By: riese

In reply to Marika.

Marika,

Hi! Firstly, I’m sorry. I truly am. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not at all — everybody who worked for Autostraddle when the Spirit Animal Conversation was being had was informed not to use the term anymore. An extra layer of protection exists in that Laneia, Rachel or I usually look at everything before it’s published.

But:
1. Taylor is one of 2 people allowed to write/publish her own things independently of me.
2. Taylor wasn’t working for AS when the spirit animal email was sent by Laneia. She has now returned to us thank jesus but at that time she hadn’t been writing for us for a few months. So she didn’t receive the email.

And! I’m in Michigan w/my family for my mom’s bat mitzvah, arriving at 2 a.m friday morning. my girlfriend was here w/me this weekend. friday evening was shabbat dinner and saturday was the ceremony — it was my mom’s day. I also spent some time with my “other Mom” and her son. Her other son just had a baby, justyce, who I finally met this weekend. Yes, I dared to actually make time for my family and step away from the computer/internet! (silly me!)

To prepare for taking a few hours off this weekend, i spent all of last weekend writing posts and scheduling them to publish while i was out. i also threw together a listling circa 3am the night before the bat mizvah but didn’t have time to survey activity on the entire website.

As soon as I was made aware of the spirit animal conversation which I think was saturday night, i immediately emailed taylor and told her to take it out and that i’d explain in the morning.

on sunday morning I emailed taylor and shared a conversation I’d had with a reader about spirit animals, as well as the email Laneia sent to editors saying to stop using “spirit animal.”

Taylor is also visiting family this week, so she said she’d respond to the comment as soon as she was back to a computer, which she did.

Laneia was moving all weekend w/o internet and didn’t see it either.

Sorry for this strange convergence of circumstance which led to a complete and total fail.

I’ll email Tess about Alex’s bio. I thought that had been handled after Laneia’s email but I guess not — we’re rearranging that page big time so looking at it before all the edits are done makes me feel crazy. (and yes, Alex was informed a month ago about this)

I’m sorry.

okay my mom is here to take me to the dentist, i will come back and probably hate this entire comment in 2 hours,

I AM REALLY SORRY

– Riese-