Really? Really, readers? Only nine comments on my last post about the latest fashions with which I’m clothing my body?
How disappointing.
And I tried so hard…I thought it was some of my best work, but I only got nine comments on it, so obviously it wasn’t very good.
When I don’t get the expected number of comments on a post that I’m pretty sure is good, I immediately begin to descend into the doleful dredges of blogging self-doubt. I go through the same basic routine every time:
“Maybe it was some holiday and people weren’t online as much…no, my stats are normal.”
“Maybe it wasn’t as funny as I thought it was… Maybe they didn’t get that I was poking fun at myself when I said, ‘I’m so, like, totally trendy…’ No, there’s no way they could think I was being serious when I said that. If I’m trendy, then the Queen of England is penniless and balding…”
“Maybe they wear their boots with their skinny jeans. Maybe they all own that hideous sweater from Anthropologie™. Maybe they don’t appreciate that I just called it hideous. Maybe they’re un-friending me on Facebook™ as I’m typing this. Maybe, maybe, maybe.”
Fact is, I can’t please everyone. I can’t even please anyone. A lot of people hate me. Maybe you hate me. I’m not going to say I don’t care, because that would be cold and unfeeling; plus, it goes against my blogging creed, which is to say, I blog For the People. For you. So I can’t say I don’t care what people think, because I do care—leastwise, I care what my darling readers think. I want them to like my blog, so they can tell all their friends about me, and I can get bigger and famouser and maybe someday make money blogging, which will, in turn, allow me to quit my day job and dedicate my entire life to the creation of ever more fascinating blog posts.
So of course I care. But I can’t allow myself to judge my own worth on whether or not I get more than twenty comments on any given post. It’s not healthy. I’ve got to stop.
Still, I hope you don’t hate me. Hate is a strong word. [“But I really, really, really don’t like you!” Anyone? Who knows the song?] I have felt hatred towards lots of things and people in my life, but I can honestly say I don’t, to my knowledge, hate a blogger I’ve never met before. It seems kind of hard to feel such passion (because indeed, when I hate, I hate with PASSION [as in, I cannot STAND that wretched, vile, monstrously sinister English 101 professor whose life goal it is to sit around in her swank office and contemplate ways to make my life miserable through tactics mainly involving exorbitant sums of GROUP WORK assignments, the evil psycho hosebeast]) for someone I’ve never actually met.
I hope you don’t hate me.
But if you do, and there’s nothing I can do to change your mind about it, please, by all means…TELL ME OF YOUR HATRED. I want to hear about it—every seething, scathing word. Hate mail kind of thrills me, to be honest.
And once I gather enough, I’ll do like Dooce™ and make some money off it.
***This post is written in conjunction with Sprite’s Keeper’s weekly Spin Cycle, the topic of which, this week, is “Hate.” Click here to see more of this week’s most hate-ish posts on the internet.***
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