I have made an executive decision.  Out of sheer shame for the trashy tripe with which I have utterly inundated my regular readers, I have.......deleted all but seven of my xanga posts.  That's right.  If you look through my entire xanga history, you will find only seven posts now.  I've deleted everything that I thought was meaningless, embarrassing, or too personal.  Too many of my friends use xanga as a funny place to write a thing or two, and I used to use it as a diary, which I now realize was inappropriate.  So, as of now, I won't post anything personal, or deep, or embarrassing, or anything that would make me vulnerable to the passing acquaintance who reads my xanga.  I will only post funny observations, the occasional rant, and maybe an informational tidbit.  Many of my friends say they have nothing interesting to post, so they don't post.  I always think I have nothing interesting to post, but I post anyway.  That leads to a drastic drop in the quality of posts, and I have a tendency to ramble.  These two facts combined mean that at a certain point, nobody cares about my xanga any more.  If I keep posting personal stuff, no one will care, and I'll just be that guy nobody wants to listen to anymore.

So, I will no longer post anything deep or personal.  Effective immediately.

P.S.  I do, however, encourage you all to look over the aforementioned seven entries, which includes this one.  Those entries provide an interesting cross-section of everything I've written over the years.  My personal favorite is the oldest entry listed, the one about crazy drunnk racist hitchhiker (CDRH), something so crazy that you would think it could only have happened to Alyssa M. Keysor.  But it didn't.  It happened to me.  Enjoy.

Merry Christmas!  In case you didn't know, every year my best friend C.J. and his brother film a video for their parents as one of their Christmas gifts.  Every year for the past five years, I have been their right-hand-man in bringing the film together, and this year was no exception.  This year's premise: their mom and dad don't like any of the same movies (Mom prefers the traditional Christmas fare, Dad likes guy movies), so what would happen if we combined the two?  The sketches this year were:

A Few Good Miracles on 34th Street:  Jack Nicholson is on trial for being Santa Claus, with Tom Cruise as the prosecuting attorney.  The ultimate question: "Are you the Big Red?"

The Untouchable Santa Clause:  After Christmas, the new Santa decides to reinforce to his elves who's boss by giving them a lesson on what happens to elves who don't play well with others.  A helpful illustration comes from a baseball bat.

The Apprentice--A Christmas Carol:  The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet-to-Come are charged with the task of making Donald Trump like Christmas.  When they fail, Trump wants to know who exactly is at fault, and who should be fired.

The Naked Gun Who Stole Christmas:  Police officer Frank Drebin resolves to steal Christmas from Whoville.  After a series of hilarious slapstick mishaps and a run-in with Cindy-Lou Who, Frank learns his lesson.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's Wonderful Life:  Butch and Sundance, on the run from the law, roll in to Bedford Falls and decide to rob a small Savings and Loan.  Proprietor George Bailey says that the money isn't in the building itself, but it's in Bill's house and Fred's house.  Butch and Sundance then decide to go rob Fred instead.

So, there you have it.  Christmas cinema at its finest.  Merry Christmas, ya filthy animal.

A brief explication, if you will.  My birthday this year fell on April 3, which, as you may or may not recall, was Daylight Saving Time's Spring Forward.  Ergo, my birthday contained a paucity of hours, 23 as opposed to the typical 24, due to 2:00-3:00 being removed.  And yet, that hour was not removed as such, yet merely transported to October 30, Daylight Saving Time's Fall Back.  I have thus decided to reclaim the errant hour of my birthday, and am having a soireé at my humble abode this Saturday eve/Sunday morn at 2:00/1:00 in the morning.

In layman's terms, I'm having a brithday party Sunday morning to make up for the hour I missed on April 3.  It starts at the second 1:00 A.M., right when we turn our clocks back.  You are most definitely invited.

All right, my noble experiment has officially ended.

Y'see, I have long harbored this theory that xanga intentions are inversely proportional to xanga responses, perhaps even exponentially inversely proportional.  The theory was based on the repeated and consistent observation of certain people writing very long and introspective xanga entries and receiving little to no response, whereas conversely certain other people would write next to nothing and receive several comments.  In an effort to gather more information on my theory, I decided to dedicate myself to producing only xanga entries at either one one end of the spectrum or the other.  Since writing very little is clearly less time-consuming than writing a lot, I chose to make very brief, superficial entries in an attempt to see how many comments they would receive.

Well, gang, the results are in.  Present entry excluded, in my past 11 entries, I have received a total of 14 comments.  In a month and a half, that averages 1.27 comments per entry, which is clearly fewer than your average poster.  Thus, brevity of post is not directly responsible for the quantity of comments.

To what factors, then, can we ascribe the status of being the determining factors as to how much interest a given post will receive?  Barring such undefinable notions as the subject matter of the post, I have developed a brief (which, as you will see, is key) list of reasons behind why some writers receive a high influx of feedback, whereas others are left out in the proverbial cold.

1. Frequency of posts is inversely proportional to response garnered by each post.  The more frequently you post, the less likely people are to comment, perhaps because they feel that your posting is "nothing special."  People inherently value, or at least have their attention drawn to, that which is unusual.  The more usual (in frequency) your posts are, the less likely people are to be interested in them.

2. Length of post is a tricky factor to nail down, but I have determined that the rule of thumb here is that the post must be two or three solid paragraphs long, with something interesting to communicate, but not so long as to cause the reader to lose interest.  Long, drawn out posts cause the reader to assume that the post is either boring or too heavy for them to handle at the moment, and they pass it by, unless they have an overabundance of time on their hands.  Conversely, the post cannot be too short.  Occasionally, a brief, perhaps cryptic or humorous, post will earn quite a bit of response, but writing sparse entries in overabundance is prone to either confuse the reader or simply cause them not to think.  The reader wants to know something from the post.  Although viewing a modicum of information may be intriguing at first, the reader typically does not want to have to go to the trouble of actually asking for clarification or explication on most matters.  Rather, they want to know a little bit about you, maybe read something that will cause them to stop and think for just a moment, and then carry on with business as usual.  If you are going to post very little, do so on rare occasion.

3. Song lyrics, as a rule, are generally not terribly interesting.  I have read several xangas from several users where an entry is an entire song, with possibly a sentence or two of reflection by the author at the end.  Even I once posted simply one stanza of song lyrics in a xanga entry.  I let the entry sit there for a week, and the result?  No one commented.  If the song is one that someone already knows, they will gloss over the entry thinking that it is old hat.  If it is a song that they don't know, they won't bother to read it because song lyrics typically do not hang together very well as prose.  Without having the sound of the music in the background, simply reading the lyrics is quite dull.  Anything that can be expressed through song lyrics can also be expressed through intelligent prose, with a footnote that a particular song really made you think about that particular topic.

4. Humor, clearly, is usually sufficient impetus to elicit a comment from most thoughtful readers.  If a post has something particularly humorous to say or has been related in a particularly humorous manner, it will likely warrant a passing comment from even a casual reader.

5. Lastly, I cannot overestimate the importance of aesthetics.  Certain xangas I have recently attempted to peruse have been downright painful for me to try and discern just what the author has written.  Not what the author is trying to say, mind you, simply what the author has actually written on the page.  If I can't read it easily, I don't want to read it at all.  If the background is dark, make the type light, and vice versa.  Caveat emptor: don't have backgrounds that are both light and dark and patchy in spots.  It's simply unappealing.

Well, I hope I've left you all with something to mull over.  Regrettably, I fear that, in stark contrast to my own suggestions, this post has been far too long and terribly dull.  But I had to say what I had to say, and that's the way it is.