Does this cupcake make me look fat?

Well, my friends, tough titties if it does, because it's a blog award, and I'm all about the ego strokes.

This award is from tutugirl, who has excellent taste in blogs, and I'm not just saying that because she picked me. Listen up, oh ye of little faith; she also picked the Hotfessional, so there. Also a couple of gals I've never heard of before and now need to check out.

And let me tell you, not only am I thrilled to win this award on its own merits, I'm also thrilled because it gives me something to blog about.

I don't know whether you've noticed, but blogging has slacked off around here. It's not that I'm not blogging regularly, because I am. I take that whole Blog365 thing very seriously. (Too seriously.)

But there has been a certain ... meme-ness seeping in. A tendency to indulge in the facile or the quick-and-dirty. A certain reluctance to engage--to talk about what I'm actually doing.

The cry goes up: This is Poppy's blog. Where's her slice of life?

It's up there, disguised as a cupcake.

Which pretty much sums it up for me at the moment.

First of all, if I were to really let it rip, the slice-of-life stuff I'd write is so brutal and ugly that it's unthinkable. I mean, my readers would quit on me in total disgust if I told them this stuff. And it's not that I think Sarah Palin represents the nadir of modern political so-called "thinking," because I said something along those lines yesterday, and it worked out fine.

No, the indigestible truth is this: my mother wrote me a very unpleasant letter about two weeks ago. And it really pissed me off. Big time. And now, every time I think about blogging about something going on in my life, all I want to do is post about what an asshole my mother is.

The thing is, she's really old. I should show some respect. And anyway, she won't be around forever, so I should just suck it up. And anyway, a mommyblogger knocking her own mother? This just seems wrong. We get to BE lovably imperfect mothers, but do we get to HAVE them? I don't know. I don't notice a lot of women knocking their mothers on their blogs. Kids, yes. Husbands, hell to the yeah. Mothers? No.

So there's that.

Now my other real-life stuff just reveals that I'm a brat who is spoiled rotten.

I mean, you aren't about to weep vats of tears over the fact that my cleaning ladies move my stuff when they dust and don't put things back when they're done, and I have to go around and rearrange my mantelpiece and my perfume bottles and other little knick-knacks. And it drives me crazy.

See, that's petty, right? And I'm spoiled. Somehow I don't think that would generate 137 supportive comments and ((((hugs)))). You know?

So, these days either I feel like a turdball for simmering away, full of repressed "OH YEAH, WELL FUCK YOU" type feelings that I refuse to actually express about my mother, or I feel like Marie Antoinette sitting around blogging while someone else deals with my wretched refuse yearning to be put out in the trash can.

I'm telling you, sometimes you just can't win at this blogging gig.

Except for today, because I just did! I won a prize.

Thanks, tutugirl!