Those are the exact words I said aloud while laughing at my new blog a minute ago. It wasn’t an evil laugh, but a laugh of pure joy at my own cuntishness. An acquaintance once described me as “vulnerable, with an edge.” I was flattered at the time. Now it might be more accurate to say, “A cunt, with a heart.” How would that be on a gravestone?
Anyway, here is my Tribute Blog. It is dedicated to my very special fan, The Crazy Muffin Woman. I need to figure out how to remove my Sister Wolf photo without having to change my google profile thing. Who can help a Sister out?
The photo of Megan Fox as Mother Theresa is how I like to think of myself. It’s such a ravishing image, isn’t it? It’s the kindness that so reminds me of me.
However, when you’re feeling bad about yourself, and you need a lift, you can feel better just by looking at images like this:
Go ahead, click on them! If god didn’t want you to take comfort in Priscilla and Lisa Marie and Donatella and Woody and Soon Ji, He wouldn’t have created them for us!
Hhahah awww man, that tribute blog is hilarious.
found you via EasyBakeCoven. nice digs here. i think i’ll look around a bit.
just so you know… you’ve created a monster.
i’ve moved onto searching for russian georgia muffin parlour.
and i called my sister a cunt today. oh sweet and pure joy…
Jesus H. Christ, and I thought I had a problem with taking slights and building grudges.
Hermana Lupa, here’s my unsolicited internet advice to you. Anyone who takes huge stock in constructing a larger than life persona online is severely lacking in gravitas in their offline life. It’s best to let such sad individuals puff themselves up online not realizing that the vast majority of humanity has a better ability to read inbetween the lines than they do. Let those brave Underground Men and Women show the world who’s boss, it’s the only consolation they have for otherwise insignificant existences.
It’s helped me let go once such grudges stop being fun and start being work.
Now please don’t rip my spine out Mortal Kombat style.
*Runs away*
Sister Wolf, could you send me an email at aliasclio-weblog-at-yahoo.ca? There is something germane that I want to mention to you in private, and as you have no blog email address I can’t do so directly myself.
Nothing monstrous or invasive, I promise.
Spike, you have much wisdom for your stated age. I must think this over. I am know in these parts as Venganza de la Reina.
Oh my! I vote for Spike’s option, not that you asked me.
Spike used one of your favorite words: gravitas.
Sister Wolf: YOU RULE! Your tribute blog is hilarious! It’s 3 AM and I’m going to bed a happy man.
Which one is Lisa-maree? and which one is the waxwork?
xx
happy times
If ever someone was needed to talk me down from plastic surgery it’s Priscilla “let’s-inject-industrial silicone” and see how that works.
“A cunt, with a heart.”
I think if this is not carved on your headstone, it will be a serious miscarriage of responsibility on the part of whoever is in charge of taking care of these things for you posthumously. I’m just sayin’.
The plot thickens. Do you think she knows about it?
Darling Sister,
You do not love yourself too much. It is impossible, both logically and empirically, to love you too much. So please, no more of these obviously false statements.
Philosophically,
Patrick
P.S. You mentioned earlier my “perceived immaturity”. You perceived correctly. I am immature. However, I am highly logical, and insist on respect for the truth.
P.P.S. Is that her? Oh, you are cruel indeed. Ah, my love for you only deepens–like a cube root, it multiplies in all directions. (Do you know from whom I stole that statement? If you do, you are beyond amazing. If you guess correctly, your prize is fewer messages from me. So think hard!)
Patrick, I am leaving off your H in deference of our deepening intimacy.
Nope, I won’t even guess if it means less stalking.
Sans H, I feel almost naked! Eventually, when our intimacy is complete, you won’t call me anything at all…
And you are so sweet about not guessing. It was a phrase used by a woman who was in love with Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward Angel, not Bonfire of the Vanities). I forget her name, but she was a married Jewish woman of a certain age (unlike your svelte self, she was <zaftig, but still a cutie) who developed a major yen for the burly wordy guy. She wrote to him once, “My love for you is like a cube root–it multiplies in all directions.” The reviewer of her biography said this kind of phrasecraft showed that she was a better writer than Wolfe, which I agree, though with the sense that that is not such high praise as the reviewer intended.
Still, I share her generous and expanding sentiment.
It’s not an easy wisdom. Since it seems that the personage who irks me doesn’t read here, I feel more free to expand a bit.
