You may have seen the fun little poll over at Nine Moons in which, among other things, our very own Adam Greenwood was voted “The Blogger Who Consistently Drives Me Most Crazy.†I offer the following in response to the 17 people who voted that way (or perhaps the one person who voted 17 times; it is worth noting that over 30% of respondents are driven most crazy by at least one of our bloggers).

When I was first introduced to the Bloggernacle, I was intrigued by A. Greenwood (this is how he prefers to be addressed, of which more later). Who was this vested and mustachioed man who threw himself into the fray with flowery language and anachronistic ideas? Even though I disagreed with him a great deal of the time, I found him eloquent and entertaining. However, during an exchange he countered a statement of mine in a manner I found condescending and dismissive, and, fragile egotist that I am, I decided I disliked him. I’m not sure how long my dislike lasted, but it wasn’t long.

Perhaps what I find most endearing and admirable about A. Greenwood are his intuitive and deeply-felt principles. I readily admit that many of these make absolutely no sense to me; however, the fact that I don’t understand them partially explains why I admire them so much. Allow me to explain. I am not a very intuitive person; I simply don’t feel or intuit things very strongly. There are many things that to most people are so obvious as to require no explanation or reasoning; very few things fall under that category for me (like the time I needed to go to the temple and didn’t have my recommend with me and asked my shocked Dad to lend me his; this made perfect sense to me, but it violated an intuitive and basic principle for my Dad).

This is both a blessing and a curse. It is a curse in that arriving at everything via a process of reasoning often leads me to erroneous conclusions, both because my logic is in many ways flawed and because some things simply can’t be explained by logic but are nonetheless true. People like A. Greenwood are better equipped to recognize those things than I am. A humorous example of this: A. Greenwood has a policy that unless he has shaken your hand and looked you in the eye he neither feels comfortable with calling you by your first name nor you calling him by his. Hence the reason he refers to me as “Davis Bell.†Is that weird? Yes, I rather think so. But I like it.

From his intuitive character springs certain other traits that I admire: his sense of romance, honor, and the dramatic. As a self-confessed fan of the English and Catholicism, A. Greenwood values duty, tradition, and nobility. I am possessed of a rather more pedestrian character and value system. But again, I am glad for the fact that people like A. Greenwood exist, for they are the people who go back after the body of a fallen comrade, let the women and children off the ship first, and, in less dramatic circumstances, remind us all of the beautiful and romantic in our dreary workaday world. This is nowhere more evident than in the topics Adam chooses to write about and the words he employs when doing so. I very much enjoy the way he writes, and can spot it a mile away without glancing at the author’s name.

Now, none of this is to say that A. Greenwood doesn’t occasionally lose his temper, or come to faulty conclusions. But of whom could not the same be said? So, to those 17 people who are driven crazy by Adam, I say, “Pish.â€

Although I wrote this post, any negative feedback will most certainly be directed at A. Greenwood, which is unfair, as he didn’t ask me to write it. Therefore, I’m turning the comments off. Any feedback can be sent to: davis@idontreallycarewhatyouthink.com