“Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time” ~ Dave Van Ronk

Introspective post warning. Continue at your own risk.

I do not have the respect for honesty that most people do, in a common, every-day sense. I believe there are times (many of them social niceties) where lying is not only a kindness, but a necessity. Measures of self-deception are called for in ourselves to deal with hard times and to come to terms with some of life’s complications. The same is often the case when helping others. It’s tricky, of course, as all nuanced aspects of life are. Knowing when you’re lying for someone else or when you’re lying for yourself; knowing when you’re lying for good intentions as opposed to simple convenience; knowing when your lies are a bridge and when they are a crutch — these are all concepts that can give us mental vertigo and some of us wrestle with them all our lives.

However, there are also times when wielding the “truth” is done recklessly — when facts and hyperbole are used to cloud a narrative rather than clarify it. This has always been a tightrope walk for journalism and writers of non-fiction. It’s one of the main reasons that integrity and reputation are so important when dealing with someone in the position of journalist. A reporter’s responsibility is to relay facts in context with as little editorial as possible. A critic’s job, in contrast, is to deliver an honest, well-defended opinion. Anything different is pandering either to subject matter or reader-base or one’s own ego.

If living in America has made anything brutally clear in the last decade, it’s that facts presented out of context or opinions delivered with a pandering agenda aren’t just distasteful, but also damaging. Championing such acts (whether out of ignorance or lulz) breeds a destructive sort of emotional vandalism that doesn’t wash away easy. The result is that honesty begins to have no distinction against pap and fact begins to have less importance than frenzy.

In the real world we see more and more the pushing of ridiculous narrative in effort to avoid hard work. We know that a 17 year old girl sending a topless photo of herself to her boyfriend on her iPhone isn’t distributing child porn. We know that a hippie grandmother growing pot in her basement to offset chemo nausea isn’t drug dealing. We know, but too often we allow our legal and political systems to further untruths in the name of convenience. It’s easy to catch a teenager and a hippie grandmother. The result is that resources which might have otherwise gone to finding and convicting actual producers of child porn or actual harmful drug distributors are squandered, and the individuals who pushed the agenda are free to push to ever more precarious edges. And those edges reach toward a place where justice has no meaning and can have no authority. The actual gray areas, which are crucial for us to explore that we may better understand the world and ourselves, disappear in order to establish a nursery school palette of primary colors to classify everything as simply as possible; giving us a paint by number ruberick that any idiot can follow. So we don’t have to go to the trouble to explain or, god forbid, think. So we can fall back on outrage when anything makes us uncomfortable and forget about all that tiresome critical thinking. It’s the thread that, once pulled, unravels the whole sweater.

The virtual world is just as tainted by this human game as the concrete-and-sky world. Humans, being the constant, import their vices along with their virtues. Sitting behind the mask of an avatar often lends the distance necessary to unburden ourselves and be truthful, but that same distance also gives us the length of rope with which to be truly vile and hang one another. And that vileness breeds itself, convinces itself it has both nobility and purpose.

Combating this invasive species of sophism isn’t just the responsibility for writers of important subject matter. In the beginning I felt that blogging about make believe clothes meant that I could take a pass on caring about hypocrites and liars. I wanted to just maintain my own standards and not engage because with attention-seeking glowworms, to address them is their own sort of victory. But as I’ve blogged virtual consumerism in Second Life and watched the community develop around it, my feelings have shifted. The silence and indifference of people who would maintain standards is just as destructive as those who prance around advocating drama for its own sake.

So I’ve decided a few things are non-negotiable. Honesty matters. Integrity matters. Ethics are not flexible. Even in the world of make-believe clothes. This is not to say that I won’t color outside the lines from time to time — I simply have to push myself to acknowledge when I do, if for no other reason than to demarcate the point where I crossed over and will cross back. No one can maintain an ideal all the time, but we can endeavor to know what the ideal is, to adhere to it when we can, and acknowledge (winking, smiling, crying or on our knees as the individual case may dictate) when we fall short.

I can do that. When all is said and done, it’s just not that hard.

Manifestos about who does and doesn’t belong in a place are meaningless. Venting without purpose is vanity. Building a reputation on unresearched, out-of-context facts, and outright lies you go back and edit out later is cheap. And every time a person that knows the difference makes excuses for or turns a blind, exhausted eye upon these practices, the good things, the fun things, and those elements of the world that are worth a good fight, disappear under a groupthink veil of mendacity.

