• There are currently 219 participants on the Creme de la Creme list and the list was last updated at 10:59 am on January 3, 2012.  There are 281 total currently in the queue to get on the list.  The list closes to new entries on January 6th (if you want to get on, click here).

Updated with name of app (see below)

I have been putting off going to see my general practitioner for a yearly checkup because I’m afraid of what she’ll say about my eating habits/lack of exercise.  I’ve stopped running for the time being while I’m trying to finish a manuscript, and I’ve always eaten like crap.  Josh has pointed out that these problems still exist whether or not I see the doctor, so I might as well put on my big girl panties and go for my annual physical.  He has also pointed out that her word isn’t G-d; she is there to make suggestions, but it’s up to me to make decisions about my overall health.  Through a strange turn of events, I ended up on the phone with her nurse, and while I was talking to her, I made an appointment.

Then I promptly freaked out.

I cannot add exercise back into my life at the moment and keep my sanity because there is nothing else I can give up, timewise.  Which left my eating habits.  So in one day, with the help of my friend, C, who is doing this with me (and I seriously could never have gotten started if I wasn’t IMing with her non-stop throughout the day every day about every morsel of food passing between our lips), we have overhauled the entire way we eat.  I downloaded an app that tracks what I’m consuming and the nutritional value of those items, and I only eat what is in my food budget for the day.  I am such a numbers person so this is perfect for me.  I see what I have to spend, I see what I need to buy, and I try to ensure that I have some room for savings.  I am eating no processed foods with the exception of Kashi granola bars (I did a comparison of all granola and powerbars based on protein, fiber, sugar, and cost, and Kashi came out as the best option).

I am already obsessed with this app: keeping it neat, filling it out, trying out different food combinations to make the best nutritional plan for the day.  I am very proud that I have started this on a week when I have a cold and my period.  There, I’m going to say it completely immodestly — I am so damn proud of myself for changing the way I’ve eaten for the last 10 years.  For not giving in to the siren song of Yogiberry and choosing to reward ourselves with Legos instead of food.  That it isn’t even about weight loss (well, yes, it is, but you know what I mean) — I feel healthier.  I go through my day feeling better.  I feel like I’ve accomplished something huge.

And now I have a question, and I’m sure someone knows the answer: I am going over in the sugar category, but almost all the sugars I’m eating are coming from fruits and vegetables.  For instance, I went over 20 grams of sugar yesterday, but the culprits were blueberries and a sweet potato (okay, and a yogurt, but I have to finish these Wallaby yogurts before I switch to the lower sugar Greek yogurt AND I can’t give up the yogurt because it’s my breakfast protein).  At the same time, I’m way under my carb limit.  And my fat limit.  How bad are sugars?  Should I be limiting my fruit intake in order to get under that sugar limit?  Or should I only be concerned about sugar if we’re talking refined sugars, baked goods, candy?

App: The one I’m using is MyFitnessPal.  It operates a lot like the Weight Watchers app, except it’s free.  Plus, you can access it online, on your blackberry, your iPhone, iPad, etc.  And it has that cool scanner function.

*******

Speaking of food, I was obviously amused by this:

Even though I wish I could edit it (the repetition wasn’t necessary).  Plus, people don’t say, “passing on the left” as much as they either say, “stand right!” or stand behind you on the escalator sighing very loudly.  But the best part of this is what I finally learned the name mumbo sauce, something I’ve eaten my whole life that I didn’t know (1) was a DC thing though in retrospect, I can only think of one place I’ve seen it outside of the DC area and (2) had a name.  I’ve always referred to it as “the red stuff.”  When I heard “fries with mumbo sauce,” I Googled it, realized that the sauce had a name, and then said, “I never thought to put that on fries.  Damn, that would be good.”  I am a Marylander at heart, so my fries are always smothered in Old Bay.  Not that I’m eating French fries anymore.  Since, you know… the whole change in eating thing.  So I’ve learned the name mumbo sauce too late since I won’t be partaking in any of the foods that go with mumbo sauce for a long while.  Or the mumbo sauce itself since I’ve always suspected that it can’t be very good for you.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Even Here?” (Mrs. Spit… Still Spouting Off)
• “The First Rule of Mommyblogging…” (Crib Chronicles)
• “Forward” (Crib Chronicles)
• “The IVF 2WW Survival Guide” (My Path to Insanity & Beyond)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I loved From IF to When’s post about politics and your body.  Seriously, how can you not stand up and cheer when you read: “There is never shortage of debate about how and what women should do with their bodies. Yet, the argument for equality in women’s healthcare compared to men, or in women’s healthcare compared to other women (e.g. infertility coverage) is minimal. Politicians would rather tell me what I can and cannot do with my own body than give me equal access to medical services.”  The post is a great rallying cry, especially with an election coming up.