Consider this: The sort of people who get off on being assholes online will invariably have more time to spend than normal people do on being an asshole online. I have a full time job, three time-consuming pursuits and an active social life of several circles. The guy whose mere balloon headed existence preturbs me, seems to have an existence solely of macking on 16 year olds at dance clubs and being the emotional kleenix of a bunch of 18 year old frosh girls at his school. His hobbies so far as I can tell is posting pseudo-scientific screeds on why his taste in women and music is based on sound mathematical principles on boards where he doesn’t seem to get that he’s comic relief and folks are laughing at him and not with him.
Oh, and mocking how everyone else, from writers, to historians to other biologists are stoopid and so benighted compared to his munificent genius.
My irritation at his deluded sense of self-worth and purposefully abrasive style takes the form of reactive snark. It’s like trying to hold in a fart in a decompression chamber.
However, these types of people think that if someone hates them, then they obviously must be right, and more importantly to them; *important*, so it only makes the problem worse. Add to that the fact that they have a lot more time to kill in baiting you online than you do to them and you’ll always tire out before they do. They make fun pinatas to whack, but if the candy never falls out of them, it gets tiring real quick.
In the end, they want people to pay attention to them online. The more the better. Since they can’t do it by actually contributing anything thought-provoking, creative or entertaining, they do it by the easiest plays in the book, by being outrageous and by being a jerk.
Since it seems that the personage who irks me doesn’t read here
Oh, thank God, I thought you meant me!
In the end, they want people to pay attention to them online. The more the better. Since they can’t do it by actually contributing anything thought-provoking, creative or entertaining, they do it by the easiest plays in the book, by being outrageous and by being a jerk.
Oh, you do mean me. Damn.
seems to have an existence solely of macking on 16 year olds at dance clubs
Oh, thank God, you don’t mean me after all! You mean…him. I feel sorry for the guy, actually. He’s been eviscerated, flensed and otherwise vivisected over at Roissy’s by a couple of commenters. He seems like small fry for you, Spike, more pathetic than anything. What gives? (Feel free to tell me to mind my own business, but I am just a plain old nosy parker these days, so tell me anyway! Tell me!).
Intrusively,
Patrick
Spike and Patrick, let’s go after that Personage. I believe I know the one you mean, but I can’t remember his name/handle at the moment.
I like your pinata analogy, Spike. The problem is, I just enjoy hitting the pinata! Even though I know it’s empty! I am so perverse that I will do this for my own entertainment.
My own Special Personage is so malevolent that I must exorcize Her evil spirit by satirizing her.
Perhaps you could do this with Your Personage?! Oh wait, you are too busy. Shit. I only have one job and it doesn’t take all day to do it. If you’d like me to “attend” to him, I am at your service.
Your commitment to service is wholly admirable, Sister. 🙂 I tremble for the slender, slight-of-height would-be Alpha Male should you turn your tender attentions to him. The Mad Slav-ina is actually a considerably more formidable individual.
Patrick, formidable maybe, but needs to be taken down.
Hammie & Echinadagirl, agreed, let’s not have shit injected into our faces!
PatrickH:
Actually, he is pretty small fry. That’s another reason why I’ve kinda pulled back from directly confronting him. He’s not even all that entertaining to bait, Baba Yaga is far more entertaining and witty in her own corse way. Too bad I don’t desire a beef with her.
Mr. Big Head simply recycles the same damn shtick over and over again. I swear to God, he has about five or six stock reply modes. He so seriously believes his own bluster, that even the expert ego-poppers over at Roissy failed to even make a dent in him. If they can’t, then my much more subtle style wouldn’t stand a chance.
So why beef with him? Several reasons. The big one, is that he casually insulted my taste and intellectual honesty for no other reason than to provide him one of his usual grandstanding moments of net self-importance. I doubt he even realized how much it grated me, though when I was younger and someone said something like that directly to my face, I would have had to have been restrained. I don’t take well to being called a liar, especially by someone who states that he sees no problem with being an open hypocrite.
That’s the main one right there. All the other stuff, the complete social tone deafness, the aesthetic tastelessness, the unbridled arrogance, the in your face Asperger’s goodness, the psuedo-scientific rantings, the creepy girl lusting and frottage (y’all know his job is as a tutor, right?), it’s all freaking secondary to that. Even Roissy wouldn’t call a man who prides himself on honesty a liar. Self-deluded, maybe, I can live with that, but purposefully being manipulative of the truth? That’s another thing entirely.
