Eccentric Flower:201005/Love It Or Hate It

I have been thinking a lot today about my reputation for grumpiness. I can't claim that it is undeserved, but I think it's misunderstood.

I noted to someone that what I really need is a set of signals, to make it clear when 1) I'm griping about something just because I like griping, versus 2) when I'm griping about something because it really makes me angry/upset (far less often than most people think), or 3) when I am genuinely in a bad mental state and I need someone to reassure me and tell me everything's not coming apart at the seams (seldom, but I am going through a bout of it intermittently right now, so it's near to mind).

These three things don't look at all alike to me, so it continually surprises me that they look alike to other people.

Of course, as someone pointed out, "You admit that you like griping, but you're surprised that you have a reputation for grumpiness?" Well, not surprised, exactly, but a lot of my friends like griping. My wife has an infinite supply of righteous indignation and uses it constantly. I could name several of you reading this whom I consider to be big fans of bitching about various and sundry, but I won't embarrass you. Yet sometimes it feels to me like I'm the only person in my peer group who routinely catches hell about it.

Oh, mind you, the hell is seldom much more than mild teasing, and I don't mind being teased. What I do mind is when people profess that they're scared to meet me, or think that it would be unpleasant to be around me, because of my gripes. (Yes, this has happened. Many times, over the years, in fact.) I worry that there are people who think I walk around under a black cloud all the time, who think that my online demeanor reflects my real one, and it simply is not true.

It is true that I can be acerbic in person. It is also true that I am not a good talker, which is the main reason I am reluctant to make face-to-face contact even when I crave it. We've discussed before the enormous gap between my written and verbal expressiveness. I don't really like the way I stammer and repeat myself and tread on the tail of my own thoughts and run in circles when I'm speaking. I find it humiliating. (I also don't like my physical appearance, but that's a neurosis for another day.)

But grim? No. Nervous, ill at ease, yes. Sarcastic, perhaps. But depressing to talk to? I fervently hope not.

I'm aware that I'm not doing much to fend off this reputation, since I do tend to mostly post to gripe about things. On the other hand, I think that you (and this is a very broad you - it means "anyone who reads anything I have to say in any of the places I post regularly") are somewhat complicit. And I'll explain why.

There are many things I like, but I almost never talk about those. The problem is, when I talk about those, I get no impression that there is any purpose to spreading them, because they are almost always greeted with dead silence. I assume my enthusiasms are uninteresting except to one or two people who share them (and possibly not even then), because very seldom does anyone ever say, "Wow, that was an interesting link" or "Huh, I'd never heard about that before, thanks" or even "You obviously are very fond of this, but I disagree and here's why." Almost no positive sentiment I ever post spurs response, let alone reaction, let alone discussion.

This has been the rule from the beginning, back when the web had twenty people on it and we all knew each other by name. (I oversimplify, obviously ... but sometimes, reading my very old entries, it feels like that. And almost all those people are gone now.) Even when people had the time to reply to things other people wrote, the positive things seldom got much notice. I don't think this is just me; I think this is a general rule of the web. Share your enthusiasms and be met with silence.

(Mostly. I have gotten any number of good comments on things I've written positively about over the years. But viewed in proportion to the other sort of reaction I'm going to talk about in a moment, they look slim indeed. They're few enough that I remember most of them vividly, even when they happened ages ago.)

[Let's stop right now and spare you and me both some hate mail. I don't think this is anyone's fault. I don't think it represents any kind of lapse on your part, and I am not calling anyone out. Frankly, I do the same thing myself, on other people's work. I think it is either a comment on the nature of the web or the nature of people or both, and it is just an observation, calling it as I see it, and anyone who is getting their back up about it is reading it wrong. And it also doesn't mean I'm ungrateful for the good comments I HAVE gotten, nor does it mean that I'm hinting/pushing for more. It's just the way it is. OK? So if you were going to get your hackles up about that, stand down.]

There are, I will be the first to admit, far more things in the world which annoy me than please me. I see the world as a basically stupid place full of basically stupid people, where life among the alert and interesting people consists of continually sifting for precious stones in a pile of garbage, but most people are neither alert nor interesting.

