This online practice has always amazed me.

I used to run into it on journal sites. I never sought-out friends on those sites, but people would friend me. They would friend bunches of people, I assume. Then three months later they’d make a post like “Cutting friends. Message me if you want to stay friends.” And I would always message and say, “Cut me. Thanks!”

I’m not a fan of justifying my existence. I’m also not a fan of people making YOU responsible for making their life easier.  You don’t like to read my posts? Cut me. I won’t take it personal because I don’t really care what you think. But to cut everyone and ask me to “re-friend” you? No way, sugar. (oh please, make me feel loved. again.)

The thing that gets me is that Facebook makes this so easy. You can block a certain person’s or application’s posts. The day I decided to do that, my life got so much less stressful. No, I don’t want to hear about how awesome your kid is 24/7 or hear you whine about your (honestly, pretty simple) life 24/7. Are you as unbearable in real life as you are online? I know I am, but I try to shut-up on facebook so no one knows.

And the thing that pissed me off the most was the religious vitriol people were shoveling out. I get it – the world is in shambles because people don’t follow your God.

I should be fair. I also think the world is in shambles, because too many people don’t follow my God – the God called Critical Thinking. It’s not really a God, just a Guideline.

But seriously:

• Posting  links to that asshole Kirk Cameron every day? You’re blocked.
• Daily Bible quote? You’re blocked.
• Crazy updates on how much of a hipster you are? You’re blocked.
• Only update on how awful your life is? You’re blocked.
• Daily complaining about your job?  (Do you work in a coal mine?) You’re blocked.
• Complain about men and/or women in stereotypical ways? You’re blocked.
• Constantly update about your baby’s poop? You’re blocked.

Facebook is for making nice.  (I do not link to this blog on facebook). I block those people so I don’t go on angry tirades, but I’d still sit down and have lunch with them. I don’t have facebook friends I haven’t physically spent hours with in my life (except one woman who I’ve talked with online for probably ten years at this point).

I believe they’re all generally good people, making the best they can out of the world with what they have. Most of us are the same way. And if being in Missouri has taught me anything, it’s this – people’s views don’t make them good people. The way they act does. And people here – regardless of views – have shown me great kindness.

That doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated with people who DON’T THINK. But I can enjoy them if I remember that they’re doing the best they can, and that they mostly just want to be good to others.

In conclusion – people are irritating; okay.

I think she thought it was insightful. It is not. Blogs rarely are.

The blogger irritated me first by referring to mid-america as, “that space between the two coasts”. Maybe she was being facetious. I hope so. Living in Missouri has made me over-sensitive to people who talk shit about mid-america. Hey – we’re not all Oklahoma (and if you haven’t seen the crap Oklahoma passed last Tuesday, you have no idea…). But, even Oklahoma has a couple pretty nice cities.

I live close to St. Louis. St. Louis reminds me a lot of the east coast. It reminds me of Baltimore, if Baltimore’s industrial businesses still existed. I always liked Baltimore, and I like St. Louis.

People here are nice. You show up to a job and they all talk to you. They walk you to your car. They run to catch up with you and talk to you if they see you walking. They ask you to lunch. They do all this your first week, it doesn’t take them months to start thinking of you as a nice person. They just assume.

If you say hello and talk to a young child in a public place, parents here don’t wrench their child’s wrist pulling them away from you. They’ll chat along with you.

Not everything is about politics or proving yourself here.

So, that pissed me off, a little. But I was willing to give the blogger a pass, because it could have been facetious. It’s hard to tell in print.

Then she started talking about race.

Let me put this out there: I grew up in suburban DC, probably in the same county as this blogger. But I grew up in a neighborhood where my friends were almost all African American or Hispanic or Indian or Pakistani.  It was not a wealthy neighborhood. My high school was probably 30% African American. I have friends who grew up 20 minutes from where I lived – in a couple directions – and went to schools that were primarily white.

I can’t tell you how this impacted me, because I don’t think it did. Yes, I had friends whose parents had immigrated. Yes, I had friends who had themselves immigrated – had been sent with distant relatives to escape life in a country that could easily take their life. But we were mostly just kids or teenagers together. We listened to music. We played video games. We ran around exploring. We did homework together.

What got me is when this blogger talked about poor kids who got a bunch of awards from one school, transferred to a presumably “better” school, didn’t score so well on academic tests administered by the state and the blogger basically said, “think about the (poor) children.” They got awards and now they have to cope with the fact they’re not prepared for the world.

WHOSE WORLD?

I was blessed with some level of intelligence. I had plenty of friends who struggled for grades and to pass tests for a variety of reasons – learning disorders, poor home environment, less intelligent, whatever. Those friends are often doing better than I am. They have degrees, they have full-time jobs, they live on their own.

