observant among you will notice that I've updated my post labels, which I refer to in the sidebar as Fobheadings. I did this because I'm a geek.

The subject and genre/form headings all come from the Library of Congress Subject Headings controlled vocabulary, except for a few headings that are specific to this blog--these exceptions are noted with "|2 fob" after them, as is the standard form of noting non-LCSH headings (and technically, I could put "|2 lcsh" after all the LCSH headings, but in practice that's usually assumed). The first three digits are MARC fields, referring to the kind of heading it is:

• 440=Series title
• 600=Subject (personal name)
  
• 610=Subject (corporate name)
• 650=Subject (topical)
  
• 651=Subject (geographic name)
• 655=Genre/form

In other words, 600-651 say what or whom a post is about, while 655 says what it is.

The two digits following the first three are called indicators; they are codes that tell us something else about the heading, depending on what kind of field it is. A "0" in the second indicator slot, for example, often means that the heading comes form LCSH, while a "7" often means that it comes from another thesaurus that will be named in subfield 2. (Technically, I could have put non-LCSH headings in a 653 [Index term--uncontrolled] field, but in a sense I am using my own controlled vocabulary here, and besides I just like it that way.)

In a real library catalog, of course, you don't see all these codes; they get translated into text like "Subject headings" and "Genre/form headings." But I'm not using the codes so much for their functional value as for their nerd value.

The hardest part of all this has been finding LCSH terms that corresponded to all the labels I had. I'm particularly proud of the one I used to replace Metablogging: 650 _0 Blogs |v Blogs. The first part means that the thing we're describing is about blogs. Subfield v is a form subdivision, meaning that the thing in question is a blog. A blog about blogs. Which, you'll notice below, is what this post is.



Note: Fellow library geeks are welcome to outgeek me by pointing out errors.

HTML Question

Does anybody know how I can get rid of those strips of background on the very top and very bottom of the page? The problem is that the header and footer aren't all the way up against the top and bottom, respectively, but I can't figure out how to fix that.

Also, does anybody know what possesses me to keep staying up way later than I should?

Reasons I Might Not Respond To Your Comment

1. I'm lazy.
2. Commenting on my own blog leads to inevitable letdown, as I will be excited when I see an email in my inbox, only to find out it is just my own comment.
3. Being inconsistent myself in whether I forget to check back on blogs where I've made comments or obsessively check back every hour for three days (even during the night when I wake up to use the bathroom), I'm never sure if a commenter will read my witty reply. And why waste wit on a void?
4. I am so dumbfounded by your eloquence and grace that I have no worthy response.
5. I say, "I'll respond to this later," and then I forget.
   
6. I am so offended by your vile attack on my character that I am too busy crying in the bathtub to respond.
7. I am saving up my response for a later post in which I will elaborate on the thought-provoking and/or offensive points raised by your comment, but then by the time I get around to writing that post it's two months later and nobody cares, so I don't write it. Or I do, and still nobody cares.
8. Really, it's most likely #1.

Rest assured, though, my Fobs, that I read each and every comment, and if your comment is funny I laugh hysterically and if it's poignant I shed exactly three tears. And, of course, if your comment is parenting advice, you can be sure I've put it into action because, after all, I am the highly suggestible type.

This Would Be My 500th Post

Except that included in the supposed 499 posts before this one are eight unpublished drafts, four of which are dummy posts I used to publish template images, two of which are notes for posts I was going to write, one of which is the stub of a post I never got around to writing, and one of which is a complete post I decided against publishing. So really this is my 492nd post. But it's the thought that counts, right?