One Good Blog Deserves Another

First published February 3, 2006

When I was a kid, my parents loved to humiliate me by hugging me in public, or to crush my dreams of glory by keeping me from sky-diving off the tool shed. Back then, the only way I had to get even with them was to wait until they weren’t looking, then drink directly out of the milk carton. If I was really mad I would eat cookies first – and backwash.

When I became a parent, I assumed that my son was working with the same set of options, so I just stayed away from the milk. And I’ve always figured that by the time the kid gets the chance to pick out which nursing home I’m going to end up in, his psychoanalyst will have taken some of the edge off the emotional trauma I inflicted by not buying him that dirt bike when he was in the third grade.

I never dreamed that I might get “blogged.”

For those of you who are not yet familiar with blogging, this is an activity in which a person publishes a personal diary or “log” on the Web – a “Web log.” If you repeat “web log” over and over with a mouth full of Tostitos, you get crap all over your keyboard.

You can write about that on your blog.

Blogging has opened up important new possibilities for the free interchange of critical information in our society. For instance, as I’m writing these words the blog management Web site “Blogger.com” lists 3,589,074 posts about cats. Yes, without her blog, Lindsey Applegate of Cincinnati, Ohio would have no way of sharing with the rest of us those vital photographs of little Sammy, Cocoa, Cassie, Stinky, and Zoro.

And there are many other topics diligently covered by bloggers throughout the world. Right now on Blogger.com there are:

674,050 posts about meat;

56,034 posts about toenails;

148,966 posts about stop signs;

17,344 posts about ear wax;

12,306 posts about scabs ;

10, 548 posts about boogers;

and 45 posts that deal with both scabs and boogers!

As you can see, the informative potential of blogs is almost limitless.

So you can imagine my excitement when I discovered an entire blog created by my son, dedicated to me. A tribute, I thought, to the years I spent nurturing his growth, developing his character, and keeping the credit cards handy.

And then I discovered the title and overall theme of his blog; it’s called “My Dad Is A Dork.”

Now, I’ve been told that I was a dork on a regular basis for a sizeable chunk of my adult life. In fact, as my son grew up I actively developed my own signature brand of dorkiness, elevating embarrassing the kid to something of a fine art. I drove a Volvo, wore flip-flops to the grocery store, sold the Volvo and bought a PT Cruiser, and on one occasion – in perhaps the crowning triumph of my dorkosity – called my son “Sweetie” in a hockey locker room.

So I guess I can live with having my achievements in dorkdom celebrated and commemorated online. It’s just a shame that he’s away at college now. Otherwise I’d start another blog of my own and call it, “My Kid Is Grounded.”

You can check out “My Dad Is A Dork” at http://learnedsofar.com/dork/.


Copyright © 2006 Michael Ball