Free Tips on Blogging; or, Ginger Ingenue's 'How to Blog'

Welcome to the Ginger Ingenue School of Blogging! Pull up a chair, and watch as Ms. Ingenue ever so carefully lays out the well-guarded secrets of how to write a wonderful blog!

-- Results may vary. If you actually lose followers, please don't sue.

"Lesson number one," she says, as she bends over to pick up a piece of chalk, and avoids the frog one student has unleashed from his crumpled-up top hat.



Oh yes, your teacher, Ms. Ingenue is dressed like a naughty librarian -- in fact, the library fired her for being so naughty, and that's why she's here, teaching you how to blog! -- with black high heels and black thigh highs, and all of this is irrelevant. Irrelevant.

"Don't you know what irrelevant means?" she asks the class.

"Sure," says Chico. "They've got irrelevants in the circus!"

Her star pupil. Sitting in the back row, between his two brothers.

And in the desk next to him, Groucho says, "Yeah, and the irrelevants keep stealing my pajamas!"

-- You didn't know you were gonna be in the same room with the Marx Brothers, now did you? Oh yes, lots of famous people in Ms. Ingenue's class today. Fred Astaire is passing a love note to Ginger Rogers. Dana Andrews is listening to opera on his ipod. And upon the dunce chair, sits Marilyn Monroe.

Now back to our lesson!

Ms. Ingenue bends over to pick up the chalk she purposely dropped a second time, and this time, Harpo honks his taxi horn. The brothers laugh. Fred and Ginger slip away to make-out behind the filing cabinet, and Dana Andrews has nodded off to sleep.

Marilyn's still trying to read the word 'Dunce' on her hat.

"It's a 'd', Marilyn," says Ms. Ingenue. "'D' as in 'dog'."

-- Always willing to encourage even the most hopeless of pupils.

Now back to our lesson!

Startled by the taxi horn, but otherwise undaunted, Ms. Ingenue drops the chalk a third time, and this time, takes her sweet ass time in picking it up! While retrieving the chalk, ever so slowly, in order to give the Marx Boys a healthy look at Ms. Ingenue's equally healthy backside, she then rises too quickly, disrupting the one single bobby pin from her updo, causing a cascade of brunette curls to slap her blushing face. A chocolate covered strawberry.

But this is all irrelevant, for Ms. Ingenue is allergic to chalk!

"Chico," she says, "now be a good boy, and go fetch me a pair of rubber gloves."

"Two hand rubbers coming right up!" he says.

-- We won't see Chico again for the rest of the day. Two lucky girls received Ms. Ingenue's rubber gloves...or Chico received two hand-rubs from two lucky girls.

Either way.

Ms. Ingenue washes her hands of the whole affair, along with the chalk dust, and uses Fred's immaculate top hat to control her unruly hair, and Groucho's greasepaint mustache to write on the blackboard...of course, you can't see black on black, so Ms. Ingenue has Groucho crawl (while riding on his back) to the other side of the room where Ms. Ingenue once again rubs her finger between Groucho's nose and lips, and then onto the wall to write the following lesson for the illumination and benefit of her ever-dwindling class.

LESSON NUMBER ONE in the Art of Careful, Deliberate Blogging

Don't move to the woods just yet, Walden. Just disappear from your blog -- nay, the entire blogosphere! -- for a long stretch of time. The longer you're gone, the better; the more people are going to miss you, and the more they miss you, the more likely they'll come and read your blog as soon as you get back. Of course sometimes staying gone for too long will make the heart grow less fond. People will dislike you for being so distant, flippant, and otherwise unobtainable. But don't be the Monroe of the blogging world -- no, don't be easy! -- be the Greta Garbo of the blogging world! Be so distant, and flippant, and otherwise unobtainable, that people will never truly know you at all, and when you write that rare, God awful, late-night essay, and post it, no one will be there to read it, and you won't have to feel embarrassed!

Ah, no more regret!! No more wishing you hadn't wrote about your ideal form of suicide; or how the Dead End Kids are the best actors of all time! Because that wasn't YOU talking, genius. That was the five-dollar-bottle of wine you bought at Walmart last night. In fact, it was all three five-dollar-bottles of wine you bought at Walmart last night, and used as a time machine to drink your way through the night, and write BIG prose (prose that seemed big at the time) and a few poems involving your sexual fantasies of actors who are old enough to be your father, but now they're dead (so it doesn't matter), but just what kind of girl wants to have sex with men who are already dead, though every girl (I assume) longs to have sex with at least one man who's old enough to be her father.

