Random acts of blogging
I recently joined the blogher.com community. I've been reading the blogs of some of the members for a while now and enjoying them immensely and so I finally thought why the hell not. I'm a woman, I blog (hehe... I almost wrote glob there. I'm eating chocolate cake as I type so my hands are a little sticky), I'm literate, my run-on-sentences and overuse of commas aren't the worst writing offenses one can commit. I have stuff to say. I'm told that a little tiny bit of it is even moderately interesting. So after being somewhat silent for several days in the forums and just watching the dialogue , reading the various contributing editor posts and browsing through the recent entries, I found one article about working moms and the sharing of duties that I felt resonated with me and my own experience. And so heady with the idea that I had information worthy of sharing with this group of women, I took a bold step and decided to go ahead and add my comment.
And oh, I wrote a glorious comment. I was eloquent, relevant, personal. I regaled my comment with tales of my own perseverance and inner turmoil and life struggles. I bared my soul. I was so proud. I even managed to minimize the comma use and keep my sentences to a reasonable length. And I included a link here, to my blog, to see if maybe some of those who read my comment might be interested enough to want to read more stuff I had written.
Yes, I was ready to join something and be an active participant. I haven't tried joining anything, I mean really joining with the intent of actively contributing, with the exception of the friday night gang which well, you guys know... you're special (and you can interpret "special" any way you think appropriate :-)) since attempting (and failing miserably) to fit in with the popular kids in high school. Even when I joined the Heart & Stroke foundation marathon training group I still trained alone - running by myself at my own pace, and choosing to warm up and cool down in my own little patch of green grass. I didn't try to learn anything about anyone or share anything about me with anyone. I was content just doing my own thing and not trying to forge new friendships or relationships or whatever.
But this... this time I was going to contribute and share. I was tingly with excitement. I read and reread my comment and then I clicked "submit".
And instead of seeing my comment appear at the bottom of the page, I was redirected to a maintenance page where I was told that the blogher site was down temporarily and they were very sorry for the inconvenience.
And it was lost. Forever. No amount of clicking the back button or searching my local hard drive for a cached copy of the web form would bring it back. And by then the moment and emotions were gone and it was too hard to recreate. And I was just feeling pissy and not so much like "sharing". And the second time around wouldn't result in anything nearly as good as the first draft.
The moral of the story is of course the same as for functional spec writing, really good flame mails (that you've already decided you were committed to sending), the C++ code you wrote all term for your honours project in computer science, and tax returns: Save often and save often. So you'd think I'd have learned that lesson multiple times over by now.
But I want you all to know - Wow did you miss out and you're all a little less for not having read what I never submitted.
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