Yeah, bite me.

Okay, so it's been a while since I posted anything on my blog. Don't act like I'm the first blogger ever to let a mere few years elapse between entries. What do you want from me?

It's probably important to point out that I officially have no followers for this blog, at the moment. Which means I'm really addressing myself. I'm okay with that. I talk to myself all the time because, let's face it, someone needs to benefit from my intellect and humor, and it might as well be me. Hell, pretty much everything I do online amounts to little more than amusing myself. Now, let's get on with it, shall we? (Yes, John, let's.)

So today is Mother's Day, and, despite the fact that most everybody knows it's a faux holiday created out of whole cloth as a way for greeting card companies to pad their ledgers during the other eleven months of the year when people don't feel compelled to mass mail their products to virtual strangers and people (they think) they're distantly related to, no one--NO ONE--would dare miss observing it by participating in one of the many empty gestures available to them for the purpose of acknowledging the person who popped them out into the world. I'm guilty of it. I just sent an email to my mother's work address apologizing for the fact that I didn't get the same pro forma gesture to her 24 hours earlier. Why her work address, you ask? Well, I've somehow managed to lose her home address. Not her physical address, mind you. Her email address. I totally have her physical address, and I could have very easily mailed her a real card or some such thing which probably would have gotten me bonus points for taking five minutes during a regular visit to the grocery store to pick out some vacuous card telling her I care enough to make a 20-foot detour between buying bananas and wandering through the baking goods aisle wondering why the fuck Kroger doesn't carry Dutched Cocoa. (And, yes, I know Hershey's is Dutched, but I don't buy Hershey's because I'm a cocoa snob. See the title of this entry if you have a problem with that.)

Now, I'm sure you're wondering how I managed to lose my mother's home email address. I know you're wondering because I'm wondering, and as previously mentioned I'm the only person who's reading this entry. That's actually a very good question. If you had asked a question it would have been good, at least. Anyway, I'm guessing it has something to do with the Cloud™. See, I very wisely back up things like my iTunes library and my personal contacts list to the Cloud™ because the worst could happen and my DVD backup disc, my external hard drive backup, and my smart phone could crap out at precisely the same moment (or, because fate is a motherfucker, each could crap out the instant I raced to it in a futile effort to retrieve the pertinent information so that I might have the experience of watching each safeguard fail in sequence in real time). So, of course, I make the only decision left me which is to entrust vital personal information to whatever company actually maintains the Cloud™ without asking myself whether it's secure or how said company might use said information in ways I wouldn't appreciate but will probably never learn about anyway. So, yeah, I do that because I trust anonymous people not to fuck me over. Because that sort of thing never goes wrong. So, John, you're patiently reading this entry as you type it wondering when I (also, you) will manage to get to the goddamn point. That would be now. Thanks for being patient.

Apparently, during one backup or another only my mother's work email made the transition, and when I synced everything else like a responsible 21st century man the Cloud™ noticed that one set of data had multiple email addresses for her while the other set did not so it did the only reasonable thing. It deleted the set with multiple addresses because the Cloud™ has reached the point in its evolution where it has an intellectual capacity equivalent to your run-of-the-mill English major (or a sensitive, precocious high schooler) and is rather fond of Thoreau's famous instruction to simplify. In essence, I've been outflanked by a computer algorithm. It's not surprising because, you know, Skynet and all.

So what does my ability (well, let's be honest, inability) to deal with the mystery that is the World Wide Web (which, for those non-existent readers under 30, is an archaic name for the internet) have to do with Mother's Day? Not much. It's a way to pad an entry centering on the overused trope which points out how Mother's Day is bullshit commercialism, and how that fact does nothing to prevent us from feeling obligated to tell our mothers that they're special on this particular day. Honestly, I considered for a moment not sending anything to my mom, but I knew that she would feel disappointed, at best, and rejected, at worst, and no matter what baggage I carry because of the history I share with her she really doesn't deserve to feel either of those things. Even though this day really isn't more important than any other, and we're both being manipulated.