I think the dude doesn’t have any male friends because he can’t make actual friends for the life of him. The chicks he hangs out with are either his students, girls who need a male friend to dump their emotional baggage on, or underagers looking for free cocktails by bumping and grinding the weird loser in a suit on the floor.
I know he’s a weird-looking loser because I got pics of him. He posted them on his blog a couple years back and then quickly pulled them down. Not before I snagged them to disk, hehehe. I’m saving them in case he ever decides to get personal with me. I may not be a looker myself, but then I don’t brag about being a baby-faced mack daddy to anyone that’ll listen on the net.
That’s the story right there. I don’t lie when I say I got a bit of Iago in me. I’ve actually bided for a very long time and made nice with him for awhile until I realized he’s just the same underneath as outside.
SisterWolf:
I’m good. Hell, the reason why I’m unloading here is to get it off my chest someplace where he (hopefully) won’t read it, is to purge the bile. He’s not worth my time and more cogently, he’s not even entertaining to poke. Besides, more and more I get the feeling he’s actually a true blue Asperger’s case, and thus not really fair game to bait. Some might say the underage macking outweighs that, but eh, if I punched every guy like that, I’d have been deported from Japan already. (Why couldn’t his 25% Japanese ancestry picked up the humility aspect of Nippon instead of the sexual paraphilia?)
Baba Yaga…Spike that’s perfect. Hah!
As for the Other…he is clearly Asperger-y. I mean he just kind of shrugged and stared, so to speak, when he was tagged, and good, over at R’s. People like him are immune to the slings and arrows that creative destructors send their way simply because they have neither the wit nor the humour to even understand that they just been perforated and flayed and gutted for all to see. They’re like dinosaurs, except it takes forever for them to know they’re dead, not just five minutes.
He called you a liar? Yep, them’s fightin’ words. So, carry on my good man! I’d like to see you come up with something like this:
From the movie The Longest Yard:
Burt Reynolds is in a bar getting drunk. Two policemen, one of whom is very short, enter the bar and approach him. The short policeman brusquely confronts BR, who replies, drunkenly:
Hey look, it’s a miniature cop!
The little policeman doesn’t like that at all, especially that his partner laughs too. That would be cool…getting a zing in that everybody gets, and laughs at, even if it passes the Other by. He won’t be immune to that, I’m thinking.
Anticipatingly,
Patrick
PatrickH:
Man, I wish I could have been around for the takedown. I’m not a regular reader of Roissy. He himself is interesting, but about 90% of his commentors are ultimately tiresome. They really take what he says word for word. Looking at the changing tenor of his posts, he’s getting somewhat Crowleyian, and putting in suggestions that will lead to self-destructive ends if taken completely straight-faced. Perhaps it’s his way of reminding them that Game is as much an art as a science? Nah, it’s just his way of getting shits and giggles.
In anycase, I doubt if I could lure the other into such a situation. First off, it’s nearly impossible to pull off on the net, where even normal people have trouble reading all the subtleties and cues (I include myself in that estimation). Secondly there’s no real way to have someone become a laughingstock. Most of the posters would just think “what a loser” and stay silent. Thirdly, even if there was a way to negate the aforementioned reasons, he tends to stay in places where Aspergery people congregate (gnxp), the tone is already a freeforall (roissy), or that sort of shit-testing is frowned upon (clio’s place). It doesn’t help that people like to use him as an unwitting source of comic relief and/or comment fodder. Me, I like my buffoons to know they’re buffoons.
Spike, I don’t think your level of outrage directed against A Certain Person is really proportional. I did not infer (from your encounters on my blog at least; but perhaps there were others elsewhere), that he called you a liar either implicitly or in so many words. So far, he has baited you more successfully than you have baited him, simply because your fuse is shorter. In fact, I doubt he has a “fuse” at all, esp. if he really does have Asperger’s. If you go after him, it will happen again. You will be enraged; he will calmly dust off his hands and walk away, clueless about the cause of all the fuss.
The Malevolent One is another matter. She is deliberately offensive, and I suspect she is slightly mad. She can also be dangerous. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s not above tracking down an enemy’s identity and address and posting them, for example. Is it worth tangling with her, and allowing her to take up so much of your psychic room?
