{"id":3704,"date":"2010-02-22T19:16:50","date_gmt":"2010-02-23T00:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=3704"},"modified":"2010-02-22T19:18:49","modified_gmt":"2010-02-23T00:18:49","slug":"the-creepy-thesis-hangover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2010\/02\/22\/the-creepy-thesis-hangover\/","title":{"rendered":"The Creepy Thesis Hangover"},"content":{"rendered":"

L<\/span>eave it to Marla <\/a>to come up with the perfect final word. By the time I’d gone to bed last night, I was feeling that vaguely hangover-y, regretful way she describes in her comment. You know, that guilty and indulgent way you feel when you’ve eaten too many chips or wasted too much time on the Internet when you could have been doing more productive things with the real people in your life? Not that spending a couple of hours with y’all is a waste of time, and anyway, I was already feeling tired and cranky for reasons that have nothing to do with the Internet and everything to do with a toddler who thinks he’s a newborn and wakes up 4x a night now, so I didn’t mind sitting on my ass tapping away and not washing the floor for a couple of hours.<\/p>\n

And it was a really interesting conversation, wasn’t it? <\/p>\n

So here’s the thing. Today, Theryn sent me an e-mail to say hello. Theryn, aka Heather Lyn, the author of the thesis, who is still a regular reader and even a blogger herself. Look, she even said hello<\/a> on the comments, and I’m not sure anyone noticed. And here’s the big lesson of the day, one I should have known better: she’s a real person, not just the two-dimensional author of some obscure (less obscure than last week, though!) thesis. And whatever we might have collectively inferred about her academic abilities, turns out she’s pretty nice, too. Certainly she’s got a thicker skin than me, and bore all of our criticism and commentary with grace and good humour. <\/p>\n

As I told her in our e-mail exchange, I’m still not sure how I feel about her thesis — but I do regret bringing down a hailstorm of unsolicited and occasionally savage criticism on her head. And so Theryn, I’m sorry that you had to endure a verbal assault on your work that would have brought me to tears, thin-skinned and praise-needy as I am.<\/p>\n

Funny thing, this Internet. Even for someone like me who lives and breathes it, who prides herself on hosting fair and respectful discussions, it’s easy to forget that there are people behind the keyboard, people with feelings and biases and opinions that are different. I can’t say that I regret my original post, because I wrote it in good faith and I think it resulted in a truly fascinating conversation. I haven’t changed my mind about thinking that Theryn crossed a line in her assumptions, and that she took my work out of context. But I do regret that I was naive enough to think that Theryn wouldn’t see the commentary if I didn’t explicitly name her, and frankly I regret that she did see it if only because I would have been hurt by those criticisms if there were directed at something I’d invested a lot of time and energy and myself into.<\/p>\n

Ironic or what?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leave it to Marla to come up with the perfect final word. By the time I’d gone to bed last night, I was feeling that vaguely hangover-y, regretful way she describes in her comment. You know, that guilty and indulgent way you feel when you’ve eaten too many chips or wasted too much time on … Continue reading “The Creepy Thesis Hangover”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meta-blogging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3704"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3708,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3704\/revisions\/3708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}