OR MORE.
A decade ago, I rode around all day with a television news reporter to do a news-story on her and how the whole news-story system worked. She said her professors told her that news reporting all comes down to a 30-second soundbite--if that. "Not even the president is worth more than 60 seconds". (Or was it 15?) She filmed several things that day, spent hours filming and talking to folks. Then came back to the station and cut hours of tape down to two 3-minute reports. Crazy.
Sometimes blogging is like that. You spend hours writing something and someone else reads what you write, then starts snipping, clipping, and introducing personal clarification to what you just said until it sounds more like something they would write than you would.
Perhaps it's just me. But do you have times when you just don't want to bother explaining anymore? You've written something as clearly as you know how...double-checked your nouns, verbs, and adjectives--removed part of them so as not to mislead anyone into thinking you are speaking of them directly in a perjorative sense. Then someone slips in and picks a pinch out of what you write or say and slaps on a little Dijon Mustard to spice it up?
Suddenly, the rather bland innocuous statement you make (which is kinda like an after-dinner mint), becomes someone else's gourmet entre`? Soon folks are feasting on leftovers of another's making? It happens. It happens a lot in journalism, in news reporting, in editorial analysis, and editing processes. It seems more pronounced in blogging because even though your words are right before your eyes, someone can turn it around backwards and you're doing all kinds of contortions to try and get your sentence structure straightened out. I've watched this happen to a few people recently.
Should this happen to you when you say something, dear friends, and it is taken out of context, spliced into another's opinion, and becomes such an unrecognizable distortion of your original thinking that even you question what you say, take a few deep cleansing breaths.
Then re-read what you said. Re-read why you said it. Then re-read how the person re-wrote what you said. Then sit a while and try to figure out what you really said and how far off the other person is with their interpretation of what you said. Then write a response.
If all of the above fails to make it any clearer, then simply give up. Let it go. Move on. Write a squirrely anecdote like this:
Four-year-old Kinsey snuggled into my side as we sat in her daddy's overstuffed recliner. "I like playing fun-fu fightin' with daddy," she mused aloud.
"You do? What's fun-fu-fightin'?"
"It's what daddy does with us. He says we fun-fu instead of kung-fu because kung-fu is all about hurting each other when you fight. But fun-fu is all about having fun when you play with each other."
Sure made sense to me. Agreeing is much better than disagreeing. Playing much better than fighting. Take comfort in the fact that to everything there is a season. Yep, this too shall pass. selahV
