“There are places I’ll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain”
~ John & Paul

Salome’s Ode To Gaming Friendships and Virtual Places – Take 1

Having decided to give up on WOW and been through the detox phase with very little pang, it occurs to me that the only thing I’m really going to miss is a handful of friends — two in particular (it would be three, but I’m disqualifying one because she’s been stuck with me since high school and her friendship is not WOW-centered). My memories of these two people are heavily tinted in WOW-filtered colors. I’ll explore one later in a small rant on why I’m anti-guild. For now, I’ll focus on my “WOW best friend.”

People who do not spend a lot of time in virtuality tend to roll their eyes at the notion of friendships that develop based on a format, gaming or otherwise. The idea of a forum friend or gaming friend is less legitimate in their eyes. But, it’s really no different than a friendship that develops over shared work or living spaces. The chemistry of such friendships is always the same, physical or virtual. And, even the strongest of those friendships strain when the format is taken out of the equation. When leaving a job, for example, there are always promises to keep in touch, and often we do, but generally, we don’t. Even under the best circumstances, with effort on both sides, the relationship moves into an at-fingertips arrangement where lunches and meetings have to be scheduled and maintained; that casual familiarity of the everyday joke or encounter is removed. This is true with friends in virtual environments as well.

The randomness of how such people come into our lives, and the places that mark the important events in those relationships are just 1′s and 0′s lurking on a server somewhere. On some level we know that. But then randomness of how your dorm or cubicle mates get assigned are no less random. And a “home” is more than just stucco and cinder blocks with tar paper on top; the materials of construction do not equal “home.” Some would argue that houses and office buildings are more “real” because they are permanent, while virtual places can be destroyed in a few minutes. But anyone who has been through a natural disaster understands the foolishness of attaching permanency to physical objects as a measure of their value. Most things in life can be gone in the blink of an eye under certain circumstances. The concept that they could be lost, worn out, destroyed is what makes them all the more precious. A house can be set ablaze or foreclosed; a server can be wiped. Experience and memory are the real currency of how we assign value to the places that take up real estate in our emotional ether.

Everything beyond that is just paperwork and security measures.

The First Time I Saw Dun Modr

So, I was working up my first WOW character (human priest, of course) and even though I was in a guild, I was generally off by myself (later entry on guilds, I promise). As was my wont, I was leveling in an area about 2-5 levels higher than I should have been — my best guess is that I was between 25-27. WOW was new and shiny, I was coasting on newbie immersion and eager to see as much content as possible. I have no idea how I got to Menethil Harbor. Truthfully, everything from Fargodeep Mine to the Wetlands is a blur.

Dun Modr (Wait, Where Am I?)

At any rate, while dodging bluegill murlocs, black ooze, and mosshide gnoll-thingies I turned north up a road, entered Dun Modr and accepted The Dark Iron War quest which innocently ordered me to kill some evil dwarves. Sure, no problem.

Dark Iron War - How Hard Can This Be?

An hour (and multiple corpse runs later) I was making frequent use of four-letter words and considering giving up. The innocuous looking encampment is (or, at least, was) a devil of a place for level-appropriate characters. It’s packed tight, aggro ranges are wide and most of the mobs are linked in pulls of 2 or 3 so you can’t patiently single-kill your way through (the mid-to-low-level priest’s bread and butter method). I was getting my priest ass splattered all over the place. And I was getting grumpy in that “why am I paying money to bash my head into make believe walls” way.

I was about to die — again — when, from out of nowhere, there was a dwarf warrior beside me, tossing a group invite, which I hastily accepted. Sure, the stumpy little guy was a level below me and named after a Forgotten Realms sword, but he was warrior DPS and he killed the bad, bad dwarves that were chewing me up like it was free.

For those of you that don’t play WOW, a warrior-priest leveling team is (or, at least, was) better than peanut butter and jelly sammiches. Warriors wear a lot of armor, suck damage down like water and hold aggro (the algorithms that are used to determine which player a “monster” attacks) so a robe-wearing priest like moi can stand back and toss out heals at my leisure. With Aegis, we had 80% of the quest done in minutes. All we needed were the pesky Dark Iron Demolitionists. As it turned out, the five demolitionists were, however, a particular flavor of bitch. They were entrenched inside the tight-packed barracks buildings and there were only a scattering of them amid all the other mobs. To make matters more frustrating, they stood back and lobbed high-damage explosives while letting their little army of friends hack at you. It didn’t help that Aegis and I were under-leveled for the quest.

