Today, a girl I've liked for several years gave me her number. Finally, I worked up the courage to call her. It was a suicide help line. FML
"Fuck my life" is a popular Internet acronym popularized by the fmylife.com website. fmylife.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.
Users submit tiny stories about stupid, embarrassing, or painful 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, a man came up to me asking for my name. Thinking he was trying to hit on me, I rudely gave him a fake name. He thanked me and walked away. I continued to watch him leaving until I saw him ask another woman for her name and took out a wallet and showed it to her. It was my lost wallet. FML
The format is always the same: each story begins with the word "Today..." and ends with the acronym "... FML." Far from being repetitive, this framing technique creates a hypnotic rhythm, like the repeated strains of a blues song.
Today, I got a text message from a number I didn't know telling me, "Fine. It's over, have a wonderful life." I've never had a girlfriend and now I get broken up with by girls I don't even know. FML
Reading through FMLs 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 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, public nudity, scatological mistakes, and embarrassing blurt-outs. Often more than one of these themes are combined into a single epic FML.
Today, I was at AT&T getting my phone fixed. At one point, the salesman said 'you should see this'. It was a text message from some girl apologizing for sleeping with my boyfriend for the past four months, and telling me that they were moving him out of our apartment. FML
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" or "you totally deserved it." There are no other options: only cool sympathy or blame-the-victim ridicule. The entries are also 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, I walked into work, and the first question my boss asks me is "Are those your pajamas?" I was wearing my favorite outfit. FML
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 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, dramatically overstating a trivial event for emo effect ("Today the Starbucks near my work was all out of hazelnut syrup; FML"), but equally often it is used to describe genuinely emotionally harrowing events. The ambiguity is, in fact, part of the reason why the phrase is so useful. And funny.
Today, I got diagnosed with a condition that expresses itself in the form of violent diarrhea whenever I get nervous. Now I am constantly nervous about getting nervous about anything. FML
http://www.fmylife.com