Sorry, didn’t see you there. I only got about nine and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep last night. I know, right? How am I even functioning right now!
You know, new parents like to go on and on about how what they’re doing is so hard, so brutal, that no one without kids could possibly understand it. Well you know what? I’ve edited a humor website for the past twelve months and I think I know a thing or two about personal sacrifice, thank you very much. Sometimes I spend an entire two hours working on this site and then I ignore it completely for five days and if that’s not exactly the same as keeping an infant alive then I don’t know what is!
My friends always ask me, “How do you do it?” Or maybe it was, “Why do you do it?” Either way, all I can say is, I’m obviously just more selfless than other people. I know if I don’t fully invest in this fledgling website—and by “fully invest” I mean “spend about three minutes tweeting from our RAZED account once a week”—then why did I even bother to launch it in the first place? I don’t want to say it’s a calling but it’s a calling. Frankly, this website was my biological destiny. Feminists hate that sort of talk but look, every time I’d see a humor site? My ovaries would split open and snakes would crawl out. It’s a reaction as old as time.
If every woman decided, “Oh, I’m not going to launch a humor website, seems pretty dumb,” then where would we all be? How would the human race and/or comedy continue? Ask yourself that. Hey everyone, stop being so self-involved! Stop being so “focused on real goals with tangible results”! Stop caring so much about “not setting money on fire with no real plan to recoup it”! Stop judging people like me who “think a website is exactly the same as a human child”! Get over yourselves!
Having a humor site in this day and age is an act of faith, an act of hope, and sometimes just a straight-up act of idiocy and immaturity. But guess what, no one wants to hear that. No one wants to hear about how hard or stupid it is. No one wants to hear about how sometimes you have no idea what you got yourself into but hey wasn’t this a choice? Didn’t I do this on purpose? Just a reminder, ladies: you can’t complain about things you’ve done on purpose!
I will say that when people told me that editing a website would change my life forever, I interpreted “change your life forever” to mean something, well, just a little more… positive.
Not surprisingly, my friends who have human children like to challenge my belief that editing a website is exactly like raising a helpless infant and my only response to that is—an infant? Helpless? Have you ever heard and/or seen a baby? They know exactly what they’re doing. They are owning you. They are manipulating you. Stop congratulating yourself for being so spineless! Come talk to me when you’re nurturing something that is actually helpless, like a website with a grand total of thirteen readers.
And don’t even get me started on dog people and their “fur babies”! Yeah, guys, pretty sure hanging out with something that naps for eighteen hours and licks its own balls is just like having a baby and/or a website. How about try responding to two (2) submissions a week and then come talk to me about what a parent really is. I await your hateful comments in our comment section! Oh, what’s that, we don’t have a comment section? Oh I guess I’m a little better at this whole one-year-old thing than you, huh?
Let me take a break from what I expect to be a lifelong game of one-upsmanship with my fellow “parents” to say, I respect that you think you have the hardest and most important job in the world. But I actually do. That isn’t one-upsmanship, that’s just reporting facts.
But before you roll over and admit that I’m obviously right, I want to connect with you on a mother to “mother” level. I just want to tell you that I get it. You’re vulnerable. And wrong. But I want you to see me being vulnerable too. So here goes: Sometimes in the middle of the night I like to sneak in and gaze at this website. It’s so peaceful and quiet. That’s when I fully appreciate the weight of my decisions and feel full of, well, if I’m being honest here, anxiety and resentment. God this is such a fucking waste of time.
Illustration by Sarah Letteney