More four-letter words and corpse runs, only this time with a stumpy little dwarf in mail armor ghosting beside me.

Refusing to be defeated, we found a demolitionist in one of the barracks that was less populated and opted to wait out respawns and kill him over and over. We cleared all the mobs down to the bottom level where we found a handy little alcove to sit and wait for respawn so we could kill them one at a time as they reappeared. I don’t remember how long it took. Long enough for us to rattle off conversation tidbits with enough sarcasm and personal exchange to realize we enjoyed the company. We’d also exhausted all the /flirt and /joke options for our races. One of them for the human female was (I kid you not) “I need a hero” and one of which for the dwarf male was “I like my beer like I like my women: stout and bitter.” These sound bites would later become in-jokes between us.

By the time we finished The Dark Iron War and a handful of other nearby quests, we’d made friends, added one another to friends’ lists, yadda yadda. I sent him some potions. We suffered the abject horror that was completing Stranglethorn Vale (the WOW camaraderie equal of doing a tour in ‘Nam together). He left his crappy guild for my crappy guild and we alienated the other members together. Years of friendship followed and continue.

Whenever one of us would work up an alt, we’d always call or IM the other when it was time to do Dun Modr. “I need a hero” and “hey, short and bitter, get over here” were used in tells from server to server and faction to faction. Just so we could stand in the aforementioned alcove and jump up and down a few times while tossing /joke and /flirt emotes back and forth.

I cannot tell you how the poor fellow suffered. He leveled with me possessed of a patience that would make saints stand there and say “How the fuck does he do that?” He had to deal with things like:

1. I am a compulsive harvester and I will aggro an entire zone of mobs just to get that flower over there which I don’t even really need. He still has nightmares about killing packs of bats in Eastern Plaguelands because I saw a Plaguebloom node or two.
2. I cannot make two targeted jumps in succession with the WOW interface. (A fact that became painfully clear when we ran Blackfathom Deeps a few days later. He waited patiently while I fell, swam back, fell, swam back, fell… all the while ignoring the bitching and moaning of the other people we were grouped with.) You remember that early part of Tomb Raider 1 where you have to do the running jumps from pillar to pillar over the gator-infested water, timing it to miss the flames that shoot up? That took me DAYS.
3. He had to double back to get me when I inevitably got lost in anything remotely resembling a cave (actually, he learned to never run out of my sight so he didn’t have to waste time doubling back).
4. When we were using the “avoid Mazthoril cave” exploit to turn in for our Drakefire Amulets and he made it on the first try, he sat there and waited and waited and waited while I fell and retried and fell and retried and fell and healed and then remounted and retried.
5. Every time we had to run UBRS or LBRS, he went to get a drink while I missed the jump onto the frakkin’ balcony twenty times and ran back up the stupid rock into the alcove and…fell (I still maintain it’s just too damn dark in there to see the jump).

He never raised his voice. He never got all condescending and hissed and talked to me like an idiot. He knew that just because I couldn’t judge a jump didn’t mean I was stupid and it didn’t mean I couldn’t play my class. It just meant I sucked at jumping. Although on the screen it makes you look and feel like an idiot. A really, really lot.

In all fairness, he did get to mow down every mob without ever having to pause. And he knew that if I lost every other member of a party or died myself, he was likely going to be standing when the smoke cleared (my rule: when things get ugly, the tank lives, everyone else can wait for rez, corpse run, and/or suck it). This was back when priests were useful and hadn’t been busted down to second-class healers. Plus, while we were leveling he was fury. So we pretty much owned anything that looked at us funny, even when they were a few levels above us.

Aegis is one of those people who’s just instinctively good at gaming. He doesn’t have to learn it or work it like I do. He sees something once and knows how to do it forever. He knows where to go, what order to kill, where to stand, and what to ignore. He’s also evil and speaks my brand of sarcasm. When people would ask me why I so “shy” and didn’t get involved in guild events, I’d answer “I’m not shy, I just hate most people.” He was the only one in vent that knew I wasn’t kidding. He wasn’t a whiny little kid who thought his name was tattooed on my ass just because we gamed together and when someone was a dick about something he didn’t play the old boy’s club “let me take care of this” card. He just sat back quietly and let me demo the jerk if I wanted to. Occasionally he might toss out a “Dude, I really wouldn’t say that to her…” warning, but that was more for the protection of the noob trying to flex nuts at me.

