A confession from mimi smartypants

September 26, 2014 2:53 PM

Online diarist mimi smartypants has been typing about her life for just over fifteen years, and now she's considering quitting the gig. "Next week marks fifteen years of this online diary thing, and I have been toying with the idea that maybe that is quite enough, thank you. In fact, I had not updated in so long that I sat down to type a mic-drop “thanks for the memories”-style entry, but then this crap came out instead. So maybe I’m not quite done yet? I don’t know."

— mimi smartypants started her online diary at Diaryland (smartypants.diaryland.com)

— mimi smartypants was one of the first bloggers to publish a book based on the content of her blog (The World According to Mimi Smartypants)

— mimi smartypants has read Infinite Jest at least three times ("Why Read Infinite Jest")

— mimi smartypants switched her blogging platform to WordPress in 2009 when Matthew Baldwin of defective yeti wanted to repay her for writing about Infinite Jest for his Infinite Summer project (mimismartypants.com)

— mimi smartypants is staying on the internets; she's over here on Twitter

posted by danabanana (25 comments total)

I honor and respect whatever decision she makes; her life is her own, and she's not my performing clown.

But still, whenever I see a new entry from her, my heart leaps. I've read her since Diaryland--not the very beginning, but surely not so far from it. Many, many years by now. And she suits me right down to the ground. I would read her forever.

It's a little surprising to find the 'don't read the comments' maxim holds true for me even in a thread like the 'Stay On My Internets' one, though, where the central gist is so positive and approving. There's someone who complains, "she certainly paints a very rosy picture of adoption as relatively uncomplicated and without any real issues of race or privilege or gender or class mixed up in it", and my teeth grind, because HELLO HAVE YOU NEVER READ HER AT ALL, YOU ARE SO WRONG. She has talked very cogently and critically about alllllllll of those things. So, you know, someonewrongontheinternetblerblerbler.
posted by theatro at 3:06 PM on September 26, 2014 [18 favorites]

I really hope she doesn't stop. I've been reading her for years - I have her book! - and she is so, so good.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:10 PM on September 26, 2014

Like everybody else for a while, I was a blogger. There was even a not entirely insubstantial amount of people who read me regularly. Agents said nice things to me. I did some public readings that went alright. A few of these were with Mimi Smartypants. (She's just as great as you'd hope she'd be.) But I could never find the right balance on sharing something real about myself without egging on my own crazy. I know people who became fabulously successful with carefully maintained personas. And that's how they stayed okay. Most of us just found ways to be happy and healthy and backed quietly out of the room, taking our snark and feelings and whatnot to Twitter or Facebook or the corner bar.

Mimi has managed to keep her thing going something like five to ten times longer than most of her contemporaries without ever having to hide behind a character, without ever watering herself down, and without going nuts. You really have to tip your hat to that. And if she's done, so be it. It was a helluva run.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 3:18 PM on September 26, 2014 [8 favorites]

I don't know this blogger in particular, but I so treasure those "bloggers" who have been around for years. My friend Steve has been "blogging" since 1996, and I love going back into his archives.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 3:24 PM on September 26, 2014

It's her life, but anyone who can draw the analogy between the casual urination of house mice and hoboes has my support to write as long as she wishes.
posted by wenestvedt at 3:32 PM on September 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

I was dismayed when I read she is thinking of quitting. A unique voice of sanity and delight. Has it really been fifteen years? The Internet won't be the same without her.
posted by conrad53 at 4:25 PM on September 26, 2014

I dropped off reading mimi smartypants at some point in the mid 2000s, and it pains me that there's just way too much now to pick up where I left off. Especially since it was a project of epic proportions to read all the way back to the beginning after discovering her blog sometime in 2001-2002.

I kind of just want an end credits sequence:

MIMI SMARTYPANTS STOPPED DRINKING MILLER HIGH LIFE AND SWITCHED TO LOCAL CRAFT BEERS IN 2010. THIS COINCIDED WITH A SHOCKING DROP IN GETTING NONSENSE PHRASES STUCK IN HER HEAD.

