Clueless, toothless, and bagless is no way to go through life.

On my 16th birthday, I vacuumed my face.

Fifteen years later, vacuuming remains the household chore most threatening to my personal safety.

It would be simple enough to chalk the 1994 incident up to a freak accident. Girl grabs Dirt Devil hand vac to clean stairs. Girl fails to tie back super-long locks. Girl's locks get wound up in aforementioned Dirt Devil, causing forehead welt at point of impact and eventual black eye. Girl attends high school and endures resultant mockery/questioning. Girl eternally remembered for vacuuming up own hair on Sweet 16. Girl at least has excellent story for rest of life.

But girl, if we can still use that term, could not leave it at that.

You see, it was a few weeks ago that I found myself once again vacuuming -- this time with a Panasonic upright and an actual floor. It was in the same room where I had once ripped off half my toenail vacuuming when I stupidly tried to slide a heavy ottoman across the floor without wearing shoes. (No "Dancing with Tom DeLay" appearance for me.) Same room, same vacuum. Same girl, of course.

Different ottoman.

Our new ottoman is much lighter than the old one. It's so light, in fact, that I can just pick it up quickly, turn it upside down, and rest it on the couch to create an easy vacuuming path. In fact, that's precisely what I was trying to do when...

I clobbered myself in the face with an ottoman leg.

I'm not sure what happened, though I had just gotten done lifting weights when this incident occurred. Perhaps I did not know my own pumped-up arm strength or had lost some of my small muscle control. What I do know is that I hoisted the object with such force that I nearly knocked loose one of my remaining teeth and seriously suspected for a moment that I had cut my lower lip. My husband just happened to call within seconds after this incident occurred.

"Hey," he said. "Just wanted to let you know I was on my way home."

"Okay, great," I replied, gently patting at my lower lip. "I, um...you're not going to believe this. I just hit myself in the face with an ottoman. Really hard. It hurts."

"You did WHAT? How on earth..."

"Well, I was vacuuming..."

And that's all I needed to say.

Some people have nagging mountain-climbing injuries. Others hurt themselves playing sports. Not many people can find creative ways of hurting themselves like I can. Perhaps I need a vacuuming injury awareness bracelet to go with my hard hat and hockey mask.

Or maybe I'll never learn.

Thank you for assuming I'm an idiot.

U.S. Green Building Council customer service rep, 15 minutes into the process of annoyingly having me spell things out so she can fill out the online form with which I am reporting a server application issue, even though I've told her 17 times that I just need to be directed to their Web site support folks because the problem is an ASP coding issue: Okay, so what is the fax number...

Me: Look, can't I just send a screencap of the error message via e-mail to the technical support staff or something?

Her: Sure, you can send a screencap via e-mail. OR I can just help you now.

Me: ...

Her: Well, what's it going to be? Do you want to send a screencap via e-mail or do you want me to help you?

Me: Um...I want you to help me, I guess?

(We fill out the rest of the form. It takes at least another five minutes as I read aloud a series of extremely long numeric access codes, which she has to repeat and verify, even though I know the entire exercise is pointless.)

Her, after pressing the submit key: Okay, so. Um. Well, what I'm going to do is take a screencap of this error message and e-mail it to the technical support staff...

(To her credit, at least she apologized.)

Lord, beer me strength.

I have a ridiculously childish and self-centered attachment to my annual August lake vacation. Two weeks will never be enough, but neither will three or four. I'd even put up with the fugly cottage art forever. Just don't make me come home and have a real life.

For some reason I'm particularly cranky about having to have a real life this year. Real life people seem to be especially irritating to me this week, and my well-tanned face is already starting to peel. Yesterday at 4 o'clock, I was relentlessly fixated on the fact that at the same time a week ago I was drinking a beer and playing beanbags by the water. I totally couldn't get over it. When I received an e-mail from my mother complaining about having gained 4 1/2 pounds, I realized we have officially moved from "lake complaining" mode to "post-lake complaining" mode, the latter of which may actually be even more obnoxious than the former because it garners even less sympathy.

