Just the other day I read a blog post that I took as extremely misogynist – written by a woman. When reading the comments, I saw that I was not the only one to read her phrasing this way. I also saw a lot comments which seemed to entirely miss that part and went on to the humorous section on which to dole out praise. Even the blatant humor part was, well, not funny to me. There was too much stereotyping in the humor without enough creativity to really get my laugh-a-meter going.

I wrote one of the commentators privately, giving her a “brava” for her statements. She wrote back feeling a tad sheepish for taking the blog author to task. I wrote: “You were expressing your opinion just like her. When we write a public blog we risk open disagreement.”

Don’t you hate when your own words come back to bite you on the ass? I know I do. I should have added, when we write a public blog we risk being misunderstood; having people read their own feelings into our post and taking it in an entirely different direction; we risk feeling righteous indignation for all and any of the above.

Yep, righteous indignation is about where I am sitting right now. Yesterday I wrote a post about my connection with cooking, about my magical belief about what we put into our food that cannot be measured. I wrote about my current phase of not cooking much and feeling bittersweet about it. I wrote about being reminded by my mother’s sweet statement about how special food becomes, no matter how basic, how simply prepared, because someone chooses to make it for you. Well that’s what I thought I wrote about. The Girl Friend saw something else entirely, you can see for yourself. We have an ongoing discussion about food, preparation, how it’s served, what it means and doesn’t mean to each of us. She felt she needed to defend herself. The reference I made to her, I thought, was part of the ongoing joke we have and I make reference aplenty to here on my blog. But it was not in anyway pointing a breadstick in her direction to explain my lack of culinary inspiration. Like many artists (granted I am using that word very loosely when talking about myself), I am having a dry spell, a gastronomic block, if you will. Does the fact that she and I think so differently as to what constitutes a meal have any bearing on this? Yes. But it is such a small piece of it; her Midwestern appetites are a challenge to me most of the time.

Here I sit pondering whether I need to defend myself in response to her post. Isn’t that just silly? Especially since she is right here and I can simply have a conversation with her about my feelings. Yes, damn silly it is. Yet, isn’t that what I’ve just done? No, not really since I have not written about the things that made me feel like I need to explain, things that I believe caste a less than positive light on my {ahem} dining habits. This could easily devolve into one of those horrid she said-she said dueling blog entries, if I were a less charitable sort. Being that I am charitable, I will converse – OMG – face to face with her on the points that truly pushed my buttons and save you, my dear readers, from the un-Buddha like statements that are sure to issue from my mouth.