November and December 2008

This is, I think, the first edition of DE Expressions since I added message boards to the website. To celebrate the occasion, I'm going to answer one comment from every communication outlet covered in this column.

As always, AskMen.com accepts no responsibility for the content of its message boards. As such, the posts are considered public domain. Also note that AskMen.com is not accountable for my inane responses, but Obama can fix it.

Our first message is from the usual mail bag, which is not a mail bag at all, come to think of it.

Great job on resuscitating D-EDGE!!!

Nino

Thank you for the kind words, Nino. I rather like "D-Edge" as a moniker for this little corner of the Web. To tell you the truth, I kind of regret choosing "The Dreamersedge" as a domain. It's a bit of a mouthful, all things considered, and it just screams emo, doesn't it? What was I thinking? Still, the name has personal history, and no one seems to mind my calling the site "DE" of late. Maybe I can hold off on buying those Coldplay albums after all. I await your angry letters, Chris Martin fans.

This next comment is from the DE message board for Truth and Other Phantoms, an essay discussing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper. That's right. I occasionally read books that don't have pictures of overly muscled super-heroes in them. The folk pestering me with questions about The Dark Knight should give it a try as well.

Talking about "The Yellow Wall-Paper", this book freaks me out.

Diorissimo

Congratulations on being the first to share your opinion on a DE message board, Diorissimo. I want to thank you for taking the time to do so, and I hope you'll post again soon. Gilman's novella is one of my favourite books, but I have to admit I find it incredibly unsettling as well. I love the subtle way the narrative perspective shifts at the end, making the final scene all the more disturbing. I strongly recommend The Yellow Wall-Paper to anyone interested in both freaky psychological horror and nineteenth-century feminist fiction. Yes, I realise that's somewhat of a niche audience.

All right, let's end this thing by replying to the first comment on the board for Twelve Steps for Recovering Workaholics over at AskMen.com.

Good article. Too many people of both sexes become workaholics and have very little on the home front. PAST experience tells me that going to the boss about the workload or schedule generally does not heed any results. The rest in the list starts from Monday.

ADCMELB

Thanks for writing, ADCMELB. That step about talking to your manager was imposed by the editors if I remember correctly, though I don't necessarily disagree with it. The last time I asked an employer about temporarily reducing my workload so I could attend personal matters, she looked me straight in the eye and said, "Your people never know how to say no, so I don't see how that's our problem." I announced my resignation the next day, of course, but I like to think this brutal awakening changed my career for the better. Confronting your boss is rarely about getting a better deal. Most of the time, it's about getting peace of mind.

On that untypically serious note, I bid you all farewell and wish you a happy new recession!

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