I know I say this all the time, but I feel really lucky to have the core group of readers and commenters I do here. Writing for Pith is a really strange experience. I like the SouthComm folks and appreciate the latitude they give me. But the longer I blog over there, the less I understand the people who comment. Like, I really do have questions that nag me.
Like, I consider myself to be a funny person. I’m sure sometimes I try to be funny and fail, but I feel like it’s always pretty clear when I’m trying to be funny that I am, in fact, trying to be funny. But the longer I write over there, the more I’m convinced that, no matter what I write, I am read as being, at all times, deadly serious and practically shrill (god, yes, that word).
Now, on the one hand, I’m not too worried about changing my writing style in order to account for this. If you don’t get I’m funny, you don’t get I’m funny. But I do wonder if they just always experience the written word as this ponderous deadly serious thing or if they can’t give a woman a funny voice in their heads or what? That I’m really curious about–whether they ever find written things funny or if it’s just a matter of mismatched skill sets.
I also wonder about the folks who seem to have clear, and yet unspoken expectations of what I should be doing and who, to me, anyway, feel like they think I’m doing something wrong when I’m not meeting their expectations, even when I have no idea what they are or why I might be responsible to them in some way.
Again, not that I could or would change to meet their expectations, but I am always really curious about what they think is going on there. Like they open up Pith and think they’re getting… what? I know we al bring different expectations to spaces, and I am really curious about how those expectations are created and then how they persist even when the people who have them must be continually disappointed.
I don’t know. It’s a weird thing. I rarely feel like I’m actually talking to people over there, just the characters people play on the internet, but it continually makes me grateful for this here.
Thanks, guys.
Tiny Cat Pants 
I get the feeling that a lot of them just don’t get blogging. Like, because it’s the Scene’s masthead, everything written there should be “journalism”, with no humor, opinion, etc. allowed.
Then too a lot of them just seem to be dense and humorless trolls bent on finding fault, no matter how far they have to stretch to find it.
Ha, yeah, well, that, too, certainly. But I do suspect that they’re intentionally dense and humorless. If not, they wouldn’t hang out at Pith all the time.
I still stand by general appellation. The fulltime commenters at Pith are asstatoes. Period.
They’re the intellectual equivalent of flashers in a park who are intentionally provocative to both abuse others and arouse themselves.
Because there was a time when I read you and didn’t know you in real life and now I still read TCP and know you in real life, I can say after being on both sides I found you funny long before I met you.
Still, I think you’re funnier in person – when I hear the voice and your mannerisms and the way your eyes move when you’re telling something – especially something that horrifies you. Nobody is getting the whole package – so maybe you should video blog.
I once read an interview with Randy Newman where he said something to the effect of, “The problem with sarcasm is that some people just don’t get it.”