Psychological Transference

So, yesterday the Doctor let us know that we really should go ahead with a C-Section this weekend. I first emailed immediate family about it directly. Slightly later I went to make a blog post about it. A comedy of errors on my part ensued.

• I decided to try to use a post by email thing I’d set up last week but never tested.
• I sent the email, but then it didn’t show up, so I had to troubleshoot. Spent about 20 minutes doing this before figuring out what was wrong. Fixed it.
• The post went out, but had email header junk in it. Also, the email notification that goes out to some subscribers to this blog went out twice.
• I FREAKED OUT. There was much cursing and yelling and stress and panic.
• I edited the blog post to remove the offending bits.
• Then I realized this would not trigger new email notifications. So after cutting and pasting the relevant bits, I actually deleted the post. (Then freaked out a bit because I had deleted it.) Then recreated it a few seconds later.
• Then someone replied to the first email notification, that had the errors in it. I freaked out some more. Emailed them back begging them to please reply again, but to the RIGHT notification.
• Then I used the blog software to send email to all the people who get email notification asking them to please pretend the first email hadn’t existed and to please only reply to the second email.
• Then I realized that it actually needed to be the third one that they replied to. So I sent another email to all those email notification people. (As I look increasingly insane and/or just confuse people.)
• Then I got all stressed and upset that I had done any of this, rather than not doing the post by email thing in the first place, or once it had happened, at least just leaving it alone and not messing with everything, including deleting posts and recreating them (but now with the wrong timestamp!). Etc.
• I continuted to be stressed and freaked out for another 15 minutes or so, until I had to leave to go to a meeting at work. At which time I took a deep breath and turned all of the above off in my head until I left work again a few hours later.

Now, it should be pretty obvious that all of the above (well, OK, most of the above, I do sometimes freak out about such things) was not actually about the glitch in the blog post at all, but was really me acting out:

ZOMG! BABY!!! BABY!!! THIS WEEKEND??? WTF??? THIS WEEKEND?? JUST A COUPLE OF DAYS??? THIS WEEKEND??? BABY BABY BABY!!! ZOMG!! WEEKEND!!! THAT IS SOON!!! THERE WILL REALLY BE A BABY!!! ZOMG! JUST DAYS? OMG OMG OMG! ARGGHH!!! BABY BABY BABY!!!

And yeah, that was what was really going on. The rest was just some random event that served as a trigger to let me freak out a bit about something completely unrelated. Heh. Oops.

Having said that, for future reference, if I ever for whatever reason post something that is screwed up in some way I wish to correct, I’m just going to edit the blog post, make a note at the bottom of the post that it was edited, and not worry about the fact that the people who got the email notifications saw an earlier version of the post without benefits of that edit in those emails. They can always click through and see the edited version if they like. Now that I’ve stated that policy publicly here, I won’t worry about it any more. And this post about yesterday’s misadventures can also serve as my final exorcism of the part of my brain still screaming about how the post yesterday was screwed up and it ruined everything. Begone foul demon!

And now we can get on with things that actually matter. :-)

[Edited 18:05 UTC to fix punctuation issue.]