I can honestly say that the biggest thing I’m going to miss about WOW, without question, is the realization that I’ll never again get a random tell that says “hey – short and bitter – get over here and help me with Dun Modr.” I even had to apply my lame video capture skills before I canceled my account so that I could go and nab a shot of the infamous alcove (after helping a random noob complete their quest).

When I cleaned out my bank vaults, one of the handful of things that I couldn’t bring myself to vendor was a stack of six Crimson Lotus — items that would show up randomly in my mail whenever he had a quest in Alterac Mountains or Desolace and one dropped. Why? Because no one thought much about them, you couldn’t buy them, and other than the token gesture between us they were worthless to the naked eye. Just like the places and experiences that people in virtual environments trade every day.

Crimson Lotus

And when you find a friend who gets that and knows how to express it, that’s the kind of thing you’re gonna miss. Just like a badly textured alcove made up of 1s and 0s.

“I hate Thunder Bluff! You can’t find a good burger anywhere.” ~ Blood Elf Female, World of Warcraft

I’m leaving WOW.

This may sound like a frivolous statement because people say these things all the time (and because it’s a game, so who cares, right?). They announce grand departures on forums. They rage and quit guilds on the spot. They declare the things they’re giving up in moments of empowerment and then go slinking back when the buzz wears off.

I’m not one of those people. For one thing, generally, when I leave any sort of environment of which I am merely a member without authority, I do it without comment. Being “done” for me is generally an act of personal choice, not a gesture to discern who will try and woo me back. I can count on one hand the number of times I have openly declared I was leaving something, and I haven’t ever returned to any of them. I either knew I was done, or that my personal ethics would make it impossible to return. When I have felt the need to announce a departure, it’s generally been to make a statement about something I felt needed expressing or simply to let familiar denizens of a communal space know how to reach me outside the format without sending a gazillion private messages, or to explain why I was surrendering the responsibility of a role tethered to the format I was departing. IRL, when leaving a consulting job I’d have a brief gathering with my people before departing; there is merit in rituals like exit meetings that I consider separate from drama tactics, but that may be my open personal justification system in play.

I’ve spent years in the WOW format (I tried it in early 2005, but quit soon after, rejoining “for real” in May, 2006) — so there is history, and it feels wrong to leave without saying something somewhere. Or maybe I’m just feeling a fondness of memory. Either way, don’t follow the jump if you’re likely to be bored with such humdrummery.

(more…)

Researchers have found that introverts who act extraverted show slower reaction times on subsequent cognitive tests than those allowed to act introverted. Their cognitive fatigue testifies to the fact that “acting counter-dispositionally is depleting.” ~ Laurie Helgoe, “Revenge of the Introvert”

Dear extroverts: you are killing us and fucking up our interwebs. Okay, so that’s not exactly what the research shows, but I’m convinced it’s a statement with merit. What I should say is more like “Dear extrovert-trending virtual environments, my name is Salome, I’m an IFG and I’m exhausted by the lot of you.”

I cannot say that I remember the first time I was administered an MBTI as an adult. I know that as a child I was on occasion given personality tests because I was unschooled and the individual that guided my learning path used such tests as a means to figure out what my natural inclinations would be. What I do know is that for as long as I can remember, I have been classified with words like “right brained” and “introverted.” I test heavily INFJ.

When I entered mainstream school and peer social interaction, I had the advantage of being excited about it. Yes, I was that girl — for the first few years I was thrilled to go to school (although by the end I had senioritis along with the best of ‘em). As I melted into the culture of American public school, there was an overwhelming toll inflicted upon me that increased exponentially.

School, like most American hives, caters to extrovert tropes. Those who excel with extrovert social skills are rated better in the tribal hierarchy. Even counter-culture groups (in my high school days, these were punkers) tended to defer to the bolder, louder individuals of their subgroups. These behaviors are similarly (if unintentionally) rewarded by the school system. I was hard to intimidate as a youth, but I watched “the quiet kids” I identified with suffer through a great many situations like public speaking, large class sizes, and forced interaction. The concept that group activity was more “healthy” than quiet contemplation was everywhere. American schooling, in my day at least, was underscored by the message that you were part of the herd, and the more willingly you mooed the better you would do in the game of life. I understand the wisdom of preparing students to deal with melding into the expectations of society, and I certainly understand the limited resources of education makes highlighting individualism prohibitive. However, even as a teenager, I could figure out that it was a crummy way to run a lemonade stand.