The term "lake complaints" was coined by someone in my family a couple of years ago, and my uncle has begun recording them for posterity. They are complaints about things that are actually good -- "complaints" that reflect just how spoiled my entire family is for two weeks out of each year. "There's too much sun," is a pretty common one that's been uttered many times -- including by me. (But in that one spot on the deck it is just BRUTAL in the late afternoon and moving the chair is just an awful lot of work -- sometimes there's not even room to move the chair.) But some of my favorite lake complaints have come from the aforementioned uncle, who last year complained that a chunk of chocolate in his ice cream cone was TOO BIG for him to bite through and this year lamented that the improvement of Jefferson County A highway had caused the road to "lose all its charm" without potholes and dangerous curves.

Yes, life is rough for us. Sometimes the motion of the lake water moves our air mattresses around so frequently that we can't even take naps without fear of ending up beached in front of houses 200 yards away.

When you run out of beer, you have to get in your car and drive back to the PartyMart to buy more. It won't just reappear in the refrigerator.

You occasionally have to get your second choice of ice cream flavor because the person in line ahead of you got the last scoop of blueberry cream pie. (There was a fleeting moment during this year's vacation that we thought my mother got the last scoop of that flavor EVER, but they ended up restocking it and the crisis was averted.)

But even with all that adversity we suffer through on vacation, I strongly prefer my vacation time to my non-vacation time. But I realize that my post-lake complaining has crossed the obnoxiousness threshold, and I today seek desperately to quash my case of the grumpies by identifying a few simple transition strategies that might mitigate the harshness of reality. These might include, but are not limited to, proposing a mandatory "beer and beanbags" social hour at work, going on a semi-permanent "staycation," and digging a lake in my back yard/petitioning to have my neighborhood rezoned such that all my neighbors must convert their homes into taverns and ice cream shops.

Or I could just try to stop being such a jackass.

Please, someone: Seal my mouth shut with a big roll of federal packing tape.

In my attempts to not look stupid, I often say things that make me look even stupider.

"Sorry, I don't really know anything about mail," was today's gem -- uttered in response to a nice but not terribly understanding official at my local post office branch.

Look, I don't mail parcels very often and generally try to avoid the post office. But on this particular occasion I had a box of eco-friendly toys to send my friends in Kansas, who just welcomed a baby boy into the world -- a baby boy I desperately need to spoil immediately.

After cluelessly grabbing at packaging supplies for about 15 minutes, I settled on a very large box and placed the gift inside. I folded the corners to form a box shape but had no tape with which to seal it. But I assumed they would make it look right at the checkout counter, so I decided the time was right to jump into the fancy, roped-off "Confident? Final answer?" line.

After listening to the man in front of me relay the tale of the "little fat boy" who had stopped his mail two months ago and to the woman who unexpectedly turned around to give me a very detailed and uninteresting account of what was inside the package she was mailing, I finally got my chance to attempt to mail something.

I set the box on the counter, along with the completed but not-yet-affixed label. "Can you mail this?" I asked.

"If you tape it up and get it ready to go, I will," the man in the very snazzy polo shirt replied.

"Oh. Well, where do I get the tape?"

"You have to supply your own if you use that kind of box. If you use XYZ box (Sorry, I don't remember what the box was called), you can use this." He waved a roll of colorful federal packing tape in my face.

"Oh, okay; that's fine. I'll use the other kind of box," I said. "I don't really know anything about mail." He pointed me toward the correct vessel, and I brought it back up to the counter.

"Um," he said, "can I please get you to put it together over there out of the line so that I can help other customers?

"Oh, yes, sorry," I replied. "I don't really know anything about mail."

And thus on a Monday afternoon when the post office customers included a nutcase wearing a bait shop T-shirt that said "House of Hookers" and a woman mailing $250 worth of Crest WhiteStrips to China, I was the crazy one, the stupid one, AND the annoying one.

It's not my fault. I don't really know anything about mail.

Kate is sitting at the computer, updating her Twitter feed.

So there's my ongoing love/hate relationship with the concept of "social networking" and its role in business. (Now fortified with doctor-recommended levels of random outburst!)

Just to bring you up to speed in the event you don't want to read or re-read the referenced outburst: When we last met our fearful protagonist she was wholeheartedly skeptical of social media experts and consultants.

