Reveal yourselves

I woke up this morning and (as I too often do) obsessively checked my email. Along with the daily junk, I always hope to find a note from a friend or a comment on my blog. Today I got both, and both were nasty surprises: the (anonymous) comment was unkind, and the friend's email contained sad news about another mutual friend. I can't do anything (except think good thoughts) for my friend who's going through rough times, and I can't do much around the random nastiness, either, except to change things a bit, and a disallow anonymous comments. I know I have a few real-world friends who read and like to comment anonymously, and to you, I apologize--I don't mean to invade your privacy. Unfortunately, it appears that my skin isn't quite thick enough to deal with random hostility. I'll work on that. In the meantime, sorry to any of you who are inconvenienced or made uncomfortable by this change.

And to Anonymous in Rochester, let me just share a couple of things. When I was in high school, some girlfriends and I (and I seem to remember that I was, I am ashamed to say, kind of the ringleader) took out anonymous snarky ads in the school paper (why we were allowed to do this, I can't fathom) making thinly veiled attacks on another girl. (We believed, I think, that she was chasing after another friend's boyfriend. It was high school, and I know, it was pathetic.) In any case, Anonymous from Rochester, I still regret having done such a cowardly, dopey thing--twenty five years later, I still think of it from time to time. So, really, why bother? And to address specifically your concerns about me. Yes, I went to Yale. But my classes were not pass/fail (perhaps you're thinking of Brown) and I did ok in English. Even so, my overpriced and overrated diploma fails to guarantee a typo-free existence. So for the grave sin of typing "an new New Yorker" instead of "a new New Yorker", I apologize, and hope you weren't too harmed by the experience of reading my words. I, too, loathe typos, try to avoid them, but I tend to blog quickly, and don't catch them all.