"mobning" in the blogosphere

this may look a little scary

but really it's a totally cool place.

danish has a great word--mobning. i've seen it translated as bullying, but to me, it's a bit more nuanced than that word is in english. it's a word that conveys the whole notion of holding someone outside of your group. intentionally. if you're the parent of a school-age child, you hear the word a lot. because danish schools (or at least the one our daughter attends) are very focused on it and on keeping it from happening, at least to a harmful, overt extent, since you can never really fully prevent it. because everyone needs their albanian. but even an albanian would like to belong.

small aside to explain the last statement: this is one of the earliest theories that husband and i came up with (way back when he was still someone else's husband). we were in the balkans and noticed that everyone there (well, everyone everywhere, really, if i think about it) had someone they looked down on to feel better about their group--the croats and the serbs had each other. and tho' it was never clear to me where the bosnians stood, they had some complex system of someone they looked down on. the bulgarians looked down on the macedonians. the macedonians looked down on the albanians. the albanians looked down on the...hmm. there wasn't really anyone--except maybe the roma and let's face it, everyone looks down on them, so sadly they don't really count. if you were a regular albanian, you looked down on those poor suckers in kosovo and vice versa. so we decided that albanian was the end of the line. and that everyone needs their albanian--someone to feel superior to.

now, back to the regularly scheduled post. i've been thinking about this because things have gotten a little nuts in the comments on some of the other blogs of late (most recently the blog camp blog last evening--and i can't even blame wine b/c i was drinking tea in my hotel room in oslo since the little tiny bottle of wine in my hotel minibar costs 185NOK ($28) and the two glasses i'd had six hours earlier in the lounge at the airport were no longer having any effect).

you see, we're all stark raving mad. and we found each other here in the blogosphere. and finding other mad people has clearly fed that madness. and i fear that some people (like whoever stopped following blog camp in the middle of the madness last night) found all this talk of corn and rocks and herman and to rad or not to rad (definitely the latter) (and which shall hereafter be referred to (on this blog at least) as the r-word which shall not be named) and pink and all that stuff to be a bit much.

but i'm here to say that we most definitely didn't mean it that way. and so you should ALL feel that you can jump into the fray at any time. like monique (hey, she's new!) did last night on the blog camp blog.  all of this madness might have looked like mobning, but it really sincerely wasn't meant that way. we want everyone to feel welcome in this particular vortex of madness. so please play along if you want to--jump right in and ask what all that silly talk is about if you don't understand. we're really quite harmless. we just like the calming effect of rocks and watching corn grow (not watching corn pop, that's totally not relaxing, or so i've heard) and IM conversations in the comment section. maybe it just makes our comment numbers look good, or maybe we're just a bit crazy. but either way, we're harmless and would love it if you joined in the fun. we're all albanians here. :-)

p.s. none of this comment madness really happened here on MPC, but i feel a bit responsible for it because i'm definitely one of the IM-convo commenters, so that's why i'm posting here. click the links above if you want to see firsthand what i'm talking about. :-)