My Lazy Ovaries has a very honest, powerful post about choosing between donor eggs and living child-free.  They are both of two minds about the decision and she admits: “Sometimes I feel like I’m focusing on the crappy parts of parenthood, just so I can convince myself it’s OK not to want it, to make it hurt less to not have it.”  But this is the part that really floored me: “But this is what infertility does to you. It makes you question every little thing in much greater detail than you ever have before, in a constantly repeating loop.”  The questions she asks can only be answered by Slackie O and her husband, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t read the whole post and ask yourself the questions too.

IF Crossroads has a post about the future.  I loved the opening of this post because I too spend an inordinate amount of time thinking ahead, planning things, wanting to know “what’s next.”  Or maybe I loved it because I am also in a state of organizing and cleaning at the moment because it makes me feel as if I’m being proactive, as if I have control over my world.

Lastly, Bionic Mamas has a confessional post about reading birth stories, and how she feels when she reads about another person’s experience.  I’ve read a lot of posts explaining why a person feels emotional reading about someone’s success when they’re still in the trenches, but I feel like I’ve rarely encountered the ones where we admit that it’s hard to read breastfeeding posts if you can’t breastfeed, or read about a full term birth if you have a preemie, or whatever your trigger or longing may happen to be.  It’s just an honest post.

The roundup to the Roundup: I have changed the entire way I eat.  Please answer my question on sugar, carbs, and fat.  I learned the name mumbo sauce.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 20th and January 27th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

So right after I posted that manifesto on defining womanhood and Josh moved the stroller back to the basement storage room, a woman wrote that she saw my posting on the listserv and wanted to know if she could buy it.  I froze not knowing what to do.  The woman was pregnant with twins, due in August.  Josh’s thought was that if I didn’t give it to her, it would one day end up in a landfill because we couldn’t keep something this large forever — and even if we did, whoever had to deal with our stuff afterwards would likely dump it.  Whereas giving it to her would mean that another woman gets to use it and have that moment of pushing her twins in it.

But it felt (irrationally) like someone else got my moment.

Through a lot of thought and going back-and-forth and taking it out of the box and pretending to push it in the basement, I told her to come last night.  She showed up with her husband and the two of them were lovely.  They were so excited to be pregnant with twins, and that helped a bit, because it felt like we were looking at a version of ourselves from eight years ago, albeit African-American and wearing the sort of coat that my mother would love me to own and wear since she thinks I underdress in the winter.

Eight years ago, like her, I was about seven weeks pregnant; giddy from seeing their heartbeats.  Her due date is just a few weeks off from what should have been my due date.  A little under eight years ago, I was going to the house of another twin mother and she was giving me her baby carrier.  A little over seven years ago, I put out a hysterical message on the very same listserv, and a fellow twin mother came to my house a few hours later and showed me how to do a double feed, handing me her feeding pillows to keep.

All along the way, other twin mothers have given me their items and their advice, and I have tried to do the same.  There is a camaraderie that exists amongst parents of multiples that I don’t see in the general parenting community that feels similar to the one I see in the parenting after infertility community.  The shared experience becomes more important, more bonding sometimes, than parenting itself.

I didn’t tell her what the stroller meant to me, and I waited until the door was shut before I started crying.  And then I crawled into bed with the ChickieNob and told her why I was sad.  She let me stroke her hair, and asked me questions about multiples, and I told her all the things I loved about having twins.  I love that I have two hands, and when they walk on either side of me, we are completely symmetrical.  I love double shnuzzles.  I love when they sit against each other; when they plop down unconsciously almost in the other one’s lap.  I love when they hug each other goodnight and then run to their respective rooms so they can talk on their walkie talkies some more.  I love when I see them in school together, when they read together on the sofa, when the Wolvog stands behind the ChickieNob explaining how to do something on the computer.  I love when they do their math homework together.  I love that they are each other’s best friend, that their twosome is separate from me, their own entity.  I love when they get excited to be with other twins.