Now more than ever, it’s worth considering the toll this takes on what we now understand to be 50% of the population who can be identified as introverts. By forcing them into patterns that not only go against the grain of their personalities, but may be causing them emotional and mental harm, American society is growing more damaging to its introverted population. Moreover, because they are inclined toward silence, introverts do not necessarily serve their own causes.

Socializing on the internet largely began as the domain of misfits and introverts. It makes sense because in the early days the net just wasn’t all that shiny. The social rewards of those old forums, user groups and BBS’s appealed more to those of us who spent a lot more time with Erector sets and Lincoln Logs than we did at little league games.

I’m not implying that “the good old days” were better. Obviously, web culture is far richer now than in those early days. But I can say that as an introvert the web is a far less comfortable place for me than it once was. Social networking and virtual environments are shifting from introvert-friendly to extrovert-dominated. This evolution happens simply, without any conspiracy. The perception is that the majority of people are extroverts, so, naturally, the people designing environments want to target the things they see as appealing to the largest possible user base. Moreover, extroverts are accustomed to being catered to and are not afraid to be the squeaky wheels demanding grease, while introverts are accustomed to shutting up and adapting as best they can.

In gaming terms, however, where there is lots of player burn-out and turn-over, this may be a key to addressing player engagement, immersion, and loyalty. Take this excerpt from Laurie Helgoe’s Psychology Today article: “Revenge of the Introvert”

With a biological makeup that enables them to see positive emotional stimuli as a distraction when they are focused on another task, introverts are good at resisting all distraction. Using functional brain imaging, Stanford biopsychologist Brian W. Haas measured the reaction time for introverts and extraverts when they tried to identify the color in which an emotionally provocative word was printed. Introverts proved more able to focus on the task of color identification while disregarding the emotional content and had significantly better reaction times. Concludes Haas: Introverts, who exhibit a higher resting state of arousal, “don’t need the same kind of outside entertainment.”

Put simply, our quest strategy and goals are different, and concepts of reward are similarly different.

There are huge implications here for motivational behavior in both physical and virtual domains. In schooling terms, high school and colleges would do better by 50% of their student populations by developing methods and procedures that engaged extroverts without alienating and discouraging introverts. Businesses would benefit greatly from being able to identify introverted employees and helping fit them to better positions that would allow them to excel and recharge, thus prolonging their work energies, creativity, and company loyalty.

Virtual environments have the most to gain, however, because so much of what would benefit introverts is just a matter of coding. Allowing introverts like myself the privacy controls and the ability to opt out of too much information/social stimulation would tremendously increase immersion, loyalty, and engagement in the format.

Attempting to force introverts into the same corners that much of society already corners us into, virtual environments risk losing 50% of their user bases to gradual burn-out and withdraw. Conversely, structuring formats that provide the tools so that introverts and extroverts can customize their experiences to their own personality types is fairly simple.

It’s time to stop spamming users with unwanted social interactions and information and allowing introverts to be introverts if they choose. As a business model it was always ethically dodgy to bombard users with forced visibility and exposure in order to make them feel obligated to engage, but certainly there is a stronger case now for it being simply bad business as well.

“There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity” ~ Tom Peters

Recently, while debating a friend, I made a simple statement: “Ethics do not alter.” It’s the type of statement I would consider an axiom. After a two-day argument, however, I realized I was missing a few words. What I should have said was “ethics do not alter according to situation.” My friend wouldn’t have agreed with that statement anymore than the first, but it would have saved a few hours of semantic negotiation.

As a person who does not believe in spiritual forces of good or evil, I am of the opinion that ethics and morality have evolved over the course of humankind’s walk on this planet from a communal commitment to survival. Survival taught our ancestors that there was safety in numbers (not to mention greater odds of procreation), but it must have also been obvious from the beginning that some people just don’t play well with others. From that start came compromise, standards, values, hierarchy consequences, and a number of other factors. For me, this is simple logic. If you remove assigning morality to the decree of a “higher power” then all that remains as a constant in the human condition is survival.

A number of great minds over the centuries have tried to make the case for mankind being inherently good- or bad-natured. In my opinion, such a debate is a waste of time. People are neither. Some are more predisposed to empathy or creativity or destruction, but that’s usually based on bad meat development or funky chemistry. It’s not about good or bad; most people are just inherently simple — they want their survival necessities, their creature comforts, and to spend most of their time seeking pleasure. From an evolution standpoint this makes infinite sense. Evey hive has more drones than queens. The balance of hive society rests on rewarding worker bees just enough so that they don’t want to eat the queen’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Advanced citizenship places extra burdens upon its drones, however, and that can generate rifts. Republics and democracies break down if the people do not hold their leaders accountable. In a free market, if consumers do not keep corporations from overreaching, you get things like depressions. I don’t know the math, but I’m sure there is a probably an equation that demonstrates how much falloff to expect per removed generation. Someone like myself takes a great deal of freedom for granted as a basic right, but someone who immigrated to the US from a less generous nation would likely not take as much for granted. It takes a while for entitlement to set in.

