*sigh* Shameless... */sigh*1

That last post was intended to distract from my insecurities about the previous two posts. The first one of which, I was rather distressed about becuase it failed to elicit any immediate reader response, and the first thing I always want to do with my moments of clarification is share them with other people, both in order to get outside points of view, and to spread it around and get more people thinking about it. In my next post, I essayed the reasons for such a dearth, among those stated or alluded to:

• Apathy - people read it, but didn't care enough to make a comment
• Boredom - people started reading it, but got bored and chose to do something else
• Finger Paralysis - an inability to type due to lack of digital control
• Two broken wrists - I only know one person who's done this recently enough for it to be a semi-valid excuse
• No one actually reads my blog - so who is there to post comments?
• Inability to understand - no one wants to betray their ignorance or lack of expertise
• The post was incoherent - this guy is all over the place; I can't make heads or tails of what he says
• Too many footnotes - scroll wheel fatigue (index figer? eyes?)²
• I'm intimidating - and anything you say will be flatly refuted in no uncertain terms because I am mean!
• Nothing to say - I said it perfectly, why should there be any need for comments?
• Too abstract - High on the stack, and therefore not interesting to practical people

Having thus explored all these reasons, after sleeping, I re-read my post, and for someone who doesn't know me very well, I could readily see how this post would sound mean-spirited and condescending, as if I believed I had been somehow wronged by the reader's stupidity and wanted get even with them.

I was really making fun of my own knee-jerk reactions, for the most part. It's a way of laughing at myself. A sort of argument from absurdity, in which I assume something rediculous ("It's not me...") and come up with a bunch of bizzare conclusions based upon it ("...so it must be everyone else."). The key to "getting it" is in this case realizing what's going on. I present you with two possible conclusions: (1) this guy is nuts, (2) this guy is joking. If you don't know me, you might just come to the wrong conclusion.

Anyway, so then I went and posted that picture of The Stephanator, taken by Caleb (of Mr. TLIC), subconciously hoping it would all blow over and no one would notice or ever mention Calvinism again. I hate doing that (but hey, it worked, right?), so I'm laying all my cards on the table in hopes that I can still get some feedback on the Calvinism thing, people still understand (indeed now I think they have too much information) what's going on in my head, and no one thinks I'm mean and runs away.

Incidentally, here's the photo out of which that last post was taken, although Hello shrinks it a bit (The evil eyes in the last post are full res, however):
 

¹I am intentionally trying to start a trend in blogging and general Internet use. Astrix Markup Language^{TM--okay not really. How about we make it an open source standard convention} (or, say, "*ML") has been used for eons (in Internet time) to communicate what someone is doing: *sigh*, *cough*, *backing away from computer*, *puts on tin foil hat*, *smiles nervously*, *twiddles thumbs*, etc. What I have been doing is extending this by allowing for the expression to span something else, in the same way that simple markup languages for printer output evolved, developing many of the tags that we still use today in HTML.
² A trick I learned for keeping my place is to select (click and drag over) a few words near the note so I don't have any trouble finding my place after I read the note.