A Comment On Comments

Let me start by saying I’m an idiot. I’m embarrassed to write what I am going to write, but it’s just a blog so it’s not really writing. Right? As some of you may have noticed comments have not been showing up on my blog for the past few weeks. This was partially on purpose but mostly out of stupidity with a dash of childishness thrown in. Here’s what happened.

For some reason there is a fried circuit between my brain and my finger tips. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the decades of drug use and is simply the result of some mutation in my genetic code. Regardless of the reason, I make a lot of odd little mistakes in my writing. Here are some favorites:

I write “of coarse” instead of “of course”

My brain knows the difference between “there”, “their” & “they’re”, but when I’m typing I can never be sure which one is going to come out the end of my finger tips.

In my mind “i” and “e” are completely interchangeable.

I have misspelled the word “panel” every single time I have ever written it. You would think I would get it right occasionally, but no, it never happens.

“no” & “know” and “new” & “knew” are some other fun ones. Of coarse, I no the difference but my fingers don’t.

“attic” and “addict” is another classic.

I rarely use a question mark.

Commas, apostrophes, and semicolons sometimes seem strange and mysterious.

Then, of course, there are the really horrendous spelling errors and the occasional malapropism. The spelling errors get picked up by the trusty spell checker. The rest of it makes it to the blog. It really doesn’t bother me until someone corrects me. If someone corrects me before I make a blunder cutting a piece of tile or wood, they’re my new best friend. When it comes to the blog, though, I don’t want to hear about it. I know there are mistakes but I don’t really care. It’s not really writing. I’m not going to hire an editor or spend a lot of time poring over every sentence. I just want to write an entry, reread it once or twice, and hit “Publish”.

So a few weeks back someone corrected me on my writing and I guess I was having a bad day or something and I just said screw it and I turned off the comments. Then a few days later Deb over at Kensington Bungalow left a very clever “Message in a Bloggle” and I turned the comments back on – or so I thought.

What I did was accidentally turned on “Comment Moderation” but I did not give an email address for the moderated comments to be sent to. All of the comments have been stored on Blogger and have been waiting for me to OK them. Up until today I had no idea they were there. I have not seen any of the comments for the past few weeks. Sure I thought it was odd that comments came to an abrupt halt, but I really wasn’t sure what to make of it. I never attempted to post a comment or I would have seen they were being moderated.

Today I got an email from Nick over at Pigeon Point Project asking me why I had turned off comments. Of course, I thought I had turned them back on weeks ago, and in a way I had. I went to Blogger and clicked about for a few minutes and eventually stumbled on to the 68 comments that were waiting to be moderated by me. I posted them all and then promptly received 68 emails letting me know about all the comments. Boy, did I feel stupid. There is a lesson in here some where but I’m not going to dig in to it right now. I’ll just finish by saying that the comments are back on, I’m not moderating them, and I enjoy comments. I apologize if anyone was under the impression that I didn’t think your comment was worthy to be posted to my bog.