Simple translation: sometimes you gotta clap to bring Tink back to life or the whole damn play just stalls.

I want to enjoy my SL. I want to still have fun writing about silly make-believe frippery. I want to offer honest, well-defended opinions about unnecessary things without wading through the circus that seems to have formed around the community. I don’t get to make the world and no amount of wishing will change that, but I can change how I interact with the world. In that sense the world really can be what I want to make of it.

The past few weeks have afforded me a painful, but valuable perspective and clarity:
1. But for a handful of people in the world, I don’t have to give a fig about what anyone else thinks;
2. Quality begets quality and good work will attract attention and readership for the right reasons;
3. The only real power we have to change what frustrates us is to refuse it entry into ourselves;
4. Approval and applause are meaningless.

I don’t know that this internal change will have any noticeable effect on my subject matter or writing style. I do know it already makes me feel a little more free and a little less heart-heavy.

That can only be a good thing.

“You don’t have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won’t hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.” ~ Elizabeth Bibesco

It’s not as though bad journalism is surprising enough to raise an eyebrow toward these days, but there are times when certain articles drive a spike into the limits of patience and good taste. As such, the piece “America’s Tweethearts” by Vanessa Grigoriadis (contributing editor of Vanity Fair) managed to offend me on so many levels that I actually had to blog about it, even after a good night’s sleep.

I became aware of the article via Felicia Day’s twitter feed (I follow Felicia for a few reasons, mostly involving her creative enterprises). In the process of rushing out the door, FD took a passing glance at the article she’d been asked to participate in and made the sort of mistake many of us would be guilty of — she saw she was in focus and photographed well amongst her peers and assumed the content below the photo was equal in sophistication. She then tweeted a link and went about the day. It was some time later when she found out how painfully egregious the article was and managed to sum up her own feelings in a blog post.

Her dismay is understandable; Grigoriadis’ article manages to offend on so many levels. For myself, I find it ridiculously offensive across the board: as a modern feminist, an internet-age geek, a writer, and a person who uses interactive social media. In short, there is so much to loathe about the piece, it’s hard to know what to start with. I suppose we’ll just go down the list.

Backbiting masqueraded as intellectualism and feminism.

If you looked at Grigoriadis’ profile page on vanityfair.com, you’d conclude that she was a young woman with some understanding of how traits like appearance and attitude can contribute toward being successful. You might, for example, note that she doesn’t have any problem wearing a light blouse that takes a naughty v dip down into the cleavage area. Her long hair is nicely styled, her face punctuated by a decent (if heavy-on-the-blush) make-up job. The photo she chooses to place beside her list of credentials would indicate that she knows a nuanced acceptance of how attractiveness and sexuality can lend an edge in competitive media. You wouldn’t expect her to have that sort of photo and then paint other women as lipstick feminists. Because that would make her, you know, a hypocrite (and how can anyone with those apple cheeks be a hypocrite?).

Yet, in the article Grigoriadis takes so many pot shots at the attractiveness and gregariousness of her subjects that it comes off with robust pettiness. Let’s look at the most glaring quote from the article in this voice:

It so happens that they are nice girls—the Internet’s equivalent of a telephone chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders—and it’s all free. Any tweep who wants to talk to them will likely get a reply to his tweets (“u r so funny!”).

Setting aside the fact that I personally don’t see anything wrong with a chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders, likening successful, established, technology-pioneering young women to such stereotype is deeply disingenuous. The language here is sinister and icky both above and below the surface. The use of “girls” to set tone, the anything but subtle use of chatspeak to imply a lack of intelligence, the use of creep “tweep” and “his tweets” to characterize the only people being interacted with as trolling male leisure suit larrys trying to get their tweet on with these oh-so-accommodating “girls.” It’s all a fluffy way of saying “whore.” Apparently, this is because the women in question are polite, engaging, interactive, attractive and nice. It makes you wonder which of those qualities could trigger such insecurity in the writer. You can also bet your bobby socks that had the profiled women been less than attractive that would have been held against them as well.

