A short time after my previous entry, I realized that I can’t keep reading those mailing lists and restraining myself from posting, so I unsubscribed. First time in over 6 years that I haven’t been on some of those lists. Since these lists produce a couple of hundred emails a day, this is a huge decrease in volume for me.
All evening I kept picking up my computer to check my email as I am wont to do, only to find there was none. This is just too weird.
So now it’s 3:30 in the morning. I’ve been sleeping fitfully all night, and finally gave up and came out to the living room to read some mail and news, and of course there hardly is any email. I’m sure that at least some of the problem I’m having sleeping is due to anxiety over not being connected to these people any more.
I’d say it’s like the anxiety you’d get from being disconnected from or fighting with your family, but I’ve never been that close to my family, so what do I know?
Damn, man. Of course, I know what you mean. I think when any group gets large enough, every good-natured ribbing is usually done 3-4x more than necessary, so even mild, silly teases automagically become annoying and meaner than any one person intends.
If you disabled delivery before folks jibed at me about misreading PhilE’s joke earlier, I was put off by that today, too. It’s hard to remember that each person is teasing independent of the others, and a single tease would have been fine, only that with the group, you get three or four single jokes at your expense instead of the one. Anyway, it put me in a bad mood today.
I’ve tried to adopt a policy of not making a joke at someone’s expense without reading through everything, to make sure I’m not just piling on. If no one made a similar joke, I might make it, if it’s not too stale already.
So I hear the lament, brother. Come on back when it suits.
I was going to say something about how people speak up when they’ve got something snarky to say, but not when they just want to appreciate what someone else has written. But of course that’s wrong, because just yesterday you yourself wrote a gracious, thoughtful note to one of the lists we share, expressing your appreciation for someone else’s post. Which, of course, makes it doubly unfortunate that more of us haven’t been doing that more often.
Like Harry says, a lot of the teasing is meant good-naturedly. It’s just that we’re, as a group, mostly pretty socially inept and not all that good at picking up cues — even when “cues” is defined to mean “repeated explicit requests.” It’s also that when someone “corrects” something one thought was clear, one wonders if maybe one *wasn’t* clear, and it’s easier and more comfortable to make a joke — even at someone else’s expense — than to deal with one’s own discomfort in a more honest way.
For myself, and the rest of us, sorry.
Don’t stay away too long Paul! We’ll miss you…