NORA SMARTYPANTS IS TAVI GEVINSON.

THE BUS STILL SMELLS FUNNY.
posted by Sara C. at 4:39 PM on September 26, 2014 [4 favorites]

Oh.

I started reading her in early 2000, after a writer friend who'd gone to high school with her pointed me to her blog and said, Read this, you'd like her. And I do. And I walked around for years with the smug knowledge that I knew Her Real Name!

I stopped reading her a few years ago (as things seemed to get more settled for her and less settled for me) but she's still one of my very favorites, just on the fumes alone. (And isn't she mefi's own?)
posted by mochapickle at 4:40 PM on September 26, 2014

I'll be sad if she stops, and will miss her entries. I frequently end up reading them to my husband while giggling like crazy (in fact, a couple of quotes from her blog have become weird little in-jokes -- "I don't wan't a brain!!" courtesy of a young Nora, etc.
posted by sarcasticah at 5:02 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

This is interesting, I've been blogging/journaling online since 2000 but haven't really sat down and read her posts. I just started at the beginning, where she's the same age as I am now. It's sort of eerie in a cool way.
posted by autoclavicle at 5:44 PM on September 26, 2014 [2 favorites]

I love her. I've read her forever. Like, since I was in college and we were both on Diaryland. I remember when she switched over to her own website, and how she basically kept it looking the same, and that made me love her even more.

She has such a weird way of seeing the world, and is such a hilarious and eloquent writer.

Seriously, though - what's with the penguins? I would expect her to answer this age-old question in her final post. Don't leave me hanging, mimi smartypants!
posted by sockermom at 6:01 PM on September 26, 2014

I love her. I've read her forever. Like, since I was in college and we were both on Diaryland.

Ditto to all of that, Diaryland included.
posted by kate blank at 6:36 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

My goodness. I've been keeping an "online diary" (we didn't call it "blogging" then) since 1998 (I was on GeoCities, then got my own part of a free private domain, and since then on LiveJournal since 2005), and mimi smartypants was always part of the landscape. I'm kind of surprised she's still at it, since I figured everyone had given it up, but it seems to be the year that long-form blogging might be back?

Glad she's still doing her thing. I never had the readership, but I love the discipline.
posted by xingcat at 7:02 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

young house love are burning out, too.
posted by gatorae at 7:26 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Remember Al Gore and the alpaca finger puppets and Morris Day and the Time? Yeah. That entry kicked off a joke that's STILL running in our house. I love her. I'd be sad if she quits, which is not something I can say about every blog I ever read with any regularity.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 7:48 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

Nooooooooooooooooooo
posted by webmutant at 8:27 PM on September 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

My heart still lives in Diaryland.
posted by tofu_crouton at 11:48 PM on September 26, 2014 [6 favorites]

I started my online journal (diarist was such an odd word and bloggers didn't exist yet so I think most everyone] was id journaller) not long after Pamie in mid-1998. (Should it be noted that Pamie's first book was published in 2003 and was content mined from her journal entries reframed as a novel?)

I, like others, got sick of the effort to maintaining a website and moved to LiveJournal in 2003, and then gave that up in 2007. I had a really good run on Twitter for a while, and tried to get into the Tumblr thing, but these days I have too many things to write for work, not leisure, and I mostly just make my Faebook friends suffer a long-form entry from time to time.
posted by elsietheeel at 12:11 AM on September 27, 2014

I read that entry and my stomach dropped a little. It's a little startling to realise, but i've been reading her for quite literally half my life.

She was a pretty big deal to sixteen-year-old pseudonymph, living in a country Australia town surrounded in large part by people who liked rugby a whole lot more than they liked books. I was pretty sure I wanted to grow up to be Mimi Smartypants, who read smart, cool things and wore what the hell she wanted because it was comfortable and went to punk rock shows and yelled at people on the street and always talked about interesting and novel stuff.

(Sixteen-year-old me did not care for commas when enthusiastic, clearly.)