If I spent all my days brooding over this, I would cop to being a person that no one would ever want to interact with. But I don't. Instead, what I do is constantly vent in minor ways about minor annoyances - very few of which I consider worth more effort than a passing dismissal. It's fun, it lets off steam, and it allows me to move on without the weight of these constant irritants holding me down.

If I wrote the Big List Of Things I Don't Like, it would have to be divided into three sections:

1. Things I Hate Very Hard And I Think Everyone Else Should Hate Too. (These are the "If I were queen of the universe ..." or "They must be cleansed by fire" items.)

2. Things I Don't Care For Enough That If You Do, I May Try To Tell You Why I Think You're Wrong, But Apart From That Try Not To Think About Too Much.

3. Things I Can't Work Up The Energy To Actively Hate Or Even Dislike, But When I Bother To Think About Them, They Annoy Or Baffle Me Or Both.

Although to truly make this list comprehensive I'd have to work on it over many months (because often I forget that something belongs on the list until it intrudes into my life), I believe that the set of things in category one would be quite small, less than five percent of the list; categories two and three would split the balance.

Unlike some of my friends, I have a finite budget of anger and indignation and hate. I have to spend it wisely. This means that, in practice, I try very hard not to worry about any of the things that really annoy me for too long, especially if they're things I can do nothing about (which they usually are). One group of people who belong in category one are salesmen, for example. I do not understand salesbeings of any stripe (including evangelists); I can't stand them or their tactics; the only reason I stop short of calling them actively evil is that I know a few who happen to be nice people in an evil profession. But yes, I do think the entire profession is evil, and I don't toss that term around loosely. If I were ruling the universe there would be no salespeople. If you wanted to buy something, you could go do the legwork yourself; no one would try to pitch it to you. You would find something only when you wanted it, and would not have it thrust into your face at any other time.

(And sales volumes would plummet, and what we consider the current standards of profit and manufacturing levels for Big Commerce would be science fiction, and the world would be an extremely different place, and a lot of companies would go broke because each new product would essentially be a gamble, and a lot of good ideas would never have gotten off the ground, and many of you would find it a much worse world to live in than the one we have now, but I'd be happy, because no one would ever try to sell me anything.)

And that's as far as I go on salesmen. I've made my speech (just as I've made it before and will surely make it again); I have noted my deep and lasting objections to their trade; and, having so noted once again, I'm done. Sure, I could get all up in a huff and stay red-faced and angry about it for the rest of the night or the rest of the week or the rest of the year, but it would do no one any good, least of all me, and it would use up far too much of my indignation budget.

And that's something that I realio, trulio despise with every fiber of my being!

Now imagine how quickly something I find mildly annoying passes in and out of my system.

I think I confuse people because I can get up a good rant on zero notice. I can give you two thousand words on how art lost its mind somewhere after the first world war and has only gotten crazier and more unsupportable since, about how Banksy and Fairey are vandals, not artists, and how Picasso was a fraud, so god alone knows what Creed and Hirst and whats-his-face-who-doesn't-even-make-his-own-art are, and so on and so forth, and it'll be a pretty readable, pretty entertaining, moderately well-reasoned rant. But it is nothing. It's empty venting, and once I blow it off, it's done and it will be out of my head until the next time one of these clowns makes the news and I do it again.

Oh, it's not insincere venting. I really do believe all those things when I say them; I may exaggerate for effect sometimes but I try never to misrepresent my actual views. But you shouldn't overestimate the effort I spend on such things, is my point.

Anyway, getting back to the issue of feedback and how you folks are complicit in my griping: The fact is, when I post something positive, I am met with mostly silence, but when I post something negative, people line up to disagree with me. And disagreement, to me, is conversation. Obviously it might be more pleasant to have a conversation about good things than a conversation about bad things - obviously it would be nice to have a conversation once in a while where someone is on my side - but if it's a choice between a basically adversarial conversation and dead silence, I'll take the conversation! No contest.

So, in summation, not only is griping useful to me as a casual, passing method of slipping past the thousand daily annoyances of the world, but it also may have the fringe benefit - the psychological bonus - of getting someone to talk back at me. And if anything has become clear, it's that I urgently crave for people to talk back at me, more so since I have all sorts of obstacles - some physical, some mental - to actually having conversations with many of you in person.