It’s not at though women backstabbing other women is a new concept, and it’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen this inflated sense of “I’m more feminist than you because you’re pretty and nice” in the wielding of the knife. What is confusing about this example is that if the writer is going to call another woman (or group of women) tarty, you’d think she’d have the brain cells to replace her own tarty profile photo with something that would lend her something touching credibility. It’s difficult to take her seriously about these so-called extroverted twitterers being bubble-headed “cheerleaders” simply because they’re nice and pretty when the author herself is practically wagging her own pom poms in her own photo. I mean, honestly, if you’re going to be a superior bitch on the feminist ladder, then be a bitch with some consistency. Otherwise you risk looking like an opportunistic whore trying to score some cheap readership points by taking pot shots at other women. Oh. Wait.

Interwebs people are stupid and will ruin your relationships and infect you, even though they’re not real.

The fear of social media demonstrated in this article makes you want to hand Grigoriasdis a rape doll and ask her to show you where the mean technology touched her. Her tone takes on an edge of ludditism that could only be reserved for someone writing to please those terrified by the imminent death of traditional media like *cough* print magazines *cough*. What 1950’s health video cliches does Grigoriasdis fall back on for her article?

A. The internets will make you stupid. Sure we all cringe a little at chatspeak, but she uses more of it in her article than I can recall seeing in any of my twitterfeeds over the last several months. The implication, of course, is that we internet peoples aren’t so good with that English-speakin’ stuff (including those of us who majored in it, one presumes). I’d love to put Grigoriadis in a room with a someone like Stephen Fry and ask her to defend the attitude that Twitter is comprised of “…a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver” which she later likens to the language skills of Laguna High freshmen. The notion that otherwise literate people might simply take easy or innovative shortcuts to accommodate the limits of a new fast-paced medium completely eludes her. One has to wonder if Grigoriasdis has ever had to use a post-it note and if she adheres to perfect Blue Book grammar and punctuation when doing so. Of course, the fear of Twitter is completely justified and something to fear because as we all know, internet technology is going to render us all illegitimate illiterate and eat up all the books until the only thing left of the written word is a handful of Cliff’s Notes and Sarah Palin’s biography. Look, I don’t like the fact that the liner notes to Purple Rain have become a legitimate form of communication either, but unabridged Shakespeare is available freely on the web for those who want to read it. They sky isn’t falling, it’s just easier to reach.

B. Geek is the new gay and the interwebs will turn you interwebish. For this, Grigoriasdis not only falls back on how technology will ruin your relationship:

Real-world friends, and even spouses, can be left in the cold. Michaels’s [sic] husband, a real-estate appraiser with horn-rims and a crew cut—a “normy”—calls himself “the Twidower.” “My wife found Twitter and dropped me,” he says. “I basically lost my wife.” Then he sighs. “Sometimes, during dinner, it gets to be too much.”

Of course the husband was completely serious, I’m sure. Note the use of “he says” instead of “he jokes.” Sometimes leaving out certain things is just as sinister as adding others.

Grigoriasdis also goes that extra step and infers that using Twitter will turn you…Twittery. When describing Julia Roy as “New York social strategist turned twilebrity” the message is clear: you can’t possibly be both popular in a social media platform and accomplished in business. Forget that Joy is currently Senior Manager of New Media at her current employer, she’s popular on Twitter and should be considered infected with something Grigoriasdis would put in quotes and refer to as “twaids” or, maybe, “twyphilis.”

C. Internet people are not real people. Those of us who have been on the web for any length of time are familiar with the soap-opera antics that can happen on the internet (or, at least become the thing of internet urban legend). We all know someone with a story about that girl who turned out to be a guy, or the one who pretended to be dead/raped/robbed/abducted by aliens, or the romance that ended in tragedy when the real-life spouses found out about “cybercheating.” All of these are used as examples of how nothing and no one on the internet can ever be taken as legitimate. Forget the fact that you could point to a million people on Jerry Springer or Judge Judy and simply note that some human beings are prone to bad behavior and drama no matter their location. Anonymity on the internet is different than anonymity at some huge frat party in college or that bar where people stop over when traveling on business. Anonymity on the internet defines the reality of the internet, or, rather, the lack of reality of the internet. Grigoriasdis reminds us of this when she makes sure to note that attention and celebrity gained from social media is not “real fame…but a special, new category of fame” of consequence only to the other 55 million make-believe users who spend their days in a “digital rumpus room.” And, just in case you didn’t understand that, she makes sure to drive the point home two paragraphs later when she explains how “…Twitter uses simple technology, it’s a utilitarian vehicle for ambitious extroverts, without any previous distinction, to become digital superstars.” Those she profiles that had “no previous distinction” include (by her own reporting) a new media actress/writer/director, the aforementioned New York social strategist, a travel writer, a publicist, and a marketing executive whose clients include high profile athletes like Shaquille O’Neal. I guess those careers and accomplishments lack the distinction of being a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and are, thus, disposable footnotes of mere chatline cheerleaders.

