News! Literally!

Remember when I told you a little while ago that I had news about my Suburban Turmoil newspaper column? Well, today, my friends, I get to tell you all about it.

But the thing is, you guys are so nice and supportive that some of you decided I must be moving the column to the Wall Street Journal, or maybe USA Today. So suddenly my big news doesn't seem so big anymore...

Oh screw it, I'm still excited! My big news is that my column has moved to not one, but TWO newspapers- the Louisville Eccentric Observer (otherwise known as LEO), which is Louisville, Kentucky's alt-weekly, and the Nashville City Paper. So, not only will I now be writing every single week, but I also will no longer have to include references to Nashville people and places that the rest of you online readers can't understand. And the door now is wide open for this column to spread and proliferate AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD. Yes, I had crazy eyes as I wrote that sentence. Yes, you should be afraid.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. My first column debuted yesterday in the LEO and you can read it here. It's a great introductory column for those of you who aren't very familiar with me or the people I've pissed off- I opened with a fond reminiscence of my time spent writing about those crazy SAHDs and sure enough, one of them responded almost immediately in the comments. Google News Alerts, anyone? Sheesh.

Not to feed the trolls, but he used that tired old argument about how embarrassed my kids are going to be about what I've written when they're older- It's a comment I see trolls use quite often when they're trying to shut up a parent blogger for one reason or another. What he forgot somehow was that I have kids who are older. I have a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old and you could say that at this very moment, they both are at the peak of the non-existent-but-fun-to-imagine Lifetime Embarrass-a-bility Chart. Shockingly, they think all this writing stuff I do is... pretty cool. Even their friends think it's cool, which helps my cause a lot.

I'm telling you this because I don't ever want anyone to shut you parent bloggers up with the warning that your kids will be embarrassed or angry with you when they're older. Sure, there are bound to be incidents of misunderstanding here and there, but overall, you're chronicling their lives and it's going to end up being a tangible record of how much you love them, and how much you loved parenting them, despite all the difficulties. I love thinking of my children coming back to these posts some day when they're parents themselves and are going through the very same things I went through with them. I think they will be fascinated to read about the similarities between their children and themselves at the same age. I would even bet money that overall, parent blogs will end up bringing bloggers and their adult children closer together down the road, not tearing them apart. So dude? WHATEVER.

Tangent! Okay, so today, I also have a column in the Nashville City Paper, which I'll link to in tomorrow's post so that you're not overwhelmed with linkage. Usually, both papers will be running the same column each week, but since most Nashville readers don't really need an introduction to Suburban Turmoil, I wrote a special column just for the City Paper this week. If you live here in Nashville, be sure to pick up a copy of the City Paper on the stands each Thursday and take a look.

And that's it. My big news. I love writing the columns every bit as much as I love writing this blog. I get to work on each column for days and tweak it and edit it and make it as close to perfect as possible, so as a whole, I really consider my columns to be the very best of my writing. I hope you'll read them when I link to them because I'm like, really proud of them and shit. Okay, can I embarrass myself anymore? No? Then, uh, bye.