A Guide to Recognizing Your Bloggers: J-Money

In our latest edition of A Guide to Recognizing Your Bloggers, we check in with J-Money from Ladies… Her recent entry “How to Make Love to a Boston Red Sox Fan,” captured hearts and minds all across the nation, particularly the entire state of Massachusetts and it’s surrounding area. But fame and admiration have their drawbacks, especially when it involves Red Sox Nation. She’s had to hire a bodyguard, driver and magician since writing the aforementioned piece. I was able to contact her using a secret code on WEEI, NESN and the Sons of Sam Horn message board. She was gracious enough to sit down for an interview with me.

We’re going to start with 3 staples. Prepare a customized list that you’d like to share with the world.

Things I Wish I’d Never Done-
1) Traded my NES Power Pad for a Darryl Strawberry Rookie Card
2) Purchased pork chops from K-Mart
3) Consumed said pork chops
4) Played hacky sack at the top of the stairs
5) Stephen Coleman

Propose a fight for Fracas Friday.
Ramona Quimby vs. Beezus Quimby

Any suggestions for a future interview?
Could you please ask my neighbor why I heard the unmistakable strains of “Da Dip” coming through the walls at 3:17 this morning?  I put my hand upon your hip, when I dip, you dip, we dip.  And then we wonder what your problem is. 

What 4 celebrities or athletes do you want in your posse? Whose posse would you like to be in?
Hugh Laurie, Michael Owen, Paul McCartney (circa 1967), and…oh, wait…you said pOsse.  Nevermind.

I think I might know at least one of the answers but what teams do you follow? Sports?
The Sawx, the St. Louis Rams, the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, and the whereabouts of Brendan Shanahan’s ass.

3 best games you’ve ever watched (in person or on TV).
Games 3 and 4 of the 2004 World Series. I was in St. Louis, wearing my “Un-Foulke-in’  Believable” t-shirt, holding a CurseBusters sign and wondering why the Cardinals fans wouldn’t make eye contact with me.  For Game 3, I got to the stadium the second the gates opened, just in time to get drenched in a torrential downpour, adding “streaks of mascara staining my face” to the list of things wrong with me.  Then-Sox pitcher Curtis Leskanic threw me a baseball after warm-ups, Pedro Martinez pitched a hell of a game, and my Sox were nine innings away from being able to tell Dan Shaughnessy to screw himself.  The day of Game 4, I went to the St. Louis Galleria (yeah, shopping, because the International Bowling Hall of Fame didn’t exactly fill my afternoon) and think I was the first person to ever recognize reliever Mike Myers, which freaked him out enough to make him leave Abercrombie, saw Manny Ramirez at the Cheesecake Factory, and saw Pedro with a man purse and a full entourage and he signed the Game 3 scorecard in the $25 game program I’d just purchased from the Cardinals store.  Gametime couldn’t get there fast enough.  I donned a “The Savior is in Center” hoodie, got my sign, and sat right at first base for what was pretty much the best day of my life.  I held my breath until Foulke tossed the final out to Mientkiewicz, just waiting for the cosmic sodomy to strike the Sox again.  At the top of the eighth, a middle-aged Cards fan who was awash in eau de wholesomeness traded seats with me and I moved from the eighth row to the edge of the field behind first base.  The cops who had started to assemble along the foul lines must have seen something in my mascara-rimmed eyes because one of them pointed at me and said “Your feet touch this field and you’re going to jail”.  The second the scoreboard read “Congratulations Boston Red Sox”, I leaned over the rail and scooped a handful of infield dirt and put it in the pocket of my hoodie.  I stayed at the game until the men in the matching windbreakers swept us out.  My new best friends in the Varitek shirts and I found our way to the Adams Mark hotel where the team was staying and we high fived the players as they came through the lobby, getting covered in champagne and hugging strangers like they’d just saved our life.  Team President Larry Lucchino grabbed my CurseBusters sign and held it up for the cameras, then signed a baseball I was carrying even though I didn’t exactly ask him to.  Or want him to.  I almost got a tattoo that night, having sworn I’d get the Sox logo if they ever won a Series, but after perusing the yellow pages I had a rare moment of clarity and realized that any tattoo parlor open at 3 a.m. in St. Louis would probably commemorate the moment with the indelible mark of hepatitis.  I made my way back to my hotel, watched Sportscenter, and sobbed. Un-Foulkin’-Believable indeed. 

And I realize that’s only 2 games, but they’re worth way more than that.

Wow. That’s an awesome story. Who needs 3 games when you have two like that?

Give me your picks for the World Series, Super Bowl, and BCS Championship too. This will be recorded and referred to when the time comes, so you better be right…
Oh, what the hell…
World Series- Boston Red Sox vs. Milwaukee Brewers (if this happens, I’ll look like a genius. If it doesn’t I’ll pretend I meant to say Cleveland vs. San Diego… which is equally retarded)

Super Bowl- New Orleans vs. New England

BCS- Florida.  Again. 

What is your greatest athletic achievement?
Ask me again next Monday.  I’m running the San Diego Marathon on Sunday so either that will be my greatest accomplishment, or it will be the reason I’m confined to a wheelchair, forcing me to change my standup set into forty minutes of impressions of Stephen Hawking, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joe from Family Guy. 

What do you want your blog to be known for? What do you personally want to be known for?
I want to be described using lots of superlative phrases, like “New York Times Best Selling Author” or “America’s Funniest Funny Comedian” or “The Pride of Beckley, West Virginia, Other than The Exhibition Coal Mine and That Place You Can Buy Pottery”. And I also would like to be speculated about in the pages of US Weekly and hope the world “canoodling” will be used. 

Do you want to do this for a living?
I’m willing to do anything that doesn’t involve fluorescent lighting, itchy-looking cubicles, or group insurance coverage. But yes, writing and comedy are the only things I’m good at, so if I can’t make a go at either one of them, I’m screwed.

It’s not secret the blogosphere is predominantly male. What challenges have you (or your fellow Ladies…) faced as women with your blog(s)? Any advantages?
I think we’re starting to establish ourselves and find our identity as a blog, but at the beginning, I think maybe some people checked out the site to see if we’d be dressed in feathers, seductively eating corn dogs, or putting our tits on things.

What are the origins of Ladies…? How did you get together and start the site?
I can’t recall exactly how we went from being Deadspin commenters to having a DeadSpinoff blog, but I’m pretty sure Holly had something to do with it. 

Tell me something interesting/funny/thoughtful about each of your colleagues at Ladies…
Holly is an accomplished French horn player. 
Andrea once guest-hosted Blue’s Clues.
Clare is immune to conventional weapons.
The Starter Wife dabbles in scrimshaw.
SA is a very powerful sorceress.
Wanda invented the twist tie.
Texas Mel speaks only in iambic pentameter.

I don’t want to ruin the image of any male readers that assume you all live in a sorority house together, but what is it like to run a blog with multiple contributors that aren’t in the same place?
Before we can coordinate our posting schedule, we have to find each other Carmen San Diego-style.  Starter Wife just told us that she paid for her internet access in Dirhams, which means she’s either in Morocco, Qatar, or at Pier One.  I’ll have to check my almanac. 
 

Any side projects you’d like to share with the world?
I am a stand up comic and if you live in a town of less than 20,000 that ends in -ville, there’s a good chance I’ll be playing there this summer.  Look me up… I’ll be staying at the hotel that shares a parking lot with a bowling alley. 

The Ladies… will be back with Metschick in “The Blog Who Loved Me”