So what if I was felt up to Wilson Phillips' "Hold On"?

DysFUNctional Mom wrote a great post yesterday. She compiled a list of blogging don'ts and the top reasons people stop reading blogs. One of the comments really struck me. Someone wrote that she stops reading if someone never comments [back] on her blog.

I understand where the person is coming from. If you invest time reading and commenting on someone’s blog, it would be nice to have the gesture reciprocated. But I wonder if the whole commenting craze has gotten a little out of hand.

Of course, comments are fun. It feels good to get feedback, and on a good comments day, you feel you’ve been crowned prom queen. Comments make blogging a little less lonely. You feel validated. You have readers.

Yay!

Sometimes the comments are more interesting than your post, but let’s not get into that right now.

The downside of commenting is that if you get too caught up in it, it can start to feel as if you’re blogging for other bloggers and that your blog would be nothing without their participation. The comments can start to feel like the reason for your blog’s existence. You use them as a barometer for your content. Even if a picture of your kid’s turd on the sidewalk garners more comments than your touching post about your masturbating great aunt, Burty, the commenters have spoken.

Even worse, comment obsession can trickle into other areas, like Facebook (“Why didn’t more people comment on my status update?? Am I not funny/witty/beautiful enough?”) or home life (“Why didn’t you say anything when I said I did the dishes?? Am I not funny/witty/beautiful enough?”).

They’re a dangerous thing, those comments.

Having said that, after reading DysFUNctional Mom's post, I feel like I need to explain why I haven’t been around to comment more on people’s blogs (also a commenting negative: feeling the need to apologize to the blogosphere). First, there’s my job. I read blogs at work—on my lunch hour, wink, wink—but I don’t leave comments because I’m haunted by what I imagine would go down in the IT Department:

“Marketing Head? We’ve got a user registered under one frogsinmyformula. She’s gone to at least 50 non work-related sites. It’s attached to a Blogger account. Perpetrator is in quadrant D455. Permission to professionally obliterate?”

“Roger. Before you obliterate, publish the blogger’s posts to the company website. We’ll make an example out of her!”

“Roger. Uh, sir. There’s a post here about you and a frozen turkey. Permission to remove from site?”

“A frozen what? Bring me the offender’s head!”

Second, there’s my home life. Time after work is dedicated to one-on-one time with Junior, making dinner, hating Mulletville, catching up on laundry and gardening, reading mail, brushing the cats, more Mulletville-hating and rubbing Chuck’s feet.

Junior goes to bed at eight; oftentimes that’s when I get back on the computer to work on freelance jobs I’ve taken to help pay the bills.

So you see, if I’m going to leave comments, it has to be somewhere between 2 - 3 a.m. and call me crazy, a little rest would be nice.

Just a little.

Anyway, since I can’t comment as much as I’d like, I want to take this opportunity to say, “Hello and thank you” to all the fabulous blogs I read. There are some amazingly talented bloggers out there. Thank you, too, to the wonderful people who regularly comment on my blog and make me feel like I’m a pimply, promiscuous teenager again at the prom.

God, I was a slutbag.

The end.