So you're normal.

At least we've established that.

LESSON NUMBER TWO

Always write about the most morbid subject you can think of. That way, your audience will become accustomed to your outgoing, and brave personality! Nothing will shock them!! If you want to post naked pictures of yourself: go ahead! If you want to declare yourself a puppy-hating atheist: be my guest! There is no stone unturned that can't be turned again in the land of morbid blog topics. Discuss your latest suicide attempt. Draw pictures of your messy divorce. Post a video of your weeping. Tell 'em all how long you've been sober, and how lonely you are. And make sure they know every single gory detail about your last doctor visit, panic attack, therapy session; how your cat is getting castrated today, and you hope he doesn't hate you for it later. Likewise, how your Billy Halop look-alike lover just got a vasectomy, and you hope he doesn't hate you for it later, either. After all, just because you're through having children, doesn't mean he doesn't want any more kids. Did you ever think of that, you selfish beast?

"Dunce!" shouts Marilyn.

-- That's right, Marilyn! Good job.

Dana wakes up and tosses Marilyn a dog treat.

Meanwhile, there are soft sighs coming from behind the filing cabinet, and Harpo is painting a picture of a horse on Ms. Ingenue's lavish backside.

LESSON NUMBER THREE

The next time someone leaves you a nice heartfelt comment, completely ignore it! That's right. Make 'em work for your personal conversation. You're not being paid. After all, if people want to converse with you, they should email you. Of course don't respond to your emails, either, because then people will write you back. And then you'll have to write them back. And then they'll write you back, and so on, thus creating an ongoing pressure akin to keeping a basketball in mid-air, for if the ball hits the ground, it will make a horrible sound, waking up your only child. And if your child wakes up, then what? Then you have to stop blogging and go to bed, and it's all the stupid emailer's fault. Why can't people just leave you alone, or leave comments on your blog? Why can't every single blog post you write receive twenty-something comments (at the very least!) and every commenter say how much they loved your piece, and what a genius you are. Oh, what a great writer! Oh how witty. You're the best blogger of all time.

The reason no one says these things to you, is because they're jealous of you. That's why.

And so you go on every day, writing, and slaving away over a hot stove of a blog, wishing and hoping to some day be recognized, and possibly awarded -- and by awarded, I mean you'll get a little badge you can affix to your sidebar: oh the joy! -- and garner millions upon millions of comments!

Your comments are all you have, you know! So when you get them, ignore them, and soon the commenters will leave you alone, and then you'll be a starving artist. No one will love you! This will send you into such an emotional state of turmoil, you'll be inspired to write as well as any author, or college-taught baboon.

Assuming you don't already write like a college-taught baboon...

If so, cheers to you!

And if you don't believe it's possible, just ask Marilyn! Why, when she came to Ms. Ingenue's blogging school, she couldn't even tell her right from her left, her top from someone else's bottom, or Dana Andrews from a hole in the wall.

Needless to say, Dana wasn't impressed with Marilyn, anyway, so she ended up going to bed with the hole in the wall.

Chico was very jealous.

...

Fred and Ginger emerge from behind the filing cabinet, only to have their clothes once again shed from their bodies, this time no thanks to their roaming hands, but all due to Harpo's giant scissors!

-- Snip, snip.

And Groucho's all out of greasepaint from his upper lip, and both eyebrows, so I guess that concludes our broadcast day.

Thanks again, for your attention, and now please stand and pledge allegiance to the flag of Freedonia, as we listen to Ms. Ingenue's own creaky rendition of the Blogosphere's WorldWide National Film Blog Anthem.

"Gesundheit," says Groucho.

Ms. Ingenue sings:

Oh, say can you write
by the blog's early light
what so proudly we hailed
as the TWILIGHT's last sequel

Whose bad plot and dim stars
thru the box office plight
O'er the chick-flicks we watched
were so shamelessly steaming?

And the Marx Bros. were there!
To bombard your despair!
Gave proof to the night
that are hearts are still here!

Oh say does that speak-easy password (Swordfish!) yet stand?
O'er the land of the free
and the home
of the
bland.

[Static]

Class dismissed!

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