Suburban Oblivion

If you are not a [tag]Showtime[/tag] subscriber, get it, now!

I have never been a fan of Showtime, I am an HBO girl myself. Rome, Sopranos, Big Love; pitter-patter goes my little heart! But with Rome getting the ax and the final season of Sopranos looming, whats a girl to Tivo??

Out of the darkness comes a shining gem, a beacon of hope on the horizon. Its name is The Tudors.

The show is about the fascinating political battles, fueds, passions and intrigues taking place in the court of King Henry the VIII. My husband had actually Tivo’d the first two episodes, and about 15 minutes into the first one I looked up from my laptop and was immediately sucked in. By the the time it ended I was in no mood to wait, and had him turn on the second episode so I could see what would happen next. I am not a huge history buff, but after reading [tag]Philippa Gregory[/tag]’s The Other Boleyn Girl, it was interesting to compare what I’d already read to the way it was laid out in the show.

The Sunday night drama series starts this weekend, but the first two episodes of the season can already be seen as a sneak preview on the website, or on Direct tv or Time Warner Cable’s OnDemand.

I can’t say enough about this show, other than that we are subscribing to Showtime just to be able to watch it. Check out their website and see for yourself.

All new readers are welcome, and I hope you will consider subscribing to my RSS feed. Feeling sociable? Join me on Twitter, I'd love to hear from you!

I read a post the other day where the author said she was not comfortable doing the [tag]music[/tag] meme making the [tag]blogging[/tag] rounds, because music was such an intensely personal thing.

I haven’t done it because, quite frankly, I have terrible taste in music.

I will admit it, I LOVE music from the 90’s. If I have any XM station on, its the [tag]90’s[/tag] channel. And nothing excites me more than turning the radio on and finding out they are doing the 90’s flashback segment.

This wouldn’t be so terrible to admit, if the music from the 90’s hadn’t been so. damn. awful. Have you ever gone back and listened to it?

“All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom-zoom-zoom and a poom-poom - JUST SHAKE
YA RUMP!”
Huh? what is a poom-poom, and do I really even want to know?

“Jump Jump
The Mac Dad will make you Jump Jump
The Daddy Mac will make you Jump Jump
Kris Kross will make you Jump Jump “

“I came to get down [2x]
So get out your seats and jump around
Jump around [3x]
Jump up Jump up and get down.
Jump [18x]“
Apparently there was a LOT of jumping going on back then, but I don’t remember doing any of it.

“Informer, you no say daddy me snow me I’ll go blame,
A licky boom boom down.
Detective mon said daddy me snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky boom boom down.”
I don’t think any of us ever figured out the lyrics to this one.

And one that I still love, from Boyz II Men ‘End of the Road’
“Girl, I’m here for you
All those times of night when you just hurt me
And just ran out with that other fella
Baby I knew about it, I just didn’t care
You just don’t understand how much I love you do you?
I’m here for YOU
I’m not out to go out and cheat on you all night
Just like you did baby but that’s all right “
Thats all right?? If this song were written today, the guy would have bitch slapped her and wished herpes on her and still found some way to make it rhyme.

So yeah, I admit it, I love 90’s music, as awful as it was. You’ll have to excuse me now, I have to go pick my daughter up from school, and they’ve been playing “Can’t Touch This” at around 3:05 every afternoon.

Popularity, wow what a topic this has been lately!

It started out innocently enough, this past Saturday I had the joy and pleasure of meeting M., who is the webmistress of a blog titled Velveteen Mind. After a bit of conversation about our families and backgrounds, we got onto the topic of blogging. She has kept journals for most of her life, but is still on the fence about committing to writing in a medium where other people will be reading her work. She had a lot of really interesting questions about opening yourself up to that kind of exposure, what it does to the way you write, and what happens when people start to notice what you do. She worries that it seems pretentious to promote your blog among those who know you, and how she imagines it would get a little addicting to have a lot of people reading and commenting.

(Interestingly enough this was not long after Her Bad Mother’s now infamous blog on the meaning of narcissism as it pertains to blogging.)

With all this in mind, she asked me where I saw myself going with my blog, and what my goals were. She mentioned that in reading my posts, you could see the turning point of where I started to pick up more regular readers and comments. But what is my end goal? Where do I see myself with this down the line?

I admit, I like knowing people are actually reading what I put out there. It isn’t always brilliant, it isn’t always fascinating, but its usually somewhat entertaining, and if I can touch someone and make them smile, or give them one of those “Oh, so other parents go through this too!” moments, then I’m a happy girl. So far this philosophy is serving me well, I have started promoting my blog a bit through blogrolls and MyBlogLog and such, and wow! I used to have a few close friends who read and commented, now I’m getting more and more readers every day. It is exciting, it is fun, and yes, I admit it, I kind of like it. I am nowhere near and probably never will be near the likes of some of the big-name mommy bloggers, but I am doing well in my own way, and the future is looking bright.

But with popularity comes a price. People dish about everything, from whether a person replies to their comments enough(I’ve also seen a lot of comments in various places about how there is no point in commenting on the blog of the bigger names, because you’d just get lost in the crowd, and they probably don’t read them anyways.) to whether the blogging community is an overall good or bad place and if BlogHer was full of mommy cliques. I’m not saying all this is bad by any means, just that if it is out there, whether in cyberspace or real life, people are going to talk about it. And once you put yourself out there you open yourself up to criticism as well. I admit this concerns me even being as small potatoes as I am.

So is blogging popularity a bad thing? Have you ever been talked about online due to something you posted? If a blogger gets a lot of comments, does it say more to you about the company they keep, or the quality of their writing?

I’m curious on thoughts from all bloggers, big and small.