I'm probably more at fault than anyone else,
Semprini, for making this thread what it became. I apologize for upsetting you; I should have considered what it would look like to someone walking in a few days later.
I guess I did it for a few reasons. One was situational... the board had been so tight, so horribly wound up for a couple of weeks at the point the teasing took off in this thread... I just felt a huge need to be silly, which not only is something that we do really well around here, but is also something that had been largely missing. We had become a community focused solely on the somber business of focused negativity towards each other. That is not who we are.
Or... well, it
shouldn't be who we are.
Jnyusa chose the thread title herself, and I could feel her frustration at, seemingly, ALWAYS being picked apart for not only her decisions affecting this board, but simply being who she is. Even when she tried to "relax", I guess, and play along, just a bit, in her own sig, she is criticized for THAT. I feel that Jnyusa is held to a higher standard than the rest of us, and I can understand her frustration. She is a better person than I am. I'm not sure I could have handled a tenth of what she has shouldered at this board.
So... she felt she was constantly being criticized. She, who has done so much for us all! So, when she started this thread, I decided to "criticize" her for ALL kinds of silly things, just to complete her torture.
It was in
jest, Semprini. I really don't KNOW if Jnyusa listens to William Shatner music. And that would be totally fine with me if she did.
(EEP!) It was just a goofy thing to "criticize her" about. And if she DID listen to William Shatner music, I know she would have the good sense not to share that factoid with the board.
We also had become, in my mind, quite rigid about not straying off the topic in a thread... a phenomenon that I quite enjoy.
(I understand that the committee thread is different... I do!) It was fun to "make" people try to "stay on topic"... and I got to play with several people here I hadn't played with for a while. On both "sides" of the fence, btw! I remembered my bounce, a little, in this thread. I have felt enormously relieved since I played.
Finally, Jnyusa is a wonderfully good sport, and I knew she would recognize it for what it was. She did come in, somewhere, and say that she enjoyed the humor behind the thread... I knew she would, and even I, the one who worries the most over the least things, had no worries that she wouldn't "get" the humor. Besides, she did strange things to me one time, involving lukefisk, when I had been fairly ill. I owed her.
I am glad that you came into the thread and voiced your concerns, Semprini, and that you feel led to defend our written goals of respecting each other. It is something we probably need to be reminded of more often. It is something that I think, for a week or two there, we forgot.
Rest assured, there is no one I respect more than Jnyusa. Perhaps I have a weird way of showing it, but I think she knows my intent, and my affection. Sometimes I speak the most clearly through my humor.
And the fact that this thread blew into seven pages in a day or so means, to me, that we needed this little break to play.
It probably looks a little weird now. But I think you had to be there.