Bad Writing

While most of the above examples can be explained away as a writer who is simply content to sell out other women or score some petty points against an emerging medium that obviously intimidates her, the sloppy journalism and bad writing in the article cannot be excused as mere lack of self awareness. If the distinctions on Grigoriasdis’ profile page are to be taken at their word then this was just a lazy effort at a topic she didn’t want to try and communicate with or about.

You cannot ignore how she uses ridiculous jargon placed in quotation marks — reminiscent of the way 90’s local news stations would put “cyber” in front of everything to make it sound gimmicky. To see this kind of tactic still being employed in 2010 would be amusing if Grigoriasdis didn’t take herself so seriously and new media so lightly. The buffoonery ranges from the usual ridiculous terms that no one uses (Twitter users do not call each other “tweeple” because we are not pod people and do not put “tw” before ordinary words in some effort to take over the world with new and improved forms of pig Latin) to phrases that would only require quotation marks if you had no understanding of social media norms (the use of “real-time Web” as though the term were some odd new concept coined just for her little article).

I would have to say, however, that it’s the lack of any hint of consistency that makes this article utter tosh and its author appear intellectually dishonest. On one hand, she acknowledges that Twitter has 55 million users, but then the tone she takes is more like someone skimming the surface of a creepy subculture novelty. She notes her subjects’ impressive careers and then dismisses them in lieu of calling them fake celebrities and likening them to chat line cheerleaders. She lists a handful of distinguished high profile users, but then cannot resist snarking about how most of them likely use ghost-tweeters and proxies (it’s not like any of them would ever use assistants when setting up relations with other varieties of media outlets). She tosses out positives to create the illusion of balance such as the article’s opening line:

Whether you consider Twitter a worldwide experiment in extreme narcissism or a nifty tool for real-time reporting—a plane ditches in the Hudson, millions take to the streets in Tehran—it may not yet have dawned on your text-saturated brain that it’s also a path to becoming famous.

But anyone with even a passing sense of reading comprehension can see where the slant tilts heaviest. Not that you’d expect objective journalism from Vanity Fair, but you like to hope the snark will have some intellectual honesty or even a hint of wit. Instead, we’re simply left to hope that Grigoriadis doesn’t quit her day job.

Oh. Wait.

“Friendship is essentially a partnership.” ~ Aristotle

I’m not addressing the new SL web interface yet because I can’t decide if it sucks as much as I think, or I’m just opposed to change in general. Both are possible. So, let’s table that for a day when I’m in the mood for a more fair-minded look at it.

A common question I’ve gotten from my friends over the last year is why I haven’t unpartnered with Sabrina in SL. The answer is unexpectedly complicated. While I do miss the redhead’s presence in my life, I’m not in any sort of denial that she’s moved on from virtual knickers and escaped back to that reality place I keep hearing about where she blogs about shiny Irish things with her usual snark and delight.

There are all kinds of friendships, and Sabrina’s and mine is best when we are working on something together, pushing each other to do better, exhausting each other with debates about ethics and standards and complaining about why we don’t have the goddess-like powers over others that we so richly deserve. Our current status is in flux which is not uncommon for people who are long distances apart and who maintain relationships that ebb in and out of sync. I do not really doubt that we will tangle up later down the road any more than I doubted we would fall out of line. Of the people in my life I speak to everyday or near-everyday on the phone, Sabrina was never one of them. We are good in text, at a certain pace, and when we align on projects. Otherwise, we’re “at a distance” people and we know this about one another.

When we partnered in SL lo those many years ago, it was for a single reason — to keep from being hit on by wankers with epeens for brains. At the time, we discussed and toyed with the idea of having an SL wedding for blogging purposes — to research and examine the wedding industry in SL. I think we got as far as cake shopping and holding one meeting with a woman who did prim “animated invitations” before we both realized we’d honestly rather buy off the rack at JC Penny, die, and be forced to wear that day’s shopping through all eternity.

