Important Update: Please read this post. Thanks.
Last year, I was nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award in the weblog awards. I didn't mention anything about it on my blog because I was nominated with Fark and Slashdot, and I honestly didn't think I deserved to win. In a few years, maybe we can talk about lifetime achievement, but right now? Not so much.
However, it recently came to my attention that I'm nominated as the best celebrity blogger in something called the Blogger's Choice Awards. Yes, it's a silly popularity contest, and it just drives advertising and pageviews to the award site, and normally I just don't care about this sort of thing, but . . .
I'm getting my ass handed to me by Rosie O'Donnell, who currently has more votes than second, third, and four places combined.
Yeah, you read that correctly. I'm running a very strong second, but I'm getting destroyed by Rosie O'Donnell, and I'd really like your vote.
I don't expect you to blindly cast a vote for me just because I asked, though. I humbly offer the following entries for your consideration:
The Butterfly Tree
Before we finished the shortened version of the math lesson, I heard my little brother's voice from the back of the room.
"Mommy! I can't see Willow!"
All the parents laughed. Mrs. Krocka spun around from the chalkboard, and shot a whithering look toward the back of the room.
I concentrated on my math ditto. It was two columns of four problems, printed in purple ink on that paper that dissolved if you erased it too much. I held my oversized pencil tightly in my now-sweating hand and held my breath.
I heard my mom say, softly, "He's right there, Jer Bear."
"Hi Willow!" He called out, louder. "I see you in school!"
The parents all giggled again. To my horror, a giggle escaped from me, too.
Mrs. Krocka looked directly at me, and through colorless, tightly drawn lips said, "I do not tolerate outbursts like this in my classroom."
In the front of the class, next to the chalkboard, there was a cork board. On the cork board, next to the classroom rules, was a laminated picture of a tree. Attached to that tree were laminated butterflies, each with a student's name on it. If a student got into any sort of trouble during the day, Mrs. Gleason would take that student's butterfly off the tree, and pin it to a different area of the board.
Mrs. Krocka walked to the front of the classroom and was at the tree, taking my butterfly off before I even realized what was happening. As hard as it had been not to giggle, it now became even more difficult not to cry.
Wow. The Millennium Falcon. It was so big, it took two hands to fly it. My friend Darryl let me watch as he put his together, and it had two sheets of stickers! It had this place where you could hide your figures, and you could recreate that cool chess game and Luke's fight with the training droid thingy!
Could I do it? Could I save my allowance until I had enough to buy it? What if they didn't have it when I was all saved up, though? Then what would I do? Mom would make me put my money in the bank, and I just knew I'd never see it again, while it earned something stupid called interest.
My brother came running down the aisle, nearly losing his ever-present blue baseball cap in the process.
"Wil! Look! I got an airplane!" He held up one of those balsa wood planes that always broke on the second flight, provided you didn't break them during assembly.
"Oh no," I thought, "Mom will be right behind him!" I could hear my sister fussing in the cart as it turned the corner and squeaked up behind me.
"What did you decide, Wil?" My mom said. "Amy's getting fussy and we need to leave."
I hadn't had nearly enough time to make up my mind. This was all a plot by my mom to get me to save my money! I had to stall, so I pretended I didn't hear her.
"Oh, that's uh, neat," I said to my brother. "What's it do?"
It's a plane, you dolt. It flies."Wil?" My mom said.
For comparison, here's a recent bit from Rosie O'Donnell's blog:
i saw new baby ducks today too
so tiny and cute
i threw them salt free soda crackers
u can fling them pretty far
Also, this:
is this kelli
no rosie
well hello it is betsy
i saw the view today
and wanted to call u
and just say hi and i hope u r ok
Uhm . . . yeah.
So at the moment, she's utterly destroying the field with 7700 votes. I'm in second with 3600 3400, and Neil Gaiman -- the one blogger in the top three who is, you know, an actual, award-winning writer -- is in third with 1032, barely beating an intern from NBC.
I don't have The View, and I don't have all the stupid public feuds with idiots to draw attention to my blog, but if not even half of the people who read my blog took three minutes to cast a vote, we could knock Rosie O'Donnell out of first place. If we do that, I'd think of it not as a victory for me, but as a victory for bloggers everywhere and the written word.