And I even miss when they run in two different directions.  When they would take a toy out of the other one’s mouth and start chewing on it as well.  When they would hide together in the kitchen cabinet.  When both wanted to be fed or held or changed at the same time.

As much as I love building Lego robots and having deep conversations about friendship, going to museums or reading books with actual plotlines, I miss that babyhood.  I miss the smells and the warm bodies and the need.  They were not as much fun to be around when they were babies.  I was mostly talking to myself.  I sometimes felt very lonely even though there were two people in the room.  And now I never feel lonely; I always have someone willing to try one of my half-baked ideas.  But I can’t help but miss that other time too; to wish that instead of life being linear, it would move more in a W-shape, looping back through each stage of life so you could experience it again.

Just like the movie, The Iron Lady, this post isn’t really about Margaret Thatcher at all, at least not in the political or historical sense.  It is just a long question about who is writing the Dictionary of You.

I have a double snap-and-go currently in my front hallway, this behemoth that has been hanging around like an albatross for the last seven years.  I can’t let it go, and I can’t let it stay.  It came out of the storage room with the cleaning with the intent to donate it to Goodwill.  The night before it was set to leave the house, I put out a call on a listserv saying that I had a double snap-and-go if anyone wanted it.  No one wrote back, but I told Josh that he should probably leave it the next morning while he was gathering up items to take with him to donate.  Someone might write that afternoon.

It has been in our hallway since.

Our friend was over this weekend, and we started talking about the snap-and-go — you sort of can’t miss it.  I asked her if she knew someone who was looking for one, and she said no.  I think she only commented on it because it’s not the sort of thing you expect to see when you walk in the front door of a house that only contains elementary-school-aged children.  But it made Josh ask again what we were doing with it, and I snapped, “we’ll donate it.”

Though the thought made me sick.

I think all of us have this vision of what motherhood will be like.  This mental image of ourselves as a mother (at least, this extends to women who want to be mothers).  Mine was this vision of myself pushing a stroller with a baby inside.  In my head, new mothers took their children on walks around the neighbourhood, pointing out the trees and fire hydrants even though the baby is usually unconscious.

And then one day, that vision came true.  It didn’t look quite like my mental image because there were two babies instead of one, and there were two heart monitors in the basket below the stroller instead of a diaper bag.  But I was on a walk with my babies, just pushing them while I talked about the trees and the fire hydrants, and that moment, that patch of sidewalk, will forever be in my head as this time when I realized that my dream of motherhood finally melted into an actuality of motherhood.

In The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher tells her husband, Denis, when he proposes that she could never be the sort of woman who washes the tea cups.  Her mother was that woman — she didn’t even take Margaret’s acceptance letter to Oxford to read it because she claimed her hands were still wet — and Margaret wanted to fight hard against being limited by how others perceive women.  In other words, Margaret was not an accidental feminist.  According to the movie, her life choices were specifically made to rail against this notion of women’s work vs. men’s work.  Of course, it is impossible to get through life without washing a tea cup.  But every time a tea cup is in her hands, you think about how much that tea cup symbolizes the life Margaret most wants to avoid.

What you don’t want to be is just as powerful as what you want to become.

As we walked out to the parking lot after the film, I told Josh that I needed to put the snap-and-go in our basement.  He didn’t ask me why, he just agreed to move it when we got home.  I don’t think I can part with it, any more than I think Margaret Thatcher would have been able to control her emotions if faced with the expectation that she should wash a tub full of dirty tea cups.

*******

Before I saw the film, I read a few reviews of it which all said that Meryl Streep was brilliant, but that the movie itself was a mess, not knowing what it wanted to be or say.

