Today, I had to choose between a strawberry flavored Dum Dum and a mystery flavored Dum Dum. I decided to be adventurous and choose the mystery flavor; it was strawberry flavored. MLIA

"Fuck my life My Life is Average" is a popular Internet acronym popularized by the fmylife.com mylifeisaverage.com website. fmylife.com mylifeisaverage.com was inspired by a French website called viedemerde.fr ("life of shit") which was originally designed by Maxime Valette. The English version is maintained by Guillaume Passaglia and Julien Azarian. There is also an Italian version, vitadimerda.it fmylife.

Users submit tiny stories about stupid, embarrassing, or painful normal, often cute, sometimes humorous events in their day-to-day lives. Most of the stories are tweet-length; even the "long" ones run only the length of a short paragraph. Readers vote on every submission; the ones that pass muster are posted on the website in a blog-like feed.

Today, I went to the store and bought some Land o Lakes cheese. On the label, it said 'LOL Cheese'. I laughed. MLIA

The format is always the same: each story begins with the word "Today..." and ends with the acronym "... FML MLIA." Far from being repetitive, this framing technique creates a hypnotic rhythm, like the repeated strains of a blues song.

Today, I was having sex with my girlfriend. She yelled out the name Tommy. My name is Tommy. MLIA

Reading through FMLs MLIAs for hours -- which is easier to do than you might think, since the site encourages the same kind of Internet rubbernecking inspired by PostSecret and passiveaggressivenotes.com -- reveals certain recurring themes. For instance, a lot of FMLs MLIAs arise out of the misuse of cellphones, whether it be through misdialing, drunk texting, or inappropriate photos preserved on memory cards. There are also myriad stories of humiliating breakups healthy relationships, public nudity light embarrassment, scatological simple mistakes, and embarrassing blurt-outs situations that could have easily turned out much worse than they actually did. Often more than one of these themes are combined into a single epic FML MLIA.

Today, I saw a commercial for the Snuggie. I thought it was stupid idea but I couldn't change the channel because I was under a blanket and I didn't want my arms to get cold. MLIA

Once an entry is posted on the site, users can vote on it in one of two ways: they can click "I agree, your life sucks" "Average" or "you totally deserved it." "Meh." There are no other options: only cool sympathy or blame-the-victim ridicule agreement or apathy. The entries are also not tagged with generic labels like "kids," "work," "health," "love," and so on, if you'd like to read entries organized around a certain theme. Some of the most popular have been published in a book entitled F My Life.

Today at school I leaned back in my chair and it made a farting noise. I casually did it again so everybody would know it was the chair. MLIA

Like so many other Internet memes, this one has had an impact far beyond the website that it calls home. People everywhere use the acronym FML MLIA on blog posts, tweets, IMs, and no doubt it's slipped out in real life conversations too. Often the use of the phrase is ironic sincere, dramatically overstating identifying a trivial event for emo effect ("Today the Starbucks near my work was all out of hazelnut syrup; FML MLIA"), but equally often it is used to describe understate genuinely emotionally harrowing events. The ambiguity is, in fact, part of the reason why the phrase is so useful. And funny.

Today, I realized that I am unemployed, live with my mother, play video games all day in my basement, and I am still a virgin. It's alright, I finish 9th grade next week. MLIA

http://mylifeisaverage.com

Big thanks to hapax for having a sense of humor about this!

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