opinions are like you-know-whats

so i read this blog on glamour.com. i forget how i stumbled upon it, but i read it daily, pretty much, as does my Aunt Val. the girl who writes it lives in the same town as Val and she sometimes sees her from a distance in the park or at the grocery store. anyway, Val and i have chatted about this girl and how her blog gets tedious sometimes. it's my opinion that she can get a little self-important and awfully redundant. i'm intrigued by her life situation—and the fact that she lives where she does—which is why i've kept up with it for so long. but today i felt compelled to leave a comment suggesting—gently! i swear i did it gently!—that perhaps the blog has run its course. i even blamed it on glamour.com for making her post something every single day. no one has a life worth writing about that often. 

i know from reading Dooce that people who leave comments on blogs can be—often are—crazy. (thankfully none of them read this blog.) i've read through comments on other glamour.com blogs and people get ridiculously defensive and quarrelsome over nothing. someone dares to critique a writer or a writer's topic and you can hear the claws come out for the catfight. 

i truly intended for my comment today to be read by the author and perhaps given an ounce, just a nanosecond of thought. when i read her entry today i just couldn't help thinking, "this girl needs a new angle" and felt i might actually be doing her a favor, writer to writer. 

an hour later i clicked back on the link and several people had already responded, pissed off that i was even reading the blog, assuming i hadn't been reading all along and, as one commenter put it, that i had "rained on [the author's] parade." someone else suggested that, "perhaps you've run your course as a reader." even the author herself chimed in with a comment that was either vapid or ironic (not sure): "guess you didn't buy my book?" she punctuated her response with an unhappy emoticon.

to quote my dad: "oh jeez." but such is life in the "blogosphere" (i'm so sorry for using that word, but i guess it applies). number one, blogging for most people is basically like having a public journal. of course people are going to get irritated with what you blather on about from time to time. (i do think it's in a blogger's best interest to be self-deprecating rather than self-congratulatory whenever possible, but what the hell do i know?)

number two, what's the big effing deal with suggesting a writer might need a break from her subject matter? there came a time when i knew i had to stop writing about American Idol and the Yankees. big whoop.  

anyway, it all makes me think of my favorite Charles Durning moment from Home for the Holidays. at the Thanksgiving dinner table he says to his daughter: "Well, opinions are like assholes, honey. Everybody's got one and everybody thinks everybody else's stinks."

uh-huh.

mb