Entitlement is not always bad. Cultural entitlement is how society sheds the scales of previous ills. For example, generations coming to age now in the US and many other countries take equality for granted and are largely repulsed at the notions of racial or sexual discrimination.There are types of entitlement, however, that paralyze or destroy systems like government and commerce because people forget they carry a burden of obligation that goes along with privilege. The pursuit of pleasure has a price tag; how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

Ethics and consumer advocacy thus become the “everyman’s burden” in a free society. However, the less these burdens are underscored by survival needs, the lower the odds that the average person will uphold their side of the social bargain. Corporations exist free of ethics. They are, for all intents and purposes, emancipated psychopathic entities that are only charged to follow the letter of the law and generate money. They don’t have to consider the spirit of law or any benefit to society; their survival is often contrary to human survival.

If you look at what is going on in the real world these days in regard to how the general population addresses ethics and consumer advocacy, you can almost draw a line between the things that link directly to a sense of survival and how much the public invests in fulfilling their side of the social bargain. (Religion, of course, is the eternal wildcard in this deck, but I think you have to consider religion intimately linked to survival in the minds of followers — they view spiritual survival at least as important as physical survival.) Downloading unauthorized entertainment or circulating copyrighted material is hardly even a blip on the moral radar of most people. Despite what Lars Ulrich told congress in 2000, no one died from downloading illegal copies of Metallica songs. Unethical corporate CEOs nearly killed the global economy, but other than a few slaps on the wrist, they didn’t have to break stride or surrender an ivory-handled backscratcher. They may have evaporated the savings of billions of average people, but they didn’t directly cause any death, so they didn’t trigger any survival instincts. I don’t equate downloading songs to bankrupting the civilized world, but apparently, most consumers do, because the consequences are largely the same: nothing. In the case of corporate CEOs they even managed to sell the narrative that consumers and the government were at fault. In a way, that’s true. Holding corporate greed accountable is the responsibility of the citizenry.

It is chilling to consider what effect this could translate to when looking at Virtuality. With few exceptions, survival does not come into play in the virtual world. Virtual goods are about as removed as they can possibly be from that key element. And what is the result? Customer service is frighteningly absent from places like Facebook, Blizzard, Linden Lab, etc. Most average consumers don’t even expect immediate responses to inquires anymore, or have been conditioned to accept long hold times to get addressed. Consumer advocacy is also pretty thin on the virtual ground, and when you get a consumer advocacy heavy hitter in technical circles, they invariably end up the target of some power-crazed entity.

Personally, I believe that ethics and consumer advocacy are, in themselves, survival structures. They balance the scales between the average citizen of the world and those offering service in exchange for power. Just as those who feel they are entitled to everything without maintaining their side of the social bargain disrupt the balance, so do those who see problems and choose to do nothing.

If we can’t be trusted, as a society, to connect the dots between greed-based corporate entities ushering in an information-age depression, how can be we be trusted to police the current or next generation of virtual world players? If we don’t redefine survival to include these advanced concepts, how will we maintain ethics? Or will the virtual world transition from the domain of anonymous and free expression to the territory of corporations abandoning consumer care and ethical standards without consequence? Are we already owned by our dependency on a handful of big names?

Don’t get me wrong — I lean capitalist, but capitalism isn’t just about companies, it’s about consumers, too. Yes, it is the job of a company to make money, but it is the role of consumers to demand companies execute their duties with ethics and fair play and it is also the responsibility of consumers to assign consequences when companies fail the basic standards of society.

What consequences are any of us willing to execute in order to define ethics and standards?

Social interaction is the most valuable element of almost every virtual environment and it happens on MMOs, social networking sites, virtual platforms, forums, etc. With that in mind, ask yourself the following:

A) Would you give up your favorite virtual social outlet tomorrow if the company behind it behaved in a way you felt was unethical?
B) What kind of ethical trespass would have to happen for you to give up your favorite virtual social outlet?
C) If you wouldn’t give up your favorite virtual social outlet under any circumstances, do believe you would have any obligation to try and advocate for change of the policies you feel are unethical?
D) Do you even pay attention to the policies of your favorite outlets?

