Your Bologna (Comments Policy)

Comments Policy:

This is my playground, my ball, my rules: play nice!

In other words, I am open to conversation and debate. Polite and respectful. You may disagree with me, you may not be nasty and call names.

I will edit or remove any comments I find offensive.

If you don't like that?  Sorry, go somewhere else.

This is not an open forum, it's my personal blog: my playground, my ball, my rules.

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As to my policy for replying to YOUR wonderful comments... um, I don't really have a consistent one.

Obviously, I have some more 'splaining to do...

OK. Here is where it gets tricky...

Many of my favorite bloggers, my blogging mentors (gals, you know who you are) are wonderful at responding to every or nearly every comment they receive.   And I am sure that is one reason I felt so close to these women so quickly: we are always engaging in a multiply looped conversation.

I wanted to be like them, felt frustrated by Blogger's inability to directly reply to a comment, that comment threading did not exist.  (And if you've ever had a child in speech therapy, I don't need to explain conversation loops to you, and how important they are to relatedness.)

So I installed the Intense Debate commenting system on my blog the last time I gave it a facelift.

But then I discovered:  I suck at consistently replying to comments.  I always want to.  I intend to.  But?  Shit happens.  All the time.  Including in the whirlwind that is my brain.

Some days I'm all over the awesome, and actually respond to all your comments within 6 hours.

Others?  I figure if I haven't responded by two, three days out it's just too late to call it a conversation at that point, and you are likely to not come back to see the response.  So I kind of just read them all and slink away.

So my non-policy policy is this:

Know that I ALWAYS do read each and every comment and I appreciate them so much.  I feel connected to you, I am so happy you have felt connected enough to me to comment.

On the days when I have time and energy?   And when I am not in the midst of a kitchen disaster or another skirmish in the homework wars or recovering from surgery?   I try to respond to all comments.

Other days, I may not respond to any, but please know it's not you, it's me.  No, really, it IS me.  Damn, wish there were a way to say this so you'd believe me... how's this:

Remember, some days I am all ADD-rific and get very little done.  IT. REALLY. IS. ME.

And on the times I respond to only one or two comments in a post that has received many? Please don't feel slighted it its not yours.  The comments I have responded to may have really needed a response, or touched something specific in me, or been from an actual non-blog world IRL friend that I really needed to say something to.

Or, also highly likely, I had three seconds to sit down at the computer to respond and that's the first comment I read at that moment. 

Randomness, luck (or lack thereof if my reply sucks), pure chance; all significant factors here.

Hope that explains it all to you!