And I’d like to respond to those reviews and say that I could see quite clearly what story the writer (as well as the actors) wanted to tell and what conversation they hoped people would have leaving the theater.  By the time we were walking to the parking lot, it dawned on me that all the reviews I read must have been written by men, because the ideas explored are ideas that are — for the most part — inaccessible to men.  By which I mean that they may be able to understand womanhood in the intellectual sense, in the same way that my male gynecologist has some inkling that when he slides in the speculum that it’s painful.  But since he has never lay on an examination table with his feet in the stirrups, his knees shaking while someone told him that it hurts more if you don’t relax and had someone slide a metal instrument into his vagina, and then force it open like a flower blooming internally… well, he can’t really fathom why a woman can’t stop her thighs from tensing when she gets in that position, especially once she is told that it will be more uncomfortable if she doesn’t relax.

And I own that I will never know what it is like to be a man.  To talk through the world as a man.  To be treated as a man.  Or the pressures that men face.  I can understand them in the intellectual sense, and I can be empathetic based on my understanding, but I’ve never lived it, so it is difficult for me to sometimes recognize those moments that men probably catch as they sail over my head.

This is a movie written by a woman, directed by a woman, and performed by a woman.  Perhaps it just needs to be reviewed by a woman.

At its heart, the movie is dually about men’s inability to separate women from the adjectives they use to describe women, and the fact that WOMEN can’t separate themselves from the adjectives others use to describe women.  That we allow others to define what it means to be a woman, and we go by a long-established, patriarchal definition for womanhood.  Yes, we are sometimes conscious of that fact and rail against it, but just as often, men still have expectations and assumptions (popular ones: all women want children, women want to get married, women know nothing about sports) that they then tweak when they get to know the actual person, and women question themselves (even if it’s just in passing) if they don’t fit into these preconceived notions about women.

The movie takes that idea and explores it within the confines of an actual woman — Margaret Thatcher — who is both affected by that old definition of womanhood and one of the creators of a new definition of womanhood.  For all of her accomplishments, for all of the groundbreaking work she did for women behind her, for all of her foibles and smallmindness and naive beliefs and stubbornness, the movie kept returning to both how others viewed her through the lens of woman as well as how she saw herself and her relationships with others through that lens.

There were the obvious — men shout, women shriek; the women’s rest room at Parliament had an ironing board in it.  And then there were the subtle, the commentary maybe missed by a man, but which cut to the heart of a female viewer.

“You’re supposed to be a mother,” one man shouted at her.  “You’re a monster!”

The way she hid her children’s clutter and crumbs from the front seat the first day she drove into Parliament, after she had left them crying at home, almost as if she is discreetly packing them away — because of her own guilt?  Because of how she feared the men would view her if they had any reminder of her home life?  Because she wanted a strong separation between her role as a mother and her role as a leader?  Because she honestly hated having things out of place, even in her car?

The letters she wrote the parents of the soldiers who died at the Falkland Islands, reminding them that she was the first prime minister who was also a mother, and how she could empathize with their loss as a mother.

How she played into her male colleagues ideas, asking the American Secretary of State if he wanted her to play mother and pour the tea after a particularly sharp diplomatic decision.

At its heart, this movie is about a leader unable to divorce herself from her other roles of wife and mother, just as no woman can seemingly divorce themselves from being seen as the nurturer, the caregiver, the creator — either by men or by themselves.  We want to accomplish so much, we want to break that glass ceiling, we want to be seen as more than wives/mothers/daughters/sisters.  And at the same time, we are limited by men –

(Let’s play a quick game.  A child gets ill at school, who do you think the principal expects will arrive at the school to take care of the sick child?  Out of the two parents, which one do you think will be expected to step up to the task unless there are extenuating circumstances stopping them from reaching said child?  Which parent do you think feels guilt over whether they can be there or not, and which one trusts that the child is cared for but would love updates about the child’s well-being?  This is obviously a heterocentric game, but I think you came up with the same answers I did.)

and we limit ourselves.  We worry how others perceive us.  Are we cold if we want to stay at work and not pick up a vomiting child?  Do we seem uncaring if we don’t show up to school events?  Offer to host Thanksgiving?  Take care of an ailing parent?  Do we seem like we don’t have our priorities in the right place if we take a job that requires a lot of hours away?  Do we look like a failure if we can’t juggle work and parenting neatly?