I have an Edward Gorey/Amphigorey collection that dates back to her mentioning him once and sending me down a google-hole about him, and then an illustration love affair happened.

All of which is to say - I do hope she finds that she wants to continue writing, but if she decides to peace out, I wish her all the best in the world.
posted by pseudonymph at 6:59 AM on September 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

I had never heard of her before, but thanks to this post I am now reading a bunch of entries and enjoying them a lot! She seems delightful. Thanks for posting.
posted by aka burlap at 1:08 PM on September 27, 2014

I was surprised by her last entry and I would miss her if she really goes (but note that she hasn't really said she is stopping!!! Just thinking about it!). To me she is sort of the MetaFilter of blogging, keeping it old style and resisting annoying trends since 1999 (well, earlier, but you get my point). But she has been at it for a long time and she can do whatever the hell she wants with no apologies owed to us.

Here are a few of my favorites (hastily found) from her old entries:
She is so right about close-talking kindergarteners and I like Oprah but she is probably right about her too.
This close reading of the back of a reduced fat wheat thins box is superior to any comp lit class discussion I have attended.
I love it when she recounts hilarious conversations with sort-of strangers or with LT her husband. She is much funnier on-the-spot than me or most people I know.
Cockpuncher. That is all.
I have not yet experienced this level of transcendence while playing Connect 4.
It's considered rude.

She also posted some great links to weird shit in the past, many of which I (and others) have reposted to MetaFilter.

Regarding GOMI, that was linked in the above post, I think the website is hypocritical and the site/its owner is often dishonest. I also think the site hurts women by snarking disproportionately about women bloggers to sort of keep them in their place.

GOMI often calls itself a sort of release valve for commenter hate, saying it provides a service as a place to gripe about bloggers and blogging without shitting up the comment section of mommyblogs etc. Alice Walker Wright, the owner, has said in interviews that she allows any comments on her site except certain kinds of hate speech or threats and comments from people who seem to be posting drunk. What she does NOT say in interviews is that she routinely deletes and blocks comments from people who simply disagree with her and post comments that are polite but critical of the snark she has published on GOMI. So GOMI routinely skewers mommybloggers for announcing some new comment moderation policy or deleting negative comments from their blogs, but she moderates comments, too! In fact, what GOMI does is worse because Wright doesn't tell anyone she is deleting or blocking negative comments, she just does it.

(I know this because Wright routinely deletes/blocks my comments now, although I was polite and, I thought, thoughtful in offering a different point of view, and I have read comments from other people she has blocked. I just find it weird that this website that HATES mommybloggers et al who are too thin skinned to handle what is often fairly hateful criticism CANNOT ITSELF handle comparatively gentle and politely phrased disagreement.)

I also think it is so like SOMI -- which is supposed to be the "positive" end of GOMI -- to have barely two pages of comments about how great mimi is, and several of those seemed like they could only say something nice if they held their nose about it first, and another handful in fact had something gross to say. You be you, SOMI/GOMI.
posted by onlyconnect at 1:36 PM on September 27, 2014 [1 favorite]

mimismartypants is pretty great and I'm always delighted to be reminded of her presence on this weird web of ours.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:26 PM on September 27, 2014

My favorite blog! Someone here hipped me to her in the early mid-2000s. I had no idea she wrote a book but now I want to read it. She's so funny (apparently not tooo much of a self-promoter though heh).
posted by SassHat at 3:08 PM on September 27, 2014

The Internet would be really stupid without mimi smartypants.
posted by jammy at 4:56 PM on September 27, 2014

from onlyconnect's Wheat Thins link:

Sometimes small policy changes have unexpected benefits. Personally I kind of miss seeing prostitutes out and about, sipping coffee in the 24-hour diner at North and Ashland and doing the ho stroll on desolate stretches of Elston. Perhaps now that Craigslist has banned "erotic services" ads, we will see more in-person erotic service providers. It will be like Christmas. The hookers are back! The hookers are back!

The delicious political incorrectness of this makes schadenfreude seem like warm stale beer by comparison.
posted by localroger at 5:41 PM on September 27, 2014