Blimey! I feel terribly British when I read all this and the comments. The c word is so wrong yet also so right.
Also the mad women who won’t go away again tell her to join the W.I they’ll wear her out with jam making and other demands.
Seriously I’ve always though Ben Stiller was a retard and now he’s made a film about himself. I only use retard for people who are arrogant pompous hollywood stars.
Make do – Haha! Thank you for distilling everything so well.
Spike and Patrick and Clio: This Other Personage is a nutty would-be child molester who’d be just pathetic if not so aggressive in promoting his fetish.
As for Asperger’s, my teenager was diagnosed at 3 years old, when few people had ever heard about it. How has it become a standard insult for arrogant egotistical losers?? This makes me sad. My kid is not just brilliant IQ wise but charming, popular, philosophical, and the light of my life. Let us not use Asperger’s Syndrome as an all-purpose description of anti-social or pompous assholes.
Everyone, feel free to vent, discuss, or plot against any nemesis here at godammit.com. That’s why We are here.
You know, Sister, I am abashed by your absolutely correct re-appropriation of the word “Asperger’s”. I’m cringing at my own thoughtless collapse into the use of the word as a general purpose putdown of the socially inept or even creepy. My ex-wife has a nephew with Asperger’s…he is a wonderful boy. My ex told me that he once said of himself, “Sometimes I say the wrong thing and people get mad”, with such sadness and regret that it broke her heart…and mine too. He is this absolutely great kid, with the best heart you could ask for. Everybody adores him.
I apologize to him, to your wonderful son, and to all Asperger’s children. The Other is a pathetic creepy loser, with something Not Quite Right about him. He would be improved if he rose to the level of Asperger’s.
Please accept my apologies to you too, Sister. And thank you for the rebuke. I needed that. And for your reclaiming the word “retard” as well. I can be heartless in a glib fluent way that appalls me when I recognize it. Please feel free to point out to me when I fall into that pattern here (or anywhere else).
Remorsefully,
Patrick
P.S. It’s interesting to have a crush on someone whom I respect morally. Makes me feel a bit like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Getting reprimanded by the one woman he just cannot ignore. I recommend it, to tell the truth! Pride, he goeth before a fall, he doth.
I think the “would-be child molester” label is inaccurate. The girls who interest him are between 16-19, or thereabouts, which is some years beyond childhood. I suppose it’s possible that he might be sexually interested in really young girls, but nothing he’s said on his blog indicates this. I think what he’s doing is unhealthy (mostly for him at this stage), and I’ve said so, but it isn’t illegal.
I don’t think it’s impossible that he might truly have some form of Asperger’s. I know this syndrome doesn’t automatically make someone arrogant or egotistical, but it can, according to the descriptions I’ve seen, make them socially awkward and tone deaf.
I don’t know. I’m a little too inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Patrick, no need for remorse. Falleth not!
Clio – An adult man who preys on 16 yr old girls = pederast, IMHO. It’s not impossible this Personage has Asperger’s Syndrome, but again, not all boors can be lumped under this diagnosis. Although you have read descriptions and perhaps even the diagnostic criteria for a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, it’s not so easy to diagnose for afar, especially when you haven’t spent time with actual “Aspies.” Even the rumor that Bill Gates has Asperger’s is just conjecture.
Sorry to sound like a know-it-all; it’s just that this subject is one of my very few areas of expertise.
Don’t worry, Sister W. I do understand and don’t think you’re being a know-it-all. My brother suffers from schizophrenia, as you may have read on my blog, and I get annoyed at the way people misunderstand this illness, and the way some used to think that it was equivalent to “multiple personality disorder”, a mistake that’s less common now. On the other hand, I never get annoyed when someone idly refers to another person as “schizo”, as I know this is an etymological confusion and has nothing to do with their attitude towards schizophrenia.
But though I think it’s wrong for grown men to flirt with 16-year-olds, I don’t think it’s a mark of pedophilia. Pedophiles are sexually drawn to pre-pubescent children, not to sexually mature teenagers, which most 16-year-old girls are. I also think that most of the girls this young man encounters are a little older than that. He’s also not sleeping with them, as far as I can determine. In fact, I’d be a little surprised if he’d ever slept with anyone, judging by his blog.
The casting about of such labels is libelous, unless accurate, and they ought to be used with caution. I apologise if I sound overly legalistic here, but I am concerned about the way the internet can spread damaging rumours.