Mocking SL partnership was a gag for us, but it stopped being funny when we realized how seriously others took it. I try with all my vanity-soaked heart not to look down on the fun and interactions of others, even if the whole make-believe wedding and baby industry in SL makes me cringe. I do, however, appreciate that for those who cannot marry the person they love IRL or have a child, being able to engage with the idea on a virtual level is something that might register as meaningful. That is their choice and should be, at least on some level, respected (so long as they do not wear a talking fetus in my chat range).

Their virtual experiences should especially be respected by the platform that pimps itself as the land of of dreams imagination.

There is something — I must admit — to the formality with which LL addresses this textual tether. The fact that it’s even a feature means it registered as a meaningful concept for someone. As much as I mock it, every time I try to change my partner status something quirky and unexpectedly sentimental simply refuses to let me. Sabrina’s avatar no longer appears in the SL database (do NOT get me started) and her SIM is long since offline. Except for that spot on my profile and the occasional items in my inventory where the wench’s name appears as creator, she’s mostly grid-gone.

Today, however, I toyed with the idea of going partner commando again, only to be greeted by the following:

A fee? To unpartner? Seriously? Has this always been the case? I laughed out loud and then felt surprisingly sick.

This strikes me as fundamentally tacky on LL’s part. I can understand and even get behind a fee to partner. In fact, I’m not sure what the fee is, but I’d probably support increasing it by a bunch. Charging someone a fee to unpartner, though, is ten degrees of gross all over.

One of the things about platforms of online immersion is the bonds that form between individuals. Sure, SL partnering is a joke to me, but there are those for whom it’s a meaningful statement. While I’m sure the vast majority of people who partner and unpartner on a regular basis are just relationship flakes, I’m willing to bet quite a few of those who partner are not. To have to deal with the destruction of a relationship carries its own price, I don’t think there’s any merit to attaching a fee to the reminder.

Imagine, for just a moment, that you have an SL partnership and the person dies, or you have a bitter break-up, or any one of the million things happens that pull people apart. The bookkeeping of breaking up digitally can be just as annoying as it is RL. Sure, you don’t have to sort who owns what CDs and books, but I know people who’ve stopped using social networking sites, switched game servers, abandoned forums in the “you stay on your half of the internet, I’ll stay on mine” sort of attitude that can result when people break up on the interwebs. All of that is ignoring the actual emotional toll that is ferried by the very human feelings we can have for people who do not necessarily sit beside us, but who are part of the mosaic of our digital lives.

No matter the circumstances, odds are when you get to the “I wish to unpartner” phase, you’re not going to be in the best of moods. It’s something you’d like to get done quickly and cleanly. And, Linden Labs, in what must be either an insipid lack of empathy or a very tiny streak of moronic avarice charges L$25 for the pain and bitterness of residents going through this motion. How tacky is that?

Guys, if you want to discourage people from abusing the system then double the cost of partnering and get rid of the break-up penalty fee. It’s too disgusting. Does the partnering system even use up enough resources to justify a fee? You don’t charge us for removing someone from our friends list and that has to be at least as equally taxing on the system.

Give the scarecrow a brain, the tin man a heart, and smack whoever is wanking off behind the curtain when they’re supposed to have the thinking cap on. Oy. Frickin’. Vey.

“When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.” ~ David Brin

A while ago a well-intentioned friend was caught up in an argument with a person who had once been an acquaintance of mine. I’d had a falling out with the second party who had taken to referring to me in colorful phrases like “the most hated person in all SL.” While I found this amusing, my friend (who is one of those tender-hearted folk) felt some need to debate my merits. In the course of the conversation, the once-acquaintance said words to the effect of: “We don’t know anything about her, everything she says is suspect.”

While I got a healthy chuckle at the notion of being the most hated person in SL (I can’t imagine I even make the top ten), the second point is something that always bothered me. I had a pretty high profile blog in SL terms, I had been on speaking terms at one time or another, with many of the people who consider themselves the movers and shakers of SL society. As SL went, I was more known than not known, and found myself desiring to be less known as the days went by.

“We don’t know anything about her,” hardly seems congruent with the concept of being the most hated anything. Yet, that double-standard is common (and seems to be growing more common) in many of the people I encounter in virtual existences.