What schools where kids are “achievers” fail to realize is that everyone achieves on their own level, for themselves.

I hope that kid who didn’t score well, thought to him or herself, I have value. I always will have value. And went home and looked at those awards for perfect attendance, or incredible sports feats, or a fantastic painting. And felt talented. Because passing a test isn’t a talent. Any farking idiot knows that the older you get, the more you can pass a test based on how the test is written and feeling out the right answers and less on knowing shit.

My point is: schools have one idea for what you can be. A student. They don’t give a fuck if you want to fix cars, write and draw comics, write programs or design buildings. You don’t have to do well in school to be successful. You especially don’t have to do well in every subject in school to be successful. Why not reward people who have special talents, even if they’re not up to standards with reading? Maybe that bit of encouragement will make them want to show up to school.

Finally, I hate when people talk about race who are isolated from it. People talk like it doesn’t or shouldn’t matter any more. Those people should take a second to walk into an Asian grocer or the flea market I went to in Baltimore that was populated almost entirely by African Americans. Afterwards, we met up with a recovering crack addict. Does that make you uncomfortable? See what it’s like to be an outsider, to talk and look and act different. Yeah, people might tease you or talk about you but it won’t kill you. It’s good fer ya. And you can do it anywhere. Just last weekend, Michael and me were the only white people in an Asian grocery. They yelled to us in Korean at the checkout. Awesome.

Actually, I probably need to go back today. I want some Kim-chi and some sesame seeds. Wal-Mart charged me like $4 for a spice jar of sesame seeds! I’ll pay $5 to get an enormous package at the Asian Grocery.

Today, though, a thoughtful man responded to an obvious spam email, which originated from my email address. Supposedly. His message?

Fuck You.

At first I was taken aback. I wanted to send him a response explaining how spam and the internet function – since his response made it clear he was not knowledgeable. His response also made it clear he has fun wasting his time, and while he’s sending rude messages into cyberspace from his personal email address, he could also have a little tab open in his browser to wikipedia. In that tab, he could do something to improve himself, like actually learn how the internet works. In all honesty, I wish there were a mandatory course about the basics of the internet that had to be passed before you could do crap, like send rude emails to people.

But, on further introspection, I realized his email amused me. It reminded me of Abe Simpson, shaking his fist at a cloud. Who responds to spam emails and sees it as anything other than quixotic?

Abe Simpson

So, good sir, thank you for the lulz.

I don’t know either of you. However, I do know two traits that you both share. Bloated egos and a sense that you are just so damn deep and intelligent that the world just doesn’t understand you. Bloggers are some of the most self absorbed bores in the world.

I hope that the Mitchell Heisman post doesn’t read as “I am smart and Mitchell isn’t and that’s why Mitchell is dead” because that wasn’t the intent at all. But that’s not why I’m writing this.

I totally agree with what Steven wrote, except of course for the parts that say bad things about me. Bloggers are pretentious jerks. I started writing random crap and occasionally posting it online about ten years ago, when I first had a website. Ever since I converted to WordPress a few years back I’ve had this self-hatred about the whole thing. I read other people’s blogs and I think, “Who are these people that expect other people to be interested in what they have to say?” And then I remember about this blog and I think, “Oh. Right.”

I really don’t know what it is about the blog format in particular that’s so obnoxious. The comments? The layout? The dates on posts that kind of say, “come back tomorrow for more awesomeness”? I set up the gopher version of this blog because it was a niche, it was all about the content and less about “look at me”, and I do think it’s being read and enjoyed by a few people.

This blog’s become a lot more popular in the past few months, for no real reason that I can figure out, and that bothers me. It’s like we put up a big flashy sign, and I never wanted a big flashy sign. I am kind of a pretentious jerk*, but I’m a humanitarian pretentious jerk, and the idea of inflicting myself on upwards of 2000 people a month does not sit well with me.

Anyway, I guess the right response is to just ignore the comment, or delete it, or say “up yours, Steve, I was online before blogging was a thing, I run a charitable web hosting business, and this is my one online vanity.” But damned if I don’t agree with him. So effective immediately, I am on a self-imposed srs bsns moratorium. Instead of writing puffy stuff, I will be using this blog to post pictures of LOLcats that I have made.

* – I write blog posts with footnotes, for crissakes.

I’m really surprised that so many people are reading this blog over Gopher. I am truly flattered to be in the company of such silly people.

In case anyone’s interested, the software that handles both the Gopher page generation and the telnet comments is open source. It’s available via Gopher and via Floodgap’s Gopher-HTTP proxy.

I haven’t updated WP2Gopher for WordPress 3.0 yet–I don’t know if an update will even be necessary–but I plan to handle that in the next few days.