there are things, many, many things about the interweb i just don’t understand. i was surfing earlier and saw a headline that read, “kathy likes her imac, wishes it came in green.” i decided my titles need to be more informative and descriptive like that. i wish to make all your lives better by being a beacon of knowledge.

also while surfing i decided to hit some sites i used to visit frequently, but no longer do because i just don’t have the time. or they bore me. or whatever. here’s the thing that struck me about that. they still bore me. i still don’t have the time. i don’t really know what led me there in the first place, but one of the things that used to sort of interest me (for lack of good content, i guess) was the blogroll. i was fascinated by who they linked to and why. i would click their links, following the trail of breadcrumbs to their natural conclusion to see if the original weblog owner had anything in common with these people they had chosen to link to or if it was simply networking, vanity, whatever. look, when you suffer long bouts of insomnia you get pretty desperate for something to pass the time. now, going back after a long break i find a few sites that have drastic changes in their blogroll. this makes a curious sort of person like me wonder. maybe i’m suspicious. maybe i’m nosy. maybe my boredom causes me to create scintillating and scandalous scenarios to relieve the tepid banality of surfing sites i’m not really interested in. for instance? i can’t tell you that! they might be looking right now! they’d be all like, “gah! you wicked girl! how dare you spill all our dirty secrets on the internet? the dirty secrets you learned about…on…the…uh, internet.” admittedly, it doesn’t make sense for them to get angry at me, but this is the internet and there are crazies on here. i don’t know if you know that or not. crazies on the internet are the worst sort of crazies. they’ll eff your ess word up, man.

listen to me. i sound awfully egotistical. like they’re even reading this. crazies or not. they certainly didn’t count *me* as a member of their blogroll, so i can’t say why i would even think for one minute that they would be here now.

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you’re not are you?

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(now, i’m kind of freaking out here. nobody move. i’ll tell you the truth: the internet scares me. lil bit.)

sorry. i get a little worked up sometimes. anyway, i’ve decided. i can’t give you specifics. but generally, i just wonder, you know?

like, maybe, generally speaking, say this guy had a pretty popular weblog. not like A-list, celebrity, self-indulgent, quit his day job and move to Hollywood popular, but, you know, a lot of hits a day and a minimum of fifty and as many as a hundred and fifty or more comments on each post; no matter how insipid and boring. big, long, healthy blogroll. say he was to meet a couple girls that were on his blogroll, a couple girls who had also linked to him from their sites. i’m not naming any names or anything. but say he did. and he blogged about it, the lead up to the meeting, how much he liked them, etc. and these girls also blogged about it and commented on his posts and vice versa until the cows come home. it was a great big tangled web of links and track backs and posts. everything seemed really, really, really h!a!p!p!y! for all of them. the guy, the girl, the other girl. they were all such great friends. according to the posts, the comments, the numbers. but NOW when i go to his site, both of their links are gone from his blogroll and his link is gone from theirs and his comments have dwindled to like, maybe ten. i don’t care. i mean, if i didn’t remember to check my stats once in a blue moon and went by comments alone you’d think anji was my only reader. so i know comments alone don’t mean anything. but still, something happened, yeah? if they aren’t going to tell me — and believe me, i looked. i realize i’ve not been to the site in probably a year so i had a LOT of archives to go through — then i’m simply going to have to fill in the blanks myself. and those blanks are not going to be pretty after i’m done filling them in, let me tell ya. because i likes me a good juicy scandal when i’m bored. i mean, generally speaking, of course. something happened at that meeting, i betcha. something went terribly awry that cause bad blood and now he’s odd man out. off the blogrolls. no longer the golden child of the interweb. no one will comment on you now, buddy! we’ll ruin you! it’s so seedy and delicious! too bad i don’t know the details. it would make his site so much more interesting.

btw, the people on my links list? they’re there because they interest me and i like reading them and i passionately feel as though the best way to live life is to force my preferences on people around me. it makes me happy. if one of those links should happen to disappear it’s probably because we had a mad, torrid love affair in which a lot of lube and probably a small animal or three was involved. also: drugs. and possibly a blade, masking tape, rope and some sort of vinyl. you can bet on that. it gets awkward after that. too awkward to maintain a “blog” relationship.

either that or they decided not to blog anymore so i was literally forced to remove their link. but that first thing sounds like so much more fun.

and finally: i have a confession to make: apparently, i’m quite stupid. and not very observant. but i won’t go backwards. i’ll own what i’ve done. something FINALLY dawned on me today. speaking of blogrolls on boring sites, i was looking at my own links list today and i visited Trouble‘s site again to see if he was back yet. i finally saw what i apparently missed for the last eight months. he posted back in freaking August saying he was moving house and i actually commented saying i wouldn’t help him because blahblahblah. i don’t know. i tried to say something clever. but okay, here’s the stupid thing. i thought he was being literal. i missed the line above that saying he was moving his site to WordPress. which, good for him. i’ve been using WP for a few years now and i love it. but i feel like the biggest moron on the planet because every time i went to check to see if he updated yet i saw that the post was the same and navigated away, still missing the link to his new site. i did wonder what was up. i wondered if he was ever coming back. i refused to take his link down. the last link i had to remove from my list didn’t come down until the 404 error message finally came up, assuring me that he wasn’t coming back to post. never, ever. there was no such message on trouble’s page. hope springs eternal.

it wasn’t until today that i actually paused half a second longer before closing the window that i saw it. so i admit it. i’m a maroon. but hooray! trouble is back! and he has a new site! sort of. i mean, he didn’t actually GO anywhere and the new site has been around since August. but it’s new to me. and now i have a LOT of reading to catch up on. and i should probably get my brain looked at it. it’s clearly leaking cells at an alarmingly rapid rate. : /