And don’t women judge other women?  I’ve certainly heard it — women judging women.  Why can’t she volunteer?  I work just as many hours as she does, but I’m at the school volunteering (and yes, I have uttered that one).  Haven’t you heard people judge women who go back to work “too soon” or judge other women for not having a career at all.  Don’t we put the word “just” in front of “a stay-at-home mum.”  Don’t we judge women who hire cleaners or nannies — especially if they’re not working but sometimes even if they are and obviously need the help.  Who breastfeed or who don’t breastfeed.  Who let their babies cry-it-out or who helicopter parent or who free-range it.  We spend just as much time judging each other as we do judging ourselves.

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I’ve never read a blog post where a man worries about how he’s being perceived in terms of his nurturing capabilities.  I have seen sensitive, thoughtful, emotional posts from men but never one from a man fretting that if he spends too much time at work, people will think he’s not a committed parent.  Who cries on his way to work because his child mentioned that she’s the only one in the class who didn’t have a parent at the school concert.  Who wonders how they’re going to get the laundry done and go to work and cook dinner and take care of a sick parent.  A woman may end up with the same solution as a man when something has to give — she may leave the laundry undone and phone in dinner — but she will write a blog post about her guilt.

I have never read a blog post by a man wondering if he can “have it all.”  I have never read a post by a man taking a women’s definition of what it means to be a man (perhaps because women didn’t get a chance to set these societal roles in place) and using that external definition to judge themselves.  Harshly.

I read those on women’s blogs all the time.

This is not a Pain Olympics, this is not a women have it harder situation.  I think it is equally difficult to be a man.  This is strictly an explanation, to all those male reviewers who saw the same movie I did, as to why they missed the point.  Why they were so limited by their life experience as a man that they couldn’t understand how much was infused in Margaret asking the ghost of her husband at the end, “tell me the truth.”  Because it mattered to her how she was perceived in her role as a wife.  Did she do it well?  Because it matters to women.  As much as we think we can set it aside, the judgment, the self-doubt, the self-assessment creeps back in where we least expect it.

*******

Actually, that was perhaps the brain of the film.  The heart of this film is a simple relationship between husband and wife, and do we love enough.  Did we give enough of our time to the people we love (and yes, this is also explored in regards to her twins, but the real story is with the love of her life — Denis).  Are we ever really ready to let them go?  And what is more painful — not allowing a ghost to go by holding onto tangible items and memories, or releasing that person and realizing you can’t hold them anymore?  You can’t talk to them anymore?  You can’t hold their hand and steady yourself.  That you need to now steady yourself on your own.

And that however much we think we can be tough and make it on our own, that all of us will be brought to our knees at some point over the enormity of losing someone you love.

The film didn’t take a strong stance on her time in office — you could equally see her as a destroyer or a saviour, or more likely, a bit of both — nor did it really come down hard with answers on whether she loved enough.  I think some will see her and think that she should have given as much energy to her family as she did to public office.  And others will see her and think that it’s amazing that she managed to have a great love with her husband as well as raise twins all while running a country.  See, it’s that judging thing again.

But all will walk out of theater wondering if we are loving enough and if we’ll be able to let go.  If we are living our lives “enough.”  If our lives matter.  If we are allowing the traditional definition of womanhood to guide our decisions, or if we are eschewing the expectations the world has for women and making our own choices.  Are we marrying because we want to or because it’s the next logical step?  Same with family building?  Same with career choices?  Margaret Thatcher is just the receptacle for holding all these enormous ideas.

And moreover, when we write the definition for ourselves and state emphatically in our hearts what we do or don’t want to become, are we staying strong and following our dreams, or are we being sidetracked by self-doubt when others voice their opinions on our choices?  How can we tune out the judgment; which when we boil down judgment to its essence is simply other people trying to define our lives for us, to write the dictionary of our selves.

Be honest: are you consciously writing your own definition for womanhood, or are you using a definition that was written for you?  And what tangible item most defines what you do or don’t want to become?

And now go take that item and place it in clear sight to remind yourself each and every day who you are and who you want to be.  Erase every other person’s definition of womanhood and write it yourself.

