The Internet bringing out the worst in me, part 8 million

The other day my boss walked out of his office and said, "Christen, what's the German word for wishing ill will on people?"

I don't know if he asks me these things because I'm just conveniently located, or because it's so obvious that my head is full of goofy trivia, or that my head is full of a particular kind of goofy trivia, like German words for habits I happen to possess: schadenfreude was my gleeful, correct response. It's also a hobby of mine.

But that word, as I understand its definition, may be too small. I'm interested in the whole process of failure: where bad ideas come from and why they persist despite all evidence. It's a fun exercise, and it's not just about being a jerk.

But being a jerk is a big part of it. And there are some kinds of stupid that aren't all that interesting -- but that I can't get over, until I realize I'm guilty of them myself.

File the following in that category: Recently I stumbled (quite accidentally) upon two social networking site profiles (with attendant blogs), in quite close succession, by people who advertised themselves as writers, with books to sell, but told us nothing about the works themselves. No excerpts, no summaries, nothing to tease or bully us into buying it other than a brief admonition to do so.

The hell, people, this is Web 2.0. You've got so many free self-marketing tools at your disposal -- with pretty much unlimited bandwidth -- and you can't even bother to give me a glib 20-word summary about the product you're hawking? Selling Yourself Properly (hell, at all) is kind of a passion of mine. Others' failure to do so in the context of grandiose claims about their achievements or achievements-in-progress -- oh, these things keep me up late at night.

What keeps me up all night is my realization that the content on this website -- which I intended to be a much more professional, bloggy-style blog than the one I keep over at that teenage girl website with all the goats -- is scant and hasn't been updated for more than a year. And the protagonist of my novel in progress hasn't updated her blog in more than a year either, partly due to hosting issues I've been too lazy to address. So I'm just as half-assed as those folks I lost all those hours snarking at and disparaging.

Somewhere, I presume my doppelganger is rolling her eyes and shaking her fist at me.

That's right. I know two German words. So buy my book.