I’m not looking for anyone to answer these questions for an audience, but I think it’s important we ask ourselves things like this and figure out where our own standards are and where we expect them to be and how we plan to address ethics when removed from survival.

If you’re not willing to walk away from something, it owns you, so here’s the million dollar question and really the only one that matters:

E) If you look at your online habits, add in the ethics you’re willing to take a stand on and evaluate the outlets you’re not willing to do without — what owns you?

“Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli

I am still sick. On the mend, happily, but I haven’t really be able to log in for a little over a week. Thankfully, my offline IMs are largely full, because what’s there is a lot of fluttering about this person calling that person this thing and this other thing. Having learned the hard way that controversy generates attention and traffic, I understand why this predominates virtual world behavior. True, an ugly part of me understands the popcorn entertainment value of it, but that’s the ugly part of myself and I know she’s wrong.

In face-to-face interaction getting attention by any means has negative consequences. For one thing, you have a limited number of responders. Behaving out of character in most small company situations will generally have an adverse affect effect which only benefits the “all attention is good attention” types. But in cyberspace, you can type whatever you like and, odds are, someone somewhere will eventually agree with you. This creates a validation loop that pushes the borders of good behavior away from the cost/benefit ratio of most social norms. As such, people lose sight of realistic behavior and can degenerate into caricatures. This is where a commitment to common courtesy, an adherence to personal ethics, and the ability to self-critique come in handy.

No one is perfect. We all slip now and then. More important than trying to be perfect, however, is the recognition of the slip. When you begin to validate your own engagement of negative behavior, you’re on the wrong side of the equation.

I have an ongoing debate with one of my closest confidants who maintains there is no way to influence the behavior of others and so negative behavior exhibited by peers, associates, agitants, or nearby strangers is merely to be endured or ignored. I understand the stance; it’s just not how I was raised. In physical world interaction there are cues we give to demonstrate disapproval. Frowns. Distancing body language. Sighs. When overused, these are passive-aggressive monikers, but far more often these are the indicators that signal when someone is behaving outside tribal norms to help them self-check. Yes, there are times when it is necessary, even brave, to buck those norms. However, that courage is meaningless if the iconoclast is unaware of the lines they are crossing.

There is no courage in lambasting weak individuals and playing pile-on atop the corpse of a horse that’s been flogged to death. There is no courage in anonymous assault. There is no courage in personal attack for the sake of personal attack. There is no courage in manifestos. There is no courage in taking pride in ignorance. There is no courage in rudeness for rudeness sake. Those who try to excuse their bad behavior in the name of “courage” are, mostly just insecure, arrogant children attempting to self-validate. As such, those people should be regarded as children and not elevated by others who should, frankly, know better.

Courage is blogging the truth when the country you live in might very well imprison or kill you for it. Courage is standing up to a mob of anger and fear and calling that anger and fear for what it is. With very few exceptions, courage simply isn’t going to be found by blogging about some person who called you a name or who said they didn’t like your lifestyle. I doubt that there is any real courage to be found in playing virtual paper dolls, but if there is, I call dibs. All joking aside, a little perspective goes a long way in this particular case.

There are bullies in the world, to be certain. But a bully has to have power over you that is beyond your control. The kid who pushes you down because he’s bigger and stronger is a bully. The boss who humiliates you because she knows you need your job is a bully. The make-believe person typing on their vanity blog is not a bully unless you allow them to be one. Calling them one means you are doing two things. First, you are declaring they have power over you. Second, you are establishing yourself as vulnerable to them. Exposing your throat to an individual that destroys happily as a manner matter of course is self-defeating and stupid. Calling them a bully does nothing but try to establish that they have power over you; it makes you a victim of your own insecurity. This is especially true when the game turns into “I know you are, but what am I?”

Unlike my friend, I don’t believe in greeting bad behavior with indifference. At the same time, it is not my place to tell anyone else how to behave. What I can do is demonstrate what is acceptable by my understanding of acceptable and give those who choose to see it the opportunity to self-check against that instead of seeking validation in negative behavior. I think that’s all any of us can do.

It’s not sexy and it won’t generate a lot of blog drama rubbernecking, but it’s real and it’s far more respectful in my book than trying to appease egos that don’t need any more petting.

Tolerance is not acceptance. Silence is often difficult but necessary. We all slip, but we also need to recognize the slip and not champion the fall.

Now I’m having juice and crawling back to bed.