Okie doke, I will just refer to this character as the Douchebag Personage, unless Spike has anything better.
I checked out his blog for a moment, and he seemed like a Saturday Night Live spoof.
Sister Wolf:
Asperger’s is just part of what drives me mad about him. I mean if he wasn’t a creep and a gigantic narcissist, he might actually be rather nice. The tone deafness just makes the other two aspects seem much more irritating. I have a couple friends who have diagnosed Asperger’s (sans the arrogance) and several others who may be undiagnosed and I get along well enough with them. Hell, I’m hardly a NT myself with my OCD. If anything I’m a bit more tolerant of these folks than most normal people are, so long as they’re decent people on the inside.
In a good person’s hands, Asperger’s folks can be the ones who say the needed unaired truths about what’s going on. In a bad person’s hands, they toss social molotov cocktails, because they have no inner compunction and feel the rest of the world is what’s fucked in the head, not them. You’ve probably seen them on support boards when then they mercilessly torment someone whom they consider a “curebie” in even the most insignificant way.
Mr. Underage Frottage may be missing certain parts of him, but it’s not those parts which I’m condemning him for.
Alias Clio:
I know, he has absolutely no fuse and no ability to have any damage done to his ego at all. I don’t even think he *gets* when he’s been flensed, as Patrick has stated. The only possible way something might get to him is a real-life public humiliation, but if you read his blog, you get that he’s been publically called out so many times and always always always he rationalizes himself the winner. Hell, the reason why I like to call him The Underground Man is because he posted an incident straight out of the book where the Underground Man purposely stands in the way of a handsome Cavalry Officer and makes him walk around him awkwardly. Of course Mr. Underage Frottage probably never had his coda with his Cavalry Officer of “Who are you? Oh, was that you? Sorry about that awkwardness, eh chum?”
He’ll never “get” anything short of a cholo stomp party after he bump and grinds with the wrong high school girl at a dance club. Some people really do need a proper hard beating to get their station in life correct. Worked wonders for me. Being that I can’t do that by distance or by moral inclination, I suppose just waiting for nature to take her course will have to do in such regards.
Also he has slept with one person, or almost slept with her (more likely hypothesis). He constantly redacts his blog (why he does so when there’s net archiving sites around I don’t know), but there’s a sudden tone shift after he spends time abroad in Spain. It’s pretty damn clear that the closest he’s getting to sex now is bumping and grinding high schoolers at a dance club and pretending they’re leaving alpha-status marking vaginal secretions on his pants legs (does he even realize how absurd he sounds?)
Spike, may I ask again that we not throw around the term Asperger’s Syndrome? If you substitute the word “gay” or “jew” or even “short” for your use of Asperger’s in your comment above, maybe you can see how bigoted it sounds.
Thanks in advance for sensitivity.
I won’t as you’ve requested it on your home turf, but I don’t see how it’s bigoted since I’ve said that it has nothing to do with *why* he’s an asshole. Let me explain
There are assholes and there are good people. They can be short, gay, Jewish or in this case be definately not NT. The problem with assholes is not that they’re short, gay, Jewish, or not an NT, it’s that they’re an asshole. The previous just colors how the asshole expresses themself. A short scrawny asshole is definately different from an asshole built like a linebacker. I would actually be more afraid of the short scrawny one, in that particular case.
In deference to the fact that I don’t have a psychiatrist giving me a DVM diagnosis on Mr. Underage Frottage, I’ll desist in referring to him as such even elsewhere from here, but it’s become a common occurance on the net because there are many many assholes online who make reference to being Asperger’s as an excuse for being an asshole (a modern day Twinkie defense?).
I know it’s not fair to the vast majority of people with actual diagnosed Asperger’s, who like any other subset of humanity, are composed primarily of decent nice people, but because a certain type of net asshole has staked a claim on the name, it’s become a taxonomic smear word for those kind of folks who match that sort of assholery.
I’m open to taking better names for contextually and metaphorically obtuse socially tone-deaf assholes online. Maybe The Underground People?
::Sings “I’d like to buy the world’s assholes a coke”::
Hahahahahaha! Well said!
I didn’t know this kind of Net Asshole was out there using the Aspie mantle to excuse their assholery. Fuck that shit, as we say in the trade.
