November 10, 2009
Tuesday

Most blogs have a “Comments” function where readers can give a response to what they have read. I keep this section monitored, which means that each comment has to be approved by me before it is posted for all to see. WordPress, the platform I use to publish these pieces, is notoriously prone to comment spam, and I have found it easier just to keep the comment section essentially closed rather than to remove unwanted items after they have appeared. Besides, some people don’t quite understand how public the comment section is, and sometimes post material that is more personal or revealing than even I am comfortable with.

Most of the spam comments are meant to sound personal and specific — “You have posted some good ideas here” — but are really just a way for somebody selling something to get his URL out there. A post from December 2005, which includes a picture of a tree in the neighborhood where I grew up, triggers a lot of spam from Romania, most of them porn sites. The comments are in the Cyrillic alphabet, so I have no idea what they might say, nor even what language they’re in.

One post, Free Turk!, about a free speech issue at a local high school in which I defended the accused students, triggered two comments. The first was in ALL CAPS, by a woman who claimed to know the situation personally, and excoriated me for defending this miserable lowlife student who  . . .  and then she included a lot of allegations about his supposed criminal behavior. She apparently did not read critically enough to understand that I wasn’t defending whatever actions had gotten the kid remanded to an alternative education program, but the actions of his friends who protested the remand. Nearly two years later I got a comment from someone claiming to be the student identified as “Turk.” He called me a bitch and pronounced the essay “bullshit” and told me I didn’t know the whole story. He had evidently not read critically enough to know that I was defending him and his friends. Both comments were anonymous, and I never posted either.

Yesterday, I got another anonymous comment. It was about What Are They Looking For? , a December 2007 post about the search strings that have led some readers to this site. I wrote it three days before Christmas, not long after I’d returned from my month in Wyoming, and I probably just wanted to get something up to fulfill my Holidailies obligation. (I enjoy Holidailies far more than NaBloPoMo — there is more of a community — and I don’t often skip days during that.)

The anonymous commenter does not say what he might have been looking for nor how he landed on that particular piece. All he offers is a single word: “Boring.”

He’s right. It is. So is this one, probably. But it’s done, and I have another NaBloPoMo 2009 day covered.

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The NaBlos of the Past:

2008: I did not post on this day in November of 2008.

2007: At Home in My Heart — And I do feel at home in my own heart when I am working on a piece [of knitting] in the silence of contemplation. Knitting in the morning, before I pick up the pen and dive into the task of taming the swirling thoughts in my head, helps center me for the day, and I find myself calmer and more productive than when I do not take that time.

2006 — Holding a Grudge — When I worked with some classmates to put together our last reunion, we started by bringing our yearbooks to the table. I always liked to show the page where one of the more popular boys had written “To one hell of a girl” across his picture. I cherished that since the moment he wrote it at our last Saturday night dance before graduation. Looking over my friends’ books, I learned that he’d apparently written that in everybody’s! When I mentioned this to him (lovingly), he pointed out that the second sentence said, “Like your poems and you.” He then proceeded to recall the content (if not the actual words) of two poems of mine that had appeared in our literary magazine, thus redeeming himself.

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