I don’t have a deadline, technically.  Rather, I have a sinking, depressed feeling as the end of the month draws nearer and I realize The Last Gaffe will have gone nearly a month without my wit, charm and pictures of me eating things (next month I plan to write an article about eating an entire wedding cake by myself.)  It is now nearly two weeks after the beginning of the month and Malcolm is threatening to kidnap and kill my Tamagotchi if I don’t deliver an article, the problem?  My article failed.

I won't let the bad man take you, Tamagotchi.

The development of my article didn’t begin until the last week of January when I began to get that sinking, depressed feeling again.  I desperately ransacked my old blogs to see if I had written anything funny in the past that I could use, but unfortunately Malcolm (A.K.A. Captain Hardass M.D.) didn’t think poetry dedicated to the cute girl who doesn’t even know I exist and long, depressing posts about how lonely Boulevard of Broken Dreams makes me feel were up to par for The Last Gaffe.   “Good Lord!” I told him, “You let a woman and an Irishman write for you, don’t talk to me about standards!”

Since my whiny adolescent ravings were so cruelly nixed, I resolved myself to be logically funny.  Think, dammit, I told myself, think.  After much research and several calculations I found that the two logically funniest things are cute animals saying things (because animals can not talk) and old people being confused by the internet.  You really can’t argue with this, I used science.

Am... am I doing this right?

Using my mad, Vulcanesque logic I concocted a brilliant article idea: Me being confused by social networking then doing humorous reviews of several social networking sites.   It seemed brilliant and surefire.   All I had to do was create a false personality and join some social networking sites. That was my first mistake.   As it turns out, there are a lot of social networking sites out there on the internet (in my article I would have called it “The Intertubewebs” because I am hilariously mystified by technology.)  From there I swiftly decided that I should focus my article on a single social networking site, Bebo.

When I was younger, Bebo was just that annoying site that my friends were constantly begging me to sign up for so they could have more people on some list or another and show off.  I would always get revenge by joining strange little Dutch website and inviting those friends to join up there.  Oddly enough, they usually did sign up, and then I was stuck with those horrible people on strange little Dutch websites and I was still getting e-mails from Bebo.  All of this is just a ridiculously circuitous way of me saying I hate Bebo and think it is a cesspool of the internet.  Basically it’s MySpace with an even worse layout and fewer people that want to be friends with you.

The joke of my article would have been that I was creating an internet persona that my totally un-hip self saw as the typical teenager.   Following is a description of my persona from my original write-up:

Who Am I?

I am Pat Pringle, a “104” year old woman from Jackson Hole, Wyoming who is “Down for Anything” on Bebo and principally enjoys My Chemical Romance, The Jonas Brothers and “sploshing.” (ed. Note: Do not Google Image Search Sploshing)My personal motto is: ♥~x~Love like you’re dancing, dance like you’re dying, and live like you’re dancing♥~x~♥ (The hearts, Tilde and ‘X’ let the kids know I am one of them.)

Goodness gracious, are your sides splitting yet?   At this point I was beginning to get that sneaking suspicion that there was no way to make this funny, but I pressed on I determined that there had to be humor somewhere, perhaps in who I befriended.   As it turns out, I’m no better at making friends on Bebo than I am at making friends in real life, because I couldn’t even get any friends from the My Chemical Romance or Jonas Brothers fan club.

I was getting desperate.   I wanted to finish my damn article but nobody was doing anything funny.  I waited days for somebody to add me as a friend, send me a message, comment me, look at my page, anything. Maddened and on an insane search for humor, I resorted to the darkest depths of internet comedy: trolling.

WARNING: I am a trained Comedist and any attempts at duplicating my actions may result in personal injury or inadvertent cybering.

I trolled, oh how I trolled, I trolled my heart out.  I told every rabid band group that their band sucked, I joined pro-grammar groups and posted phrases like “L0L I luv grammer!”   How could they have seen through such subtle trolling?   More importantly, what the hell kind of website is this that I can insult Insane Clown Posse as an obsessed Jonas Brothers fan and not have a hundred poorly typed insults informing me that they have been intimate with my mother?   For the love of God, only 1 person has even looked at my profile.   What is wrong with you, Bebo?

As I looked over my desolate Bebo page, forlorn that my only Bebo friend was someone who shared a similar interest in “Sploshing,” I saw my article slipping away and dying.  Malcolm will be so disappointed in me, I thought.   And that was about when I decided to write this stupid article about failing so miserably at being a comedy writer.

Tune in next month for an article about how I failed to eat the wedding cake and vomited on a foreign dignitary or in-law.  I promise to include pictures.