Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 9.0 // Critical Darling, Commercial Flop

You probably haven't noticed, but you are looking at a brand new site. After nearly six years of powering jennatollerson.com with Movable Type, I decided to follow the advice I've been giving out in my professional life for the past year, and rebuild the site using Drupal. This was not a particularly easy decision, as it meant migrating nearly 600 entries, and their comments, and their tags. Not to mention images, audio, and video files.

As you might guess, there is not a super simple way to do this. I got lots of help from this page, but it took a lot of trial and error, after which I went through and audited my content, trying to fix most things that were broken. Many links are still broken. However, it had to be done, because Drupal is a vastly superior CMS, and in the risk of having my salesman persona bleed into this site, I'll tell you why. This is going to be a developer-centric entry, where I talk about lots of geeky things. You might get bored , and for that, I apologize. If you came here looking for an entry all about my dark feelings, you'll have to wait for another day! Read More »

I drove away, looking up at the Cheshire Cat moon smiling down at me, wondering if I would see him again.

This is the thought I had, word for word, driving down the road on Sunday night. This writing thing is sort of a gift and a curse, because you often find yourself narrating your real life as it happens in bombastic and high-handed prose. Even the phrase “bombastic and high-handed” is fairly bombastic and high-handed. That whole sentence was like a snake swallowing its own tail.

The point is, I pretty much spend my whole day doing this, relaying this ongoing commentary back to myself, seeing the words appear before me like a close-up shot of a old fashioned type writer in action. I've been doing this my whole life, and while it has tapered back significantly in the past few years, it still happens a lot. Lately all I've been getting are turns of phrase like this one, barely fit for a bargain bin first novel.

However there is nothing of substance to write about lately. I'm working a ton, and I must admit it is a blast. At least once a day I'm typing or uploading or dragging-and-dropping and it just hits me like a freight train: I love what I do. There was a time when I thought I'd mostly be out of the web business by this age, but apparently I'm just getting started, and the extra cool thing is I'm really fucking good at it.

When I'm not working my brain spins overtime parsing this “he–loves–me / he–loves–me–not” drama, which is like something we've all seen on some network comedy somewhere, young career woman in city, focused on work but looking for love, with generous layers of sexual tension between her and the male lead. Except not as funny as that show you saw, and, unbelievably, more pathetic. They don't ultimately get together because he doesn't love her, and without the Ross and Rachael/Carrie and Mr. Big/Buffy and Angel on–again–off–again mess, the whole thing loses steam.

I'm trying to get that show canceled so I can move something else into that time. Maybe something educational. That would be good.

“You should put that story on your website.”

“It's not my story!”

“But you just told it to me.”

“I told you — I heard it on the radio!”

“Oh. But you retell it really well. You should put it on your website anyway.”

“I can't put a story about a little boy and his teddy bear on my site. Right now the site is all about how depressed and cynical I am.”

“Oh, I see — so you can't break character.”

“Precisely. I've got an arc and I've got to stick to it.”

It all started long ago. On a dreadfully ugly page.

Not to mention truly unbearable prose.

New design: 9.0, “Critical Darling, Commercial Flop”.

I also rewrote some of the About page, although I am throughly convinced that no one reads it but me. I've often said that this site functions as my memory, and in this context I must admit that the About page generally serves to remind me who I am. I find it comforting in a way that makes me feel guilty, because I'm enjoying my own writing too much. I feel it lacks some humility.

People have asked me many times how I could write about my whole life on the Internet. Anyone could read it! Dire consequences might follow! They want to know how I keep it safe, keep it secret: a website bearing my real name.

My answer is always the same; honestly, I have nothing to hide. I'm an adult, I'm responsible for myself, and I own my mistakes. For many years I've been the type to give direct answers to direct questions, and while there have been times where I might imply that I have more (or less) experience with certain things, on these pages I've been pretty straight with the ethereal out there. There never seemed to be any point in hiding that I'm a drunk, or overweight, or sometimes pretty fucking lonely. Besides, I believe that reading about my life is probably like watching Nascar: no one really wants to see anyone get hurt, but if it happens, no one wants to miss it either. Having to run across a university quad in broad daylight wearing only a bathrobe? Fantastic! Walking home alone, drunk, in the middle of the night? Well, it was a close call, but I got home okay. Finally being painfully rejected by a longtime crush? Learning experience. Hungover and puking on a public intersection at high noon, with cars all around? Comedy gold.

