The Suspicious Kindness of Strangers

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 09:40:50 -0700

In the past week, I’ve received two separate notes of encouragement to continue writing my blog from complete strangers. The first was from mdhatter, who wrote:

So, I came across your blog, through 'jessicas'. which i got to by looking up an A Whitney Brown quote and seeing who wrote a funny comment. That's 3 degrees away from my original search, but it was time well spent. Nice place you've got.

And then someone else just sent me an email saying:

I haven't yet commented but I lost your blog for a while and only recently discovered it. Even though you usually dont receive very many comments, keep up the blogging. You do a great job of it and I like hearing your interesting opinions; chances are you'll have a regular commetor.

I wouldn’t find this so odd except that in the five years I’ve been writing a weblog (oh wow, almost exactly five - my first post was on August 22), this has never happened. Am I being too cynical in suspecting some cause for this beyond the simple kindness of strangers?

Have I been giving off the impression recently that I intend to shut down my weblog soon? (I don’t.) Is there some sort of coordinated “improve the atmosphere around here” effort afoot? (Maybe there should be.) Is this all part of a targetted spam campaign? (I get a dozen I love your blog!! spam comments daily, but none with references to specific content.) Or is it really just strangers going out of their way to be nice?

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typewriting tag: kindness

The Suspicious Kindness of Strangers