This hasn't changed, but there are a few cracks in the foundation. Scott McLeod is upfront with the declaration that he is not a social media expert, which frankly makes me like him. And he pretty much knows just about as much as any self-proclaimed expert. His message: Use it or lose it.

I think he's right.

Last week I attended a presentation by McLeod and was instantly struck by how strongly he stood behind his viewpoint that businesses and organizations need presences on Facebook and Twitter. I was also instantly swayed to his side of the argument upon observing the offputting way in which the marketing and public relations professionals in the room jumped to defend his presented examples of "how not to use" these tools that existed in the marketplace. One example was a higher ed blogger who refused to respond to her reader comments and was getting digitally flogged with negative remarks about her lack of two-way communication.

"Well, how could she have time to do that?" came the fiery pant-suited counter-attack. "Who made the rule that says she has to respond just because she wrote a blog post? Maybe she's not even writing it! Who has time to do all this stuff, anyway?"

Nothing irritates me more than people doing things half-assed just to say they have done them. The entire logic is utterly flawed. Ugh, I thought to myself. If you don't have time to do something properly, don't do it at all.

Which is exactly what the presenter said, adding in a very nice way that perhaps they could stop churning out pointless press releases and try devoting some actual time to creating authentic modern two-way communication channels on the fancy innernets machine.

Amen to that.

Performance anxiety
All this being said, it was with some trepidation that I entered the world of tweeting last week (on a personal level, that is -- haven't been tripped up using it professionally yet). Thus, I have not yet written my first micro-blog. After almost six years, I have certainly become quite accustomed to the concept of the maxi-blog. Most people don't give a crap about this particular little corner of the Web, but "It's me, Kate" does have a proud tradition of being appreciated by friends and family who for some reason (Masochism?) don't get enough of my quirkiness and petty sarcasm in real life.

As a long-time Facebook user, I also have experience writing "status updates" -- which are essentially the same as tweets. I've used Facebook to pontificate on everything from Trey Wingo's inane women's basketball coverage to the Bus FM's overplaying of Paul Revere & the Raiders. My ability to generate random thoughts of mild interest to my associates is not entirely absent. But I don't want my first tweet to be any of the things that are occurring to me at present, like, "Feeling too much pressure to write a funny and/or profound inaugural tweet," or "Streaming an interview with pro-split infinitive author of 'Origins of the Specious' on IPR," or "Sad that all my hydrangea arrangements have wilted and must find a favorite summer flower." Does anyone really care about any of that?

With limitless characters at my disposal, however, I feel perfectly comfortable annoying you with pointless thoughts. This is why I think Twitter might be good for me: It would force me to edit myself significantly. As an aspiring writer of something really long who actually makes her living putting things succinctly, I should theoretically excel in this forum.

But for now, 140 characters is not instinctively part of my character. But embracing a word-related challenge certainly is. It's got me all a-twitter.

Just wave the next time you fly over.

Get yourself a Facebook account and a trip to the coast, and the country shall be revealed to you. Just be forewarned that, once you understand how people think and what they really think of you, there's no going back.

I guess I always knew this, but lately it's been reinforced to me that people tend to think Iowa -- my beautiful birthplace and home -- is rather ridiculous.

This was brightly illuminated following the Iowa Supreme Court's landmark April 3 ruling that denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples violated constitutional equal protection provisions under the Fourteenth Amendment. I thought people would look at the ruling with some admiration for our state (and some have), but mostly it has sent a barrage of unfunny, unoriginal Iowa jokes and backhanded compliments flying at our faces. For me, the fact that pundits like Maureen Dowd continue to beat the "Iowa, of all places -- I mean, look at their white bread and corn fields and goats (Huh?)" drum shows just how ignorant and holier-than-thou people's attitudes really are toward "Middle America."

Even the simple terminology that describes the geographic location of our state has been kidnapped by people who want to use the term "Middle America" to describe simpletons.

I'd love it if people could learn the term "Midwest," but that's probably too much to ask. Because after spending the last week in California, it appears that many coastal peoples only know one fact about our state: that it is "somewhere in the middle." I am trying to imagine not being able to name the other 49 states in the union and identify them on a map, but apparently our public schools in flyover country are just too darned informative.

