it’s funny how having a website where you express your random ideas or even posting on an online message board renders you subject to attacks of the personal kind. i’ve had this online feud for a while now with a few individuals, mostly from a certain vancouver-based message board. and when i try to pin-point the exact moment when i started to dislike them, i really can’t. and when i try to think of a viable reason why they might dislike me, i really can’t.

i’m not a mean person, though i can be if i’m attacked. i don’t try to sound smart, though i like to utilize the knowledge i have acquired from years of schooling. i suppose i can be pretty sarcastic in my attempts to joke around and those initial jokes could have been interpreted as rude, and for that i apologize to them. but these reasons don’t seem like reason enough to justify “bashing” someone on the internet or off. i’ve actually tried to be civil, offering to talk to them away from the safety of their computers, but i don’t think they care enough.

the problem is i do — care, that is. i care that people dislike me when i’m not really as bad as they think (and i’m sure they aren’t so bad, either). i care because i don’t like the idea of people disliking me, especially people i have never even met in real life, people who haven’t seen every side of me yet paint me with a one-dimensional brush labeled “bitch”.

however, since this feud has been going on for a while now, my care is beginning to wane. it’s become a fact of life that some people dislike me, for good reasons or bad. and i know that since i am willingly putting a piece of my life on the internet through my website or through my discussions on a message board, i will become the target of verbal abuse every now and then. and since i’m probably more sensitive than the average person (i.e., i take everything personally), i will get offended more often than those individuals who might be reading this and thinking, “whatever.”

when a feud starts from nothing, it will stop at nothing. so, i’m throwing this out into the world wide web to those individuals who know their part in this stupid, petty story: i give up. i give up because i can be a bitch and i can sometimes try to sound smart — to every extreme accusation, there must lie some truth i am unwilling to face. i give up because worrying about what bad things people might say about me online should never take away from all the good things people feel for me away from the computer. and, who knows, if we had met under different circumstances, we might have even become friends, as frightening as the idea sounds.