Let us think about a name for these Personages. “The Underground People” is almost too noble, know what I mean?
Sister Wolf:
It started in the younger subsets of the various net fandoms, otaku, furries, otherkin and the like. Since then it’s spread out of there.
Hmmmm, how about “The Blockheads”? The density and inpenetrability of their large heads brings to mind Gumby’s poker faced foes.
There’s an actual diagnosis in the DSM that fits our personage, but I can’t remember what it is. The obtuseness, the social ineptitude, the inability to read social signals.
Damn, I can’t remember. I don’t think it’s one of the major obvious disorders: he’s not a narcissist proper, borderline, or anti-social (the latest designation for psychopath). It’s that he utterly lacks what Burns glotted on about back in the glennish day: to see ourselves as others see us. He’s clueless about himself because he’s clueless about how he strikes people. I think he’s genuinely surprised and uncomprehending when people take the piss out of him.
It’s too bad, really. In a William Gibson novel, a character was described as a (clinical) narcissist, and “that’s not the kind of thing you used to have.” The personage isn’t going to get better, you know. He makes me sad. Imagine him <exactly the same at age fifty. He’s going to be, you know. Exactly the same.
Sad.
Patrickh:
It’s depressing because I know folks like him. He will be the same. He won’t learn jack shit from life or the words of others. My hard subtle jibing mocking style, the flaming takedowns of Roissy’s Posse, Clio’s more positive urgings in a nicer direction; all for nought. He will go through life with a better self-estimation than most of humanity will. He will feel better at one girl freak dancing him than a hundred women in the sack will ever have on Roosh (he strikes me as the one who actually gets the most poon out of all the gamer blogs on the DC circuit)
Thing is, the folks I know like him aren’t anywhere near as narcissistic or annoying. Comorbidity on social disorders anyone?
Well, there’s one thing he’s been doing lately, perhaps at my (or your) urging, perhaps not, and that is reading/listening to more history. I had wondered about that because suddenly his sweeping historical generalizations are less wrong-headed than they once were, and recently he confirmed it, without my asking.
Clio
Can’t stand that Personage. He IS sad, but also sickening. Clio is a monument of patience and finding whatever is ‘positive’ in someone.
I’m off to my DSM IV.
Why am I not surprised you have a DSM-IV, Sister? I imagine it next to your computer, dog-eared, coffee-stained, ready for instant use. Do try to find out what he’s got, though. It’s actually driving me a bit buggy. I know there’s one in there that fits, dammit!
And reading history as the cure for stat nerd delusions of intellectual hegemony? I like it. It is the one area of intellectual inquiry that will cure what our guy has got, if anything can. You cheer me, Clio, if you think it’s having an effect. Good! Maybe there’s hope for the boy after all.
Clio:
You’ve only helped a tiny bit, the problem isn’t ignorance, it’s ego.
Frex recently in a debate about the Ossetian/Georgian situation he proclaimed that everyone blogging on the situation was ignorant as nobody could possibly have studied the area beforehand save for Greg Cochran (go figure).
When I pointed out that the main blog poster on the subject at a fistfulofeuros had lived in the Caucauses for two and a half years and that even myself who only has a passing interest in the area had read a history of the area and several ethnographic accounts, he remained silent.
It’s a matter of him believing that what he knows, anyone who disagrees with him is ignorant, and that which he doesn’t know, well, no one else knows about either.
Oooh, that’s called “Being a big know-it-all!” They are right; you know nothing. This is like MY special Personage too!
Aargh. I didn’t mean that studying history could cure him of anything; I meant that it shows he’s capable of at least some kind of response to human prompting.
Stop tugging my chain, pH!
I was not tugging your anything, Clio. I did speak imprecisely when I said reading history might cure him of “whatever it is he’s got”. I withdraw that statement. I did say just before that, that reading history might cure him of his “stat nerd delusions of intellectual hegemony”. “Cure” in that sense is just another way of saying “change his mind about some things”, aka emit “some kind of response to human prompting”.
And I’m really, really not tugging your chain, even with the second use of the word “cure”! The comment wasn’t about you! It wasn’t! It really really wasn’t! Clio, I don’t think you’re being fair here, or even trying that hard, either. (Confession: I’m also feeling very sensitive these days as I slowly come down from my t cycle mania, so please understand…I’m feeling vulnerable right now, okay?)