Photo Credit: By Williams [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Remember back when it was newsworthy that Ashton Kutcher beat out CNN to first hit one million followers on Twitter? That was exciting in the moment, but once that flag was firmly planted in the ground, it became a race to see who could gain 10 million followers (Lady Gaga). Or a race to see who could go from zero to one million the fastest (Charlie Sheen in two days). And I’m sure we’ll one day be reading a news story about the first person to reach one billion followers.

Billion is the new million.

This idea has been on my mind because Google+ just hit 90 million users, and back in December, Britney Spears was the first person to hit one million followers on the site. Cnet’s bitter grapes assessment of her win is that “it seems likely that Spears only made it to the million-follower mountaintop first because folks like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber aren’t on Google’s social network yet.” After all, Lady Gaga has over 18 million followers on Twitter. Surely she could snag more than a million on Google+.

Forget discussions on what these numbers mean — we all know that people subscribe to blogs, subscribe to Twitter feeds, like things on Facebook and then tune out any message coming towards them (truly, how many of Lady Gaga’s followers actually read every single one of her tweets and how many catch one here and there?). The numbers are impressive and they’re fairly meaningless because we can’t measure how many people the words reach and influence.

What I am more curious about is the shifting number goal.

When I first started blogging, I thought 100 readers for a post sounded pretty damn good. I certainly didn’t have 100 people in my day-to-day world that I communicated my point-of-view with on a regular basis at the same time. One cousin may know my thoughts about X and a friend may know my thoughts about Y, but we all traded pieces of information in these small, personal amounts.

What writer didn’t dream of being an opinion columnist for a major newspaper and reaching a multitude of people at the same time? And blogs were just opinion columns, with less editing.

So 100 sounded good. And then I wanted 200. Then I heard about people who had 1000 readers and that felt like a goal to hit. Then 3000. I’m aware that 3000 is an odd choice, but it felt like a threshold number to me at one point. When I first started blogging, there weren’t a ton of non-bloggers reading blogs, and getting 3000 people to read a post felt like you had major reach, at least by blogging standards. But would you say that 3000 daily visitors is a lot of people now? It all depends on your point-of-view: some would do anything to get that sort of traffic and others would freak out if their hits dropped that low; but I think we all can agree that 3000 visitors isn’t newsworthy. Not when Perez Hilton gets about 3000 visitors in the time it takes him to sneeze.*

I’m not speaking about personal goals because we all know that we set a new one when we reach the first one. I’m talking about collectively, as a society, what numbers impress us. What numbers mean something. And yes, I think we have a different standard for celebrities or blog sites with major funding vs. everyday people and personal blogs. And in reality, I’m not even all that interested anymore in what celebrities or major sites can achieve because their success is driven by elements outside of the social media world.

I’m talking about what numbers impress you when it comes to a regular person starting a blog and gaining readers, or setting up a Twitter account and gaining their first followers.

What is the threshold where once they step over that numerical line, you start to think of them as a well-known or popular blogger? What is the number of Twitter followers a regular person could have that would make you say holy shit?

* I don’t know Perez Hilton’s traffic stats nor do I know how long it takes him to sneeze — if he’s a one and done, or one of those staccato sneezers — but I think I’m making a semi-safe assumption.

Photo Credit: Wayne Large.

Cross posted on BlogHer.

I recently noticed something on self-hosted WordPress blogs: unlike Blogger where the comment-leaver can delete their comment after posting, on self-hosted WordPress blogs, the only person who can do the deleting is the owner of the blog. This fact to me speaks volumes about the division that exists in the online world about deleting — who can delete (which is really about who owns the words) and should we delete in the case of blog posts or comments that we regret?

So before we even get into a discussion on deleting, consider that first thought: who owns the comment box?  Is it the blog owner?  Is it the comment writer?  Is it a no-man’s land controlled by both parties at the same time?  Or controlled by no one — a Wild West?

And interesting point to consider and plays into this larger idea of deleting posts and comments.

Deleting, of course, does not always mean that the words or images disappear. In the case of the recent Girl Scout cookie boycott video that went viral, the maker of the video made her manifesto private, but people had already downloaded the YouTube video and were now uploading it on their feed in order to keep it accessible.