What this person was implying, of course, was that because I don’t put my personal information front and center, I lack credibility. But, why should that be? Because I keep my private life private and my RL identity as far as possible from my virtual identity, this somehow brings everything about Salome into question? This “she’s hiding, she can’t be trusted” mentality is most common, incidentally, in people I can’t stand.

The irony, of course, is that I don’t hide my RL identity from anyone that matters to me. There are quite a few friends in SL who have my name, phone number, mailing address, etc. They know details of my life, my work history, my family, pets, and personal relationships. They know, not because they deserve to know, or because I’m obligated to give them that information, but simply because I’ve chosen to let them in.

Our relationships are what we communicate to one another. If you are a person comfortable with physical interaction, you communicate better sitting across a table from your mates. I do not. I communicate better at a distance. I need space and quiet and solitude. And I need a lot of it. Space and solitude allows me to shed the impatience, irritations, and false sense of “needing to please” that comes with being face to face. I am a better friend the further away I am. My worst moments in life all stemmed from trying to be the type of social creature I was never intended to be. My belief system thus developed (in part) from the hard-earned wisdoms that come to us with growing older and learning that you cannot be true to anyone else without first being true to yourself. Put simply: when I meet my own emotional needs, I am better at meeting the emotional needs of others.

Nothing about my RL makes Salome any more or less credible. My reputation, for better or worse, is what I earn under any name. I’m not applying for a loan, I’m not interviewing for a job, I’m not selling shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. I blog about make-believe clothes and virtual living. I owe no one anything beyond my words and the name I chose to write them under. Anyone who feels owed something more than that is someone I tend to find I don’t need in my life.

Part of the reason I loathe the entire facebook/myspace movement is because they have devalued privacy for an entire generation. Attention is now currency, and personal privacy merely a casualty of the “look at me, pay attention to me” war. It has reached the point where those types (and it’s always the same types) who clamor for attention all over the place go beyond discarding their own rights of privacy. They now feel obligated to the information of others. The act of being private equates to something suspect in their minds. I consider this to be a terrifying reality that will need to be faced down by right to privacy crusaders in the courtrooms of future generations. I’m also well aware that most of the people that I see as dangerous in this respect would find my values to be outdated and embarrassingly silly.

They have a point. I am a throwback. I do not come from “open book” people. I grew up in a house where I had the right, even as a young child, to close and lock my door if I so wished; I didn’t dare enter anyone else’s room without knocking and being granted permission first. I was raised with the understanding that asking people personal questions was rude - you waited for others to share if they chose, and you were free to share if you chose. I was taught to respect the fact that we all have bad days, dark moments in our histories, and times when life can treat us unkindly. Moreover, I was taught that some people simply require more peace and quiet than others. Far from stuffy, I’ve always considered my formative years to be rather liberal and empowering. My imagination, my ability to love and communicate, my sense of humor — none of those things were stifled by the lessons on virtues of privacy and dignity.

I often wonder if this gratification via exposure hinders creativity in the general population. It certainly seems to take a toll on the logic center of their brains. With so much energy spent grandstanding and keeping in constant touch with the hum, is there any need to distinguish one’s self with, you know, merit? All this interfacing more often than not stops at the most shallow level possible. The insipid back-and-forth of valueless topics, the frivolous drama — it all takes a toll. For some of us, it takes too much of a toll. In order to deal with those people who seem to be in constant need of attention, buzzing about like happy hummingbirds, pushing their feelings and their thoughts and their agendas toward us, some of us need more than just occasional solitude. Some of us need to detox from society in general. And those of us who are not hummingbirds do not owe our bustling cousins anything.

So if you are one of those people who feels that you’re owed someone else’s personal information, or that you have a right to demand someone’s time, or that you deserve an explanation beyond anything that’s been offered to you, allow me to lay out some information that your parents should have imparted:

1. You’re entitled to no part of another person that isn’t offered to you freely;
2. When someone needs space, unless you are in a life partnership with them or writing their prescriptions they don’t need your permission to take a sabbatical;
3. If you don’t understand 1 & 2, repeat them over and over until you get the fuck over yourself and it sinks in.

“The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.” ~ Tennessee Williams

Dear Sir or Madam:

Get your fingers out of our pies. Then: Group Chat. Fix it. Now.

Sincerely,

Salome Strangelove