During our trip to Napa Valley, we bellied up to the bar in several tasting rooms and answered the inevitable "where are you from?" question. I made a point throughout the trip to always answer, "Des Moines" instead of "Iowa." It was somewhat entertaining to watch the confused faces finally, in most cases, make the connection and spit out the response, "Oh! EYE-oh-wah!"

Yes, EYE-oh-wah.

At one winery the response was, "Well, Iowa has been in the news lately."

"Yes," I replied. "I guess we have."

"Well, I think a lot of people expect that kind of thing to happen on the coasts, but not in Iowa."

There were a lot of things I could have said at that point, but I bit my tongue and just smiled and said, "Well, Iowa has quite a history of pioneering for civil rights, actually."

And it has. Iowa passed one of the nation's first civil rights laws in 1884. According to the Iowa Judicial Branch Web site, "the early Iowa courts were sometimes called upon to decide cases that involved volatile social or political controversies of the time...These decisions demonstrate legal foresight as well as deep and abiding respect for the values enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights." As early as 1869, women were allowed to practice law in our state. In 1949, the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the decision to convict a downtown Des Moines soda fountain manager who refused service to two African-American customers. A New York Times op-ed writer recently acknowledged, in the same breath he used to make yet another tired "Iowa, of all places" remark, that his parents were an interracial couple who moved from Nebraska to Iowa to be married in 1958.

But the thing about Iowans -- except me, apparently -- is that we really don't care that much what everyone else thinks about us, nor do we expect you to know or care much about our state. We certainly don't toot our own horn or think much of those people who do. And that's probably a big reason so many people think we're a bunch of ignoramuses. But I would love to know upon which enlightened Iowa fact-finding mission these people came to their conclusions.

Before I get too punchy and thoroughly un-Iowan, I'll just leave you with a picture of my favorite T-shirt. (It's from SMASH, which has lots of great ones -- including the new "Iowa: The California of the United States" offering. Bold. Perhaps another sign the hayseeds are getting restless. Look out, coastal peoples: We'll take a side of sarcasm with our gay wedding tourism revenue.)

I'm too stupid for daylight savings time

I am driving myself crazy.

It all started this morning when I sent an e-mail announcement that an event would be held at 8 p.m. CST on Saturday. Then came the inevitable response:

"Shouldn't it be 8 p.m. CDT?"

I never have and probably never will understand this distinction. I understand the concept of "daylight savings time" in the sense that we get an extra hour of light during the spring/summer months through the processes of "springing forward" and "falling back."

Beyond that, I am clueless. In fact, it was just this morning that I realized I don't even know what the term "daylight savings time" means. I always thought "daylight savings time" was the time in which you were "saving" daylight -- meaning the dark time when you aren't getting much and saving it up for a happier, warmer time. Even though you are not actually "saving" anything, this at least made some logical sense in my admittedly twisted mind.

But now my admittedly twisted mind is blown. Apparently it is daylight savings time NOW, as in the time period in which we are using up daylight like George Hamilton on a bender. Does this make any sense? What daylight are we saving now? It seems like we're USING daylight now, not saving it. Does the D just stand for "daylight," or does it stand for "daylight savings?" Help!

I would feel incredibly stupid if it weren't for the fact that it seems like no one else can keep this straight, either. An unscientific survey of the innernets leads me to conclude that nearly half of people are getting this wrong right now. How is this helpful to anyone? The good news is, people know what you mean no matter what you write. No one is going to show up an hour early (Or would it be an hour late? Dammit!) for your event because you "S'd" when you should have "D'd."

David Prerau, author of "Seize the Daylight: The Contentious Story of Daylight Savings Time," says daylight savings time has been confusing people for years. In the 1950s and '60s, he told NPR in March, there was no national law about daylight savings time. So any city or town could decide to have daylight savings time and could also decide when to start it and when to end it. This resulted in utterly bizarre situations like the bus trip along Route 2 from Moundsville, W.V., to Steubenville, Ohio, which was only 35 miles but required riders to change their watches seven times in order to keep the correct time as they passed through cities with different laws. The sheer idea of it makes my brain bleed.