Similarly, Dave Dorman deleted his post about finding offense with an image of a breastfeeding woman in a comic book titled: “Why Dave Dorman Finds New Image Comic ‘SAGA’ Offensive.” Again, when he decided to delete, it was after the backlash, when people had quoted from his post, therefore most of the words still remain online.

Of course, there is the well-known example of Scott Adams — of Dilbert fame — who deleted a rant last March, but again, it lived on in the blogosphere.  Once he realized it wasn’t going away, he fanned the flames for a bit. He insisted that despite deleting the original post (which he then proceeded to re-publish),

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I was enjoying all of the negative attention on Twitter and wondered how I could keep it going. So I left some comments on several Feminist blogs, mostly questioning the reading comprehension of people who believed I had insulted them. That kept things frothy for about a day. Now things are starting to settle down. It’s time for some DMD.

And those are just a handful of blog posts and YouTube videos. That doesn’t even scratch the surface of the times I click over to read something from my Google Reader and find the blog post is gone, never to return again. Or the times when people are responding to a comment in the comment section of a blog, and suddenly the original comment disappears because the commenter has pulled their words.

Some people — myself included — believe strongly in deleting certain types of negative comments in the same way that if someone took a crap on my living room floor, I would clean it up rather than leaving it there for authenticity.  My blog is like my living room; it is my figurative living space on the Web. While I don’t delete people who disagree with me, I do delete hate speech and hurtful comments that are not meant to further a discussion but instead are meant to harm another person emotionally. An example would be the time when I was writing about my sadness over someone who miscarried, and the comment expressed glee that the person had lost their pregnancy. On the other hand, if I don’t believe the comment will emotionally harm another person beyond pissing them off (or if it doesn’t purport misinformation), I’ll leave it in place.

On the other hand, with the exception of deleting a comment and reposting it again immediately without a type-o, I don’t believe in deleting comments I write. Even when I’m slammed by others in the comment section for my point-of-view. Knowing that I don’t delete makes me think twice before typing, and there have been plenty of times that I’ve walked away from leaving a comment if I don’t think I can write it well or own my words in the future.

Similarly, the only time a post is removed is when I accidentally hit “publish” instead of “save draft” and it goes up before it’s ready.  But in those cases, it goes up again; only I wait until I feel the post is ready to go.  But I feel differently about deleting posts that I regret.  I don’t delete posts because I feel cheated when other people delete their posts once they are asked to own up to their words. Once you set your ideas out there and someone reads it, it becomes part of their story as well. Every reaction to an original blog post or video is just as valid and important as the original piece. And in that case, removing the original words becomes akin to stealing something away from your readers who were emotionally affected by your words.

It’s better to own your words and express regret for posting them. To explain your ideas further or even admit that the reaction of readers got you to change your mind. There is nothing wrong with stating that your viewpoint has changed. In fact, in addition to a new blog post, you can update the original post with a note at the beginning to explain how your viewpoint has changed over time.

Self-editing reflects on a person’s integrity. Just as we can’t take back words we say once they’re out of our mouths, we shouldn’t edit our online words. People make mistakes. People say things they regret upon reflection. But there is a big difference between crossing your fingers and muttering, “I didn’t say that!” with a delete, and owning your words and the damage they caused.

Of course, the simple answer is to also be circumspect with what you post on the Web. If you don’t want it connected to your name, don’t post it at all.

I know not everyone deletes for nefarious reasons.  There are perfectly good reasons for a person to delete their post, such as realizing that you crossed a line in regards to another person’s privacy and want to minimize the damage or assuage hurt feelings (again, leaving up something damaging to another person for authenticity is akin to leaving that crap in your living room).  So just to be clear, I am speaking to the times when we post before we calm down and think, and then regret it later (or times when the thoughts were calmly composed, but the backlash causes the person regret).  Those are the times — especially once people have read and responded to your words — that I believe a follow-up apology post is more appropriate than taking away the original post.  It’s about owning your point-of-view, the way you see the world (or, at least, as you presented it in that moment; again, we’re all allowed to change our minds).  Again, that’s what I believe, and I fully expect others to disagree.

Do you delete blog posts or comments you regret? Do you get upset when other people delete their posts?

And who does own that comment box?

Mostly cross-posted with BlogHer.