Diary: Sent To the Corner

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I enjoy attention, support, and compliments as much as the next girl (more, some would say), but there still is a kind of group where I never seem to fit in, even if I try: The Mutual Admiration Societies. This is partly because I'm a bit of a tease; when I'm in a naughty mood, I enjoy infuriating men I meet to the point where their confused fantasies about what they want to do to me seem to fill the room like fog (and in the interest of public health and my own education, I sometimes let them do what they desire) - but there is another, deeper reason too: Total agreement makes me nervous. If we all view the world the same way, we must be missing some other, maybe wonderful, way of seeing things.

This doesn't mean I care for empty contradictions; if you don't have a new, meaningful counterpoint you might as well save your breath until you do. I'm just potentially interested in new perspectives and erratic behavior in any kind of situation. If a kid in a tantrum starts throwing soup cans around in the supermarket I'm inclined to join him for a while before comforting him, to share the experience. To just become part of the frowning majority standing around him makes me feel more small, stupid, and dead than I like to feel. I guess that although I'm a tease, I have very little potential for becoming a bully.

Because of this, I love blog commenting and debating, and I thank everyone taking the time to comment on my stuff, whether you agree with it or not (but especially if you don't and can formulate why), from the bottom of my heart. Any new view on a topic is invigorating, even if it just serves to convince you even more of your former beliefs. Unless you're temporarily in some kind of disciplinary role-playing (and I do my fair share of that), the sentence 'I don't want to discuss it' sounds to me like 'I don't want to live'.

With these rosy cheeks and ambitions, I have managed to get my comments banned from blogs twice in the last 24 hours, and I still don't do that much commenting. Since I believe in communication, I feel terrible that some people get so disturbed by my words that they rather close their ears than hear them, and I am contemplating a proper punishment for myself. (Feel free to leave suggestions in your comments.) At the same time, I can't help but wonder how it happened.

The first case was Martha O'Connor. Apparently, she recently published a book. Always interested in new lit, I read the excerpts. The first one is about Rennie screwing a guy while thinking about her literary agent and her youth, the second is about Cherry talking to her mom, and the third one is about Amy thinking of her friends. Now, I wouldn't try to convince any of you that it was bad, and I urge anyone interested to get a first-hand look, hope you'll love it and get a new, rewarding experience - but to me, the short excerpts (from which it would be totally unfair to judge the whole book) were pretentious descriptions of very small worlds, very far from my own.

Still, that's no skin off my nose; writing a book is a tough and sensitive task which seldom hurts anyone else, and Martha would have gotten nothing but attagirls from me, but her blog was so packed with raving reviews from leading magazines and self-praise I figured she didn't need it. I was about to move on, when I glanced over her latest post at the time, announcing a big big KEE-RAZY contest. In the contest, you could win a signed copy from the collectible first edition of Martha's book if you presented the best article of 250 words or less explaining why high school sucked.

This struck a bit of a bad (well, as bad as they get) note in me. I didn't attend as much of high school as I wish I had back then, partly because of my own emotions and partly because of circumstances beyond my control. After having written a book about her own high school experiences, Martha now wanted people to confirm them and join her lifeless frowning majority, instead of offering their own experiences. Being the girly-girl I am, I vented my frustration with a little joke; I wrote a short comment to the post explaining that I hadn't attended enough high school to enter her contest, but if I instead explained in 250 words or less why her book sucked, was it possible to win a new high school education?

I passed by Martha's blog again a few hours later, checking if she had replied to my little pleasantry. My comment was deleted. This made me feel terrible - I could never imagine that anyone at the height of such success could be offended by my harmless gag. I immediately wrote another comment, apologizing if she had taken my first comment the wrong way, and explaining 'It was just a little joke. Or maybe a little perspective.' By coincidence, I was returned to the blog a third time later that night, so I opened the comments for Martha's KEE-RAZY contest post, and found that my second comment also was deleted. Furthermore, a message at the top of the comment box laconically stated 'Banned by webmaster. Your comments will not be added.'

The second case was when I happened to stumble upon yet another of these raving-lunatic-conservative blogs, for which the need seems to be endless. This one looked mildly amusing, though; every regular poster seemed to have chosen an SF/fantasy nickname, one of them posed dressed as Darth Vader, and so on. So I hung around and read the latest post, describing how some college professor allegedly had said that religious people were 'moral retards'. As a devout Christian, the poster was very upset by this accusation, and expressed his desire to beat the professor 'within an inch or four of his life'. Obviously, I didn't take the post very seriously, and tried to add to the gaiety by posting a comment expressing that beating up the professor definitely would be the moral thing to do.

Then I moved on, but I noticed by accident a while later that my blog started to receive a lot of traffic from the lunatic site. I returned to the site to investigate, and found furious comments about me from a group of posters, all patting each other's backs in perfect agreement. (To be fair: There was the odd dissident too, taking some of the heat stored for me.) Since at least one of the posters had taken the trouble to track back to my blog to find something derogatory to post about me (wouldn't be too hard to find, now would it?), I felt compelled to mildly caution them in a lighthearted way about the dangers of lacking humor and not taking people seriously because of their age, sex, lifestyle or other attributes. This made my still dead serious attackers even more enraged, and I started to feel bad about the whole thing. It was never my intention to start a battle of wits against unarmed men, so I started to mellow things down and bow out - but before I could wrap it up, I was banned. Some found the slanted exchange entertaining; it should still be available here, but if you're a mild and sweet nature like myself you might want to skip this one - there is a lot of cussing and name-calling going on from the wasp nest I accidentally stepped in.

So to all past, present, and future outraged bloggers: Please forgive me for speaking out of turn. Maintaining a noteworthy blog is hard work, and I wouldn't want to make it a bad experience for anyone. If you decide to send me to the corner of your blogs to stand and ponder what a bad girl I am instead of talking to me, you have every right to. Can I please just ask one question before I go: If you are such fragile souls, craving nothing but constant reassurance, I certainly won't judge you - but why do you allow comments from stray cats like me in the first place? Why not start a club, where you all can speak in unison? Or maybe you have already, and just use your blogs for new membership applications? If so: Sorry I didn't fit in. In that kind of clubs, I rarely do.

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