Comments

Over the course of the past couple months, a number of friends have told me that they read this blog regularly but don’t feel comfortable leaving comments. I’m glad they’ve shared this because it reminds me that I have been very lax about setting guidelines and communicating my standards for people leaving comments.

Rule #1:

Comments should either be profound enough to make me weep or witty enough to make me chuckle knowingly.

Rule #2:

Comments should be written in a style that is one or all of the following: eloquent, urbane, poetic, elegiac, subtly subversive, or avant-garde.

Rule #3:

Comments should be the perfect length, and you should know intuitively what that length is.

Rule #4:

This should go without saying, but comments should always be written with strict and unfailing adherence to the rules of grammar and punctuation.

Please be aware that I spend a great deal of time closely scrutinizing all of your comments and judging how well they follow said rules. So does everyone else reading this blog. If you fail to meet any of these standards successfully, we will laugh at you scornfully and feel ourselves to be far superior to you, you lame comment writer.**


**NOTE: So, yes, this was all an exercise in irony for me, but in case my skills aren’t up to the task or you somehow lead an irony-free life and enjoy heavy-handed literalism, here is the serious point I am making: I certainly don’t expect or need everyone to write comments (some of you just genuinely don’t have any and some of you prefer to comment in direct e-mails or conversation, which is totally fine), but if you ever feel the urge to write a comment and suppress it out of fear of it not being “good enough,” then please remember how ridiculous everything I wrote above really is and take that leap. I appreciate any and all comments whether you are responding in general to how a post made you feel, responding to a particular phrase/detail, sharing an experience or memory of your own, questioning or expanding an idea in a post, or whatever else you might feel to write. Any comment is a response, and any response is extremely gratifying because that means someone read the post and was affected enough to want to say something back. And this goes for the guest posts as well—don’t be scared to comment on them just because you don’t know the writer personally. Okay, I’ll stop the earnest lecturing now. It’s not nearly as fun as the ironic part.