Clio, it pains me to say this, but you and I may need to attend counselling sessions. We seem to consistently cross wires in comments, without, IMO, any real need to do so. While I wouldn’t say “what we have here is a failure to communicate”, I would say we aren’t closing our particular communication circuits as frequently or cleanly as I think should be possible for two such verbally able individuals.
I’m partial to cognitive-behaviour therapy, though not in the context of couples work. Gestalt? Systems? NLP?
Untuggingly,
Patrick
Patrick, this is activating my Jealousy Circuits, but if it will help you and Clio, I defer to the Greater Good. Sniff.
this is activating my Jealousy Circuits
It is? Really? Excellent.
Actually, you could counsel us, you know. I’m sure I fit somewhere in that DSM-IV of yours. Clio transcends all categories, but so do you, so I’m sure you’d get along wonderfully.
[I can’t help thinking of the scene in the Simpsons where Homer and Marge go for counselling. The stern woman therapist (streak of grey…perfect detail; all women therapists have a streak of grey in their hair) asks what the problem is. Homer starts Homering at her, and without a word, she writes in her notepad, HUSBAND. I could see you waiting about ten seconds, then writing in your own notepad, PROBLEM: PATRICK.]
I’ll really start worrying when you put the H back in.
May my two darlings have the best of all weekends. May they have to retire the word, your weekends are so sterling. They’ll have to start saying, “Put a little thing in your week.” Or, “I live for the thing.” Enjoy.
Patrick my duck, if that last post was more leg-pulling, well and good. If not, I’m sorry to have caused any distress, confusion or bewilderment. My own previous post was no more than a tease. Most of what I write in response to other peoples’ comments (as opposed to what I set down independently) is teasing, unless I sense that the person writing is in serious need of either sympathy or Firm Moral Guidance. Ahem.
No need to be jealous, Sister. Patrick would find me much too ladylike to suit his more, how shall I put it?, earthy style. You, on the other hand, are a perfect match in earthiness. May you have a long and delightful net-flirt. Meanwhile, I intend to stand on the sidelines and grin.
My dear Clio, legs are getting pulled all around here, it seems. I like you a lot, and my suggestion of counselling was simply a sign of my commitment to, well, us. I want this to work, you know.
The thing is, we’re Canadian. So if we do badinage, which is what I think we’ve been doing, it’s going to be Canadian-style badinage…which means dry, dry, dry. I’ve noticed that dry doesn’t come across well on the Web. You’ve commented on this on your site and at Michael’s too. The problem is that using emoticons is just too damn broad. The whole point of dry is dish it out in the deadest-of-pan way. And deadpan just sometimes comes across as dead. Or even angry. [My default facial expression, especially when I’m tired, is apparently exactly the same as when I’m seriously honked off about something. I’ve actually angered people just from the way I look at them sometimes. Maybe my Web stuff works the same way.]
I’m actually fairly serious about this topic, Clio. I love reading you and talking to you because of your intelligence and very particular, individual temperament, one I don’t see often on the Web. You are almost the only commenter I bother to read over at Roissy’s, and sometimes even at the Blowhards. I’d like to find a way to be able to communicate with you and my other web faves with some nuance and feeling, and I admit it’s been a struggle to find the right voice to do that. My current tactic is to use (excessively, for sure!) things like parenthetical expressions, italics, exclamation points, ellipses…you know what I mean, and often without regard for their proper employment.
Dunno why I’m rambling about this. I love talking with the most intelligent person in the room, I guess. Too often, in fleshland, it’s me! But here, I’ve got all these sharp, smart and very likable people, you, Spike (for whom I have an absurd and inexplicable soft spot–Hi Spike!), and of course, the Delectable One herself. I also really like Michael Blowhard, too, and I mean like as in warm fuzzy affectionate feeling like.
I’d like to be able to reproduce in print the sense of the kind of sharp, fun, fast, but clean conversation I could have with all you cool people gathered around a table in the Village with the wine flowing and the good times rolling on, and especially how much I’m enjoying myself, sometimes just listening or reading (though I’ve been a fantastic gab-mongering bore of late, I know).
But…hard to do here on the Web. Sigh. I’ve said more than enough, and too little at the same time. It’s late. I’m going to listen to some samba-inflected house music, eat two cookies, then hit the sack.
Sweet dreams, Clio. And you too, my sternest of sisters and wisest of wolves. Good hunting!