I started Bloggy McBlogalot in 2004 because if I didn't start writing for myself again I feared I was going to lose my shit. Also because I was told during one particularly terrible fight: "You're not smart. You're not a good writer. And you're not funny."

I'll miss being in a 10-year relationship with Christopher Hitchens. I really will.

So when I started this I was embarrassed because here I was, someone with real writing credits who had left newspapers to take jobs in PR and fundraising, and now I was doing something on par with every 12-year-old in America with access to Photoshopped pictures of their cat.

Hence, Bloggy McBlogalot.

Irealizehowretardedthisis McYoucantdestroymeanymorethanIcanabunch.

I remember thinking up the name when I was at a Mason Jennings concert during my fourth wedding anniversary in Madison, Wisconsin. "I have an idea," I whispered. I was told it didn't quite work. The next day I wrote my first entry.

Along the way I rediscovered my voice as a writer, began doing comedy regularly, got divorced, saw my parents get remarried, saw my sister have a baby, lived with my friend Luke who absolutely saved my life, moved to Brooklyn, returned to newspapers after a long hiatus, won the title of Funniest Reporter in New York and became a dickhead megalomaniac. Trix. I'm still as self-loathing as I ever was. I like to say the new site doesn't have the tagline "Self-hating misogynist cunt with a flair for words" because it just doesn't have enough pop to it!

Which leads me to the point of all this. I have a new Web site, which was designed by my friend Lester Nelson who is crazy awesome and who I'm forever indebted to in more ways than one and who I laughed and cried with this weekend when suddenly a wave of existential depression hit me like a ton of bricks and my very practical solution to get out of it was to watch all six parts of the "Angels in America" series. Thanks, Lester. You rule. I'd also like to thank AIDS.

The new site is a work in progress because there are still some kinks in the design and I also have to transfer over manually about 700 archived posts, which I'm going to do because I'm proud of most things I've written on this site (even when it's painful to read all the happy-tits stuff I was writing when I was mired pretty deeply in grief and despair) but yeah, all in good time.

For now, I ask you, dear reader, to update your link (if you link to me, and thanks if you do) to Mandy Stadtmiller Dot Com. Thanks especially to everyone who's ever sent me an email, offered me a job or joined me in filing for divorce.

I couldn't have done it without you.

xx