A week from today is the ten year anniversary of my favorite blog on the whole internet, Mimi Smartypants. Like myself, she started out on diaryland, the wacky invention of much-beloved Andrew. Unlike me, she kept blogging there regularly up until very recently (July of this year), when she switched to a self-hosted wordpress blog (like this one! see how similar we are?).
Her blog reminds me of the tagline of Cat and Girl, which is “About a cat, a girl, and experimental metanarrative.” Mimi Smartypants writes about her Chicagoan editor self, her hilarious daughter Nora, her husband “LT,” the internet, and generally a sort of experimental metanarrative. It’s the literary equivalent of someone taking quotidian reality, shaking it inside out, tamping it down on their head like a hat, and dancing around in it. Well, not quite, but that might be as close as I can get.
I love her for so many reasons. Briefly, a few:
- She doesn’t allow comments, and never has. Each entry feels like a special letter written just to you. Ten years’ worth of letters. It’s like David Foster Wallce meets Heloise and Abelard, except no one’s dead yet, or castrated, or a nun.
- She writes entirely on her own terms (which she should! It’s her blog!). There’s no updating schedule and rarely any images. Just lots and lots of glorious text. And lists. And occasionally bizarre literary devices. Things in which I revel!
- I don’t like kids. I don’t even really like most straight people, to tell you the truth. But the way she writes about her daughter Nora makes a) her daughter seem the coolest, funniest, smartest kid in the world. I would give Nora one or both of my kidneys, and b) you can tell how much she loves Nora, and what a crazy great parent she is. Even I am moved! I can’t underscore how much of a recommendation this is.
I am going to take this occasion to highlight some of my favorite Smartypants moments, in list format: Continue reading →
