In which Jo gets a bit snippy

When one blogs, one gets comments. One also gets emails.

It's amazing what people will say in emails that they won't say in comments. It's like the kid who bullies only when he's alone with another kid, not in front of witnesses. 

Apparently, folks don't like my grammar. They don't like my tone. A couple of 'em really hate the personal posts, while others don't like the posts about Manglement (or the fact that I refer to Manglement as Manglement). A few take issue with the new layout of the blog and get personally insulting in the process. There have been more than a few men (all have been men) who have gotten their socks in a twist because of my silly insistence that perhaps a) nurses ought to think of themselves as professionals and b) health care is one of those things that you shouldn't have to mortgage your life to get. Those guys are by far the worst in terms of being just plain rude. Guys, guys: you kiss your mother with that mouth?

I have this to say:

People. This is a blog.

There are approximately seventeen quintillion blogs out there. Approximately half of those are medical or nursing blogs. The other half, as near as I can tell, are divided about equally between cute animals doing cute things and beauty/celebrity/fitness topics.

The influence of this particular blog on anything going on in the world is proportional to its share of the Great Blogging Pie. In other words, with eight-and-a-half quintillion nursing and medical blogs out there, this one is just not that important.

You can relax, I swear. Nobody is gonna read HN and decide that it's time to overthrow the medical establishment, thus depriving you of whatever it is about your career that you find so important to protect. There is not a secret cabal of coruscating feminist nurses somewhere underground that uses HN as its template for revolution, its manifesto, its creed. HN is not going to raise your taxes, restructure your insurance company, take all the profits you make by inventing drugs and devices, turn nursing into some Amazonian society, or kick your puppy. Especially not that last bit.

Also, I am not undermining your attempts at formalized writing. See above: this is a blog. You ought to be concentrating on blogs that have posts that begin with letters and numbers and leet-speak, for God's sake. 

I am not making fun of you. Well, maybe a little. If you're the sort of doctor who reads a fictionalized account of my day and assumes that the doctor I'm talking about is you, rather than a composite of all the docs I deal with on a daily basis, then yes, I'm going to mock you. Relentlessly. You deserve it for being so damned self-important.

I do not talk to my patients the way that I write. Come on.

If you're so moved, either positively or negatively, by something that I write here, you're welcome to email me. The link's to the right. If you want to fawn, compliment, or give me big props, that's lovely. It gives me a nice warm feeling that lasts about a second, until everything snaps back into perspective.

If you want to send criticisms, that's lovely too. Just make sure they're rational and not personally insulting, okay? Ad hominem attacks will be promptly forwarded to the trash folder.

And if you just want to rant about how HN is destroying the foundations of nursing as a Blessed, God-Ordained Helping Role or how HN is fomenting revolution or how HN is a Feminazi mouthpiece, please, turn off the computer. Go outside. Pat your puppy.

It is just a blog. There are seventeen quintillion of them out there. Keep that in mind.

Housekeeping note:

I've deleted a couple of links.

They were to blogs that were, for the most part, much more conservative politically than I am. It's not because the authors are conservatives that I deleted them; I agreed with those authors more often than you'd think, and on a wider variety of issues.

The reason I've deleted the links is this: in the aftermath of the Presidential election, the comments sections of those blogs, including comments left by the authors of the blogs, contained some of the most vicious, mean-spirited, and even out-and-out racist shit I've ever read. 

I understand that Republicans and other conservatives must be angry and disappointed as hell right now. If Obama had lost, I would probably still be in bed, planning only to nurse a hangover and learn French prior to my move to Montreal. I would be peevish about a stolen election and bitter and crying. So it's understandable that there's some serious, serious grouchiness out there in Conservative-Land.

What's not acceptable is the amount of vitriol and the thinly-veiled racism. Vitriol is understandable and even allowable in small amounts, but gallons of it poisons discourse. Racism isn't understandable or allowable, even in small doses. If you want to make jokes about getting rocks of crack at the polling station or how watermelon is going to be the new national food, you go right ahead--but I'm reserving my right not to have that sort of crap linked from here.

This isn't a pouty, I'm-not-reading-your-blog-any-more whine. It's an explanation of why, the day after the election, my links list is shorter. 

Housekeeping: It's a Good Thing.

Why, yes, I changed the format. I'm so glad you noticed. Do you like the little nurse up in the corner? I do. That's a candid photo a coworker took of me as I swanned from room to room this past week, dispensing oral Dilaudid and love to all my patients.

This new Blogger template is so easy to use that I've decided to stop being a rebel Luddite and actually add things like tags and updated links to the blog. So, in the next few weeks, you'll be seeing some changes:

1. New, updated links to blogs like Macho Nurse and Cooking Nurse. 

2. Tags! It's hard, when you're looking for a mac-and-cheese recipe or Rules For Residents, to have to wander back through the archives and read post after post, hoping you'll hit the right one.

3. Some form of organization for the archives. I've not looked into the capabilities of the new template thoroughly yet, so I don't know what sort of form that'll take, but I'll figure something out. I'm kind of tired of just having things listed by date.

4. More pictures of the dogs. Better grammar. More ranting. More naps.

Not all of these changes will happen at once, of course, but be watching.

As for the "Followers" pictures up top...I may have to ditch those. It scares me to have little people watching me all the time, plus I can already tell I'll get all competitive and weird and start counting followers.

Yours,

Organizing Jo