Blog posts I didn’t write

Where bad ideas for blog posts go.

I’ve accumulated quite a pile of still-born ideas for blog entries over the past  month. I’m not sure what to do with them.   Maybe if I clump all of them together, I can squeeze a single post out of them, sort of e pluribus unum and all that, maybe?  Let’s try that.  Here’s a couple of ideas I had for posts that didn’t quite make it out of the embryonic stage.

Condoms.  I was going to write about condoms when a character in a novel I was reading (Stephen King’s 11/22/63) complained that they were uncomfortable and constricting to wear and it occurred to me that I never much thought about condoms, as I have the ladyparts.

The title of this image is “Sad Condom.” I can’t think of anything funnier than that, so I’ll leave it alone.

Well, I mean, I’ve thought about condoms.  I thought about condoms a lot when I was sixteen and plotting to lose my virginity and did seven loops around the Walmart as I tried to work up the courage to go through the check out with a package of Trojans that I was buying “just in case.”  I wound up cleverly camouflaging the condoms with a box of Hostess Donettes and a bottle of Febreze and whistled nervously casually as the cashier rang out my purchases.

And I’ve thought about condoms every time the guy I happened to be dating, without fail, would ask me to put it on for him.  Are there actually women out there who have the super power to get a condom onto a man? I am not one of them.  I would fumble around and swear and then turn on the bedside lamp (and maybe put on my glasses) until he grew impatient, wondered briefly if I were mentally challenged, and finally said “Oh, I’ll just do it.”  I was always left feeling embarrassed and incompetent, feelings I’m not supposed to have until after we’ve had sex.   

But I never thought about condoms from the man’s perspective, i.e. that they are uncomfortable to wear.  As we’ve already noted my vagina, I needed to ask a man about condoms in order to write this particular blog post.  So I asked my husband and he gave me this expert opinion:  “No, they are not uncomfortable to wear, unless, maybe, I dunno, you’ve got them on wrong?”

So that was the end of that blog post idea.

Bicyclists.  I also thought about writing about bicyclists when I caught this video on the NY Times website.

Cameras On Wheels

I am a (casual) runner, and, as such, bicyclists, along with dogs and lonely neighbors looking to chat,  are my sworn enemy.  Being a slow white girl, my top speed is about 6 mph.  If I crash into you at that speed, the most we have to worry about is the pile of papers you’re carrying fluttering high up into the air, and the two of us scurrying around to collect them from wherever they’ve scattered.  Bicyclists can go about 15-20 mph and if they crash into you, they can kill you.  My experience as a runner sharing the road with bicyclists is they speed around town oblivious of that fact.

Unsafe at any speed.

I don’t know if I had any other point to make about bicyclists, other than that they tend to be dicks.

Sure, they look like they’re happy, but she’s actually running the ol’ Nigerian advance fee scam on him.

Dating is a con game.  Here was another idea for a blog post that came to me from a novel I was reading, Gone Girl, about a woman who disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary.   Here is a quote from an interview the author, Gillian Flynn, did with Entertainment Weekly.

I’m playing with the idea of courtship as a con game: You want this other person to like you, so you’re never going to show them your worst side until it’s too late.

So dating is a con game.  I guess.  But then I suppose my job is also a con game, because I don’t show my worst side at work.  Or with my friends. Or even in front of my cat, come to think of it.

You can see that blog post kind of disintegrated under the weight of all the cons I’ve got going on.

These were the bad ideas for blog entries I had.  Hard to believe that I had worse ideas than this.

Royalty free stock photos including the images in this post can be found at Stock.XCHNG.