I'm sure some really smart people like astrophysicists or something will disagree with me, but I'd like to propose, at least for journalism's sake, that we drop the middle letter and just say "CT," "ET," etc., year-round and scrap all this nonsense about D and S and whatnot.

Because I am dumb.

I'll tweet yours if you facebook mine

I work in the communications/marketing segment of our beautiful U.S. economy. It's a rather large and all-encompassing group of people that likes to spend a lot of time getting together telling one another what to do. This typically happens at conferences, lunch and learns, Webinars, etc. I recognize the ridiculousness of these frequent and redundant gatherings, yet am powerless to resist them. (There's usually food.)

I attended two such gatherings today, both conducted by experts on the subject of "social media." And now, after attending literally dozens of educational sessions on this topic, I am struck by one simple fact: There is no such thing as a "social media expert."

Maybe we should stop anointing them.

A social media expert, as far as I can tell, is someone who devotes large chunks of his or her day to surfing the Internet, tweeting, and downloading LOLCats. Then he (or she...but let's get serious, here: they're men) tells others they should be doing the same thing. "You HAVE TO blog; it's essential for your business!" "If you're not on MySpace, the market will leave you behind. It's where everything's happening." "Use these sites, but also find a way to stand out on them; you can't just blend in with the crowd." Or my personal favorite today: "Blogging is just, well, journalism." (Edward R. Murrow turned over in his grave on that one.)

Let me be clear: I don't necessarily disagree with these urgings for communications professionals to embrace social media. Surely a savvy organization will and should find a way to reach its audience on a Web site like Facebook, but I would contend that you shouldn't have to think that hard about how or why you would do it. I would also contend that there are so few success stories in the realm of social media marketing that it is mathematically impossible for the hundreds (if not more) who purport to be experts on this topic to actually exist.

Oh, and if you have to ask what sorts of things you might write about on your blog, you probably DON'T NEED A BLOG.

(*gasp*)

That's right, I said it. No master's degree in Internet marketing for me.

The write stuff

So my husband started a blog. He also totally stole my move by starting his first post with the word "so." My husband has many talents (more than I care to acknowledge sometimes), including but not limited to: making buildings that don't fall down, ensuring offensive linemen can appropriately identify aiming points, and Tecmo Bowl. Oh, and giving his opinion on things. That's a talent we have in common.

I would also include writing as a talent of his. He has a way with words, even if it's not necessarily my way. I can definitely appreciate what he brings to the table when it comes to communicating, even if his communication is fraught with comma splices. (Semicolons for life! Holler at them! Woot! Also: I use cool slang terminology and have never met a parenthetical tangent I didn't like.)

I am fully aware that anything at which I have a talent pales in comparison to pretty much everything my husband does. But can I just have the writing thing? I was pretty much writing a book when I came out of the womb. I earned a journalism degree and people have paid me to write things for them on SEVERAL occasions. You might not know from reading this bullcrap, but I CAN arrange words into sentences in an entertaining manner...and even punctuate them correctly. It's sort of my thing.

And I don't hold anything at all against my husband for trying to do the same thing I do. I'm sure if I decided I wanted to try my hand at diagramming zone blocking schemes, he'd be fully supportive. It's just that...

He's already better at it than I am, and it's giving me a complex.

Well, better is a subjective term. But he's certainly more successful. I've been published on many occasions, but NO ONE has ever read this hot mess upon which you're currently gazing via ESPN.com. My husband writes a blog, and within 24 hours, BLAM: People are telling my father that they saw the link to his son-in-law's blog on ESPN.com.

But yes, I know: The blogosphere is big enough for the both of us.

I'll just be over here with my semicolons.

Things at which I suck...

...at least according to my own blog. In lieu of writing something new, here are links to some of my favorite past disaster blog posts. Here's to me sucking at more stuff in 2009 so I can write about it!

Things at which Kate has proven to be exceedingly bad (2005-2008):
1) Sports.
2) Modeling.
3) Reviewing restaurants: See Exhibit A and Exhibit B.
4) Holiday decorating: Two examples...yet again!
5) Placing an order at Starbucks. More than once.

*sigh*