Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Once again, these are comments on other people's posts, most but not all of them here on Dreamwidth:

( anthropomorphic silliness, non-gendered language, 'phase', worrying about COVID19, DW meta )

These include stuff from DW, and this will be cross-posted. ( resistance to change, obligations--and lack thereof, choice of terminology, gender, 'natural' )

More saved comments: ( attitudes toward atheism, comparative oppression, applying theory to the past, quotes, what feels difficult, online and in-person communication, talking about literature )

More saved comments: ( critics and criticism, reasons for coming out, body image, chai, names, how long nations last )

Something adrian_turtle said this afternoon led to me riffing, for the nth time, on the number of people who tell me I'm sensible.

It doesn't feel, from in here, as though I am noticeably sensible--it's as though people kept telling me I was blond (my Minnesotan friends may now look at the userpic and laugh) or emphasizing that I'm right-handed. I try to be sensible, but I know I frequently miss the mark, and it doesn't feel as though I'm better at it than other people I know.

What I said to Adrian is that, if this many people are telling me I'm sensible, either they have a very different definition of sensible than I do, or there's far less good sense in the population as a whole than I tend to think.

She said it's probably the latter, which is worrisome, though it would Explain A Lot, or at least explain this.

A third possibility, which didn't occur to me until I was proofreading this post, is that I may make unusually sensible observations and suggestions, even if I'm no more likely than other people to behave sensibly.

*Yes, as in Sense and, and the former is the quality I'm being praised for. But "sensibleness" doesn't feel like a word, and "sensible" is the adjective I seem to keep attracting.

The word of the day is "iff": I keep wanting to use it in comments.

"We didn't do it" is a denial, not an incontrovertible fact.