How Hard Can It Be?

Tonight's big project: trying to grow my blog. Sounds easy, right? NOPE.

Failure of the worst kind. I figured what I would do is get my blog its own page on facebook, which should be pretty easy considering the number of stupid pages out there that I see on an hourly basis. And then, I could just link my new posts directly onto my blog-affiliated facebook page and grow from there. Hey, like me? Send it to a friend, blah blah blah.

But here's the catch. I'm trying to keep myself relatively anonymous on the blog, which means I'm not linking up to my real facebook page. This is for several reasons: 1) I like to do shit in an incredibly complicated manner, meaning when I finally get it sorted out like I had planned in my head, I feel even smarter than I actually am because I know it's yet another occasion of me driving around my ass to get to my elbow, 2) I don't want any of my co-workers to know about my blog. This is for several reasons - I don't want to become the water cooler topic of the day, and even though I haven't mentioned my employer or my profession on my blog, I don't want to give anyone any ammunition, and lastly because I really don't want to hear the snarky comments from my co-workers about how often I'm getting laid. I figure if I wanted them to know all that, I would just send it out on an email to the whole office. 3) I have spent an inordinate amount of time on this blog bad-mouthing The Ex, most recently mentioning I hope he catches gonorrhea. Obviously, I would prefer that he not find out about my blog. I also don't want a cease and desist letter to come from his attorney, and I just prefer that my blog generally remain nameless. I think it might be more fun for the reader because then the reader isn't bogged down with remembering all of these names AND relationships, and no one gets bogged down with name-baggage, which everyone has to some degree or the other. I also think it makes it easier to pick up reading right on the current post because all I'm doing is naming the relationship, which hopefully means the reader will probably never wonder to themselves, "Who in the hell is The Ex? Mrs. Second Grade Teacher? What about Guy #1?"

This epic failure that I experienced tonight is almost similar to when I started my blog and then signed in using an email account that didn't even exist. To which I had to hurry up and create that account so it would exist and my blog name didn't end up being given away to some other unknowing person with the email account I had just signed up using but didn't actually own. If you can even own an email account, that is. Again, driving around my ass to get to my elbow from the brain. I'm smart and all, but making something super complicated in my head and then still managing to conquer it makes me feel even smarter. Like my taxes, of which the state tax filing was quickly pulled out of the mailbox the other morning when I realized I might have missed a deduction on the federal filing, thus maybe not making me as much in the hole to the feds. So I will be going over to my mother's again on Saturday morning for round #3 of tax preparation.

Back to facebook. I go to the pages section, pick out my category and create a page. I then immediately send the invite or whatever it is to the 31 friends I have (out of the 160-something) that already know about my blog. I realize I can toggle back and forth between my page for my blog and my personal page. Cool! And it doesn't show up as something I like on my personal page. Go to a different web browsing tab and log into my blog. View blog and hit the share button on the facebook icon under my most recent blog post about how I'm trying to get linked up on other sites. Uh-oh. A little error box pops up on facebook and says I must be using my page as me, personally, to be able to share that on facebook. What the fuck? Why? I don't want to do that, because I don't want my blog stuff on my personal facebook page. I want my blog stuff on the page I just fucking set up for my blog stuff. So then, I figure that I can just cut and paste a link to my blog right in the link section of facebook blog page. OH SHIT! It also cut and pasted the picture of me from my blog, which is very similar to the picture on my personal facebook. So either I can remove the pic of myself from my blog (which I'm not going to do because I'm kind of attached to it at this point) or I can figure out another way around this and still remain anonymous.

Jesus Christ, this is getting complicated. Okay, the problem here must be about all of these stupid permissions. So I toggle back and forth between my blog, my blog email, my personal facebook and my page facebook and try to change all of the permissions for both of the emails and the settings. I was feeling pretty slick by the time I got done, because I had just linked everything to everything else and so it was just a big, circular I-just-beat-the-system kind of moment. Go back to the blog page and hit the little facebook link and motherfucker, that same error box just popped up. Are you fucking kidding me? I just spent 30 minutes of my life changing everything and now it still won't work? Now I feel stupid because it just can't be this difficult and complicated. It can't be. Goddamnit, I'm just going to have to start all over. Deleted the facebook blog page and now I think that if I create a fake personal facebook profile with my blog email, and then create a facebook community page, then I can use that to link up to my blog site and it will be completely unaffiliated with me personally.

But I'm too tired for all this tonight. So shout out to the person who sent a facebook friend request to my anonymous blog email. As you can tell, I'm working on it. I suppose it would be easier to just come out of the blog closet, but then it wouldn't be as much fun and somewhere along the line The Ex would find out and that wouldn't be any fun, either. If growing my blog was as easy as growing my jeans size, I would be golden. But it's not, so I guess I'm just beige for right now.

Stay tuned.