My humanity and ability to err are the things that have made my life interesting. In the past couple of years or so, however, things have gotten much less compelling on paper. Not bad, per se, but not as riveting as things might have been in my younger days. I spend much more time just chilling out, or talking to my friends, or working, and not getting into anything really resembling trouble. On the one hand it can be comforting to have things be so constant, on the other I've almost been waiting for something to happen to me, because while I can go back to many times in my adult life and read about how things were, I feel like I'm going to go back to this time in my life and find an empty hole, resembling in that way my life before high school, of which I remember very little.

And yet.

The past couple of weeks have been different. I've felt like someone else, and that Jenna is totally irresponsible, blows off work, doesn't keep in touch with family, and is at times dishonest. That Jenna does things that draw blood. This person that I am not has felt more alive than I ever feel, but also manic, crazy, and fantastically selfish. On the one hand I want to be more like this woman, and on the other, I wonder how long I might live if I let her truly run wild.

Lately I've done enthralling things, actions and thoughts that make for compelling, if not necessarily happy or comedic, reading. I composed the essays in my head one million times, tossing and turning in my bed, trying to wrap my head around who I might become if I don't keep this all in check. Then it hit me: I finally have some things that I need to hide. I can't, at this time, live my life in public the way I used to, so I can't vent, I can't work it all out for myself in essay form and publish it for the world to see. Let me tell you, for someone who has a years-old habit of living her life out in the open, having secrets is actually pretty fucking stressful.

Due to a rash of comment spam, I'm now only accepting comments from registered users. I hate doing this because I get so few comments as it is, but it has to be done. I have enough work to do without spending a bunch of time hyper-moderating a personal site.

Registration is free with TypeKey. Once you register you can use it not just on my site but on blogs all over the web. You can even set up your own totally sweet profile (or not).

I hope this doesn't discourage anyone from leaving comments, because they make me so very happy. Hopefully, I'll be able to loosen to restrictions again someday.

In theory, I should take this opportunity to complain.

Why? Life is stressful, and over the years, when my life is stressful, I go on the Internet and whine about it. You could say this is because I'm a blogger (a term I abhor, by the way) but I think it makes me more of a livejournaler.

Zing!

In any case, registering complaints with the ethereal “out there” has become totally boring. Yeah, I'm freaking out about (my lack of) money most of the time and I don't leave the house as much as I probably should and I spend a bunch of time up in my own head worrying about the future, but do I have to keep talking about it? It's old news!

What am I going to do instead? Focus on the cuteness of my new, shorter hair, of course:

Curious about the state of things? Well, although actual funds tend to be slow to trickle in, my business is brisk, and I am working steadily on a wide variety of projects. Most of the time I am actually having a great deal of fun “at work” and more importantly, being consistently challenged. Sure, there were a couple days this week when I didn't eat at all but that is a small price to pay for being able to set my own schedule, and not having to report to a manager or worry about office politics. I mean that.

Of course, the one downside to being so busy is not having energy—creative or raw—to pour into much else, so that's why it's a currently a Tollerson family Christmas on this site. This usually means that we managed to get the decorations up, but because we lack general time and initiative, we probably won't get them down until sometime just before my birthday in early March. It's just like being a kid again!

Apropos of nothing: someday, I would like to go back to my old style of writing. Not the whiny one but the other one, in which I tell outrageous stories of misadventure. The only problem is, I don't get into as much trouble as I used to. This is something I feel I need to remedy—lately I feel like I'm aging a little too fast.

“I’m 23. Remember how old 23 seemed when you were little? I mean, I thought people were going to be traveling in airlocks, and I would have 5 kids.
Here I am. 23.
Things are um, they’re basically the same.
I think time’s running out to do something bizarre. Somewhere around 25 bizarre becomes immature.”
- Singles

We've redesigned just for Christmas.

I can't get over how dorky this is.

If you're seeing stars, I can tell you that you're probably not looking at my work. I upgraded my Movable Type installation today, and while I get some things worked out I dropped in the RAWK! style by Liz Lubowitz. This is mainly to gain a fresh start, but it's entirely temporary.

Why did I choose to do this today? I have plenty of work to do, but I'm also having one more bad day in a series of bad days lately, and as a result I'm procrastinating. It's unwise and irresponsible, but I think I'm doing it because this is the one little corner of the universe that feels at all under my control at this point, where everything else — and I mean everything — feels utterly unmanageable.

Only Jenna Tollerson would put off working on websites by working on a website.