03-27-05 @ 9:19 am EST

So, I was falling asleep while reading a book on Michigan archaeology, and decided to take my bath a half hour early. And while bathing I came up with the stupid idea to make my journal public again. Then I came up with the even stupider idea of making it rateable (sic?) again. Then I started composing a long stupid entry in my head about why I would even do this, and so that's where this came from.

If you are or are not new to Skew...

This is my personal journal which used to be public, from July 2001 to October 2004 I believe, when I made it private. I passkeyed it, but only one person ever asked for that, and I never gave it to anyone. It also used to be rateable (ratable?--who cares), but I disallowed that in August 2003 or some such. Okay, I'll back up a ways.

Seeing as I have no life, and no access to a therapist, I often use Skew to bitch about things. And since I have no life, and no access to a therapist, I tend to bitch about the same things all the time...namely, my writing. You see, when you have no life, and no access to a therapist, you tend to get fixated on the one thing you THINK that maybe you do well (though you often have your doubts). I'm sure everybody has something they fixate on, they just hide it better than others. In fact, I've seen from reading other people's journals that most other journalers have things they fixate on. Somebody talks about their kid all the time. Another person talks about their husband, or boyfriend (or wife or GF). Another talks endlessly about their job, or an obnoxious coworker. Etc. etc. You see the point. Yet these things are considered normal because these are signs of people with lives--they have families, jobs, relationships. I don't have any of those...so I fixate on my writing. It's the one part of me I feel is of any worth, and one of the very few things I'm interested in, so of course, I take a lot of it personally.

So of course, I tend to bitch about it a lot, too, especially since it's not very popular despite all my efforts trying to draw attention to it--plugging, reviewing other people with like interests, offering GPs, etc. I get very frustrated when I see popular members putting out maybe a 7kb chapter every few months and getting tons of ratings which probably came with gushing reviews from friends, whereas I try to write regularly, and post updates (20-30kb chapters) often, and actually FINISH things now and then, and almost no one reads. So yes, I get upset and bitch about it in Skew, a lot, because I'm fixated on it. (If you got the feeling nobody gave a damn about your relationship with your kid, or worse yet, if nobody else CARED about your kid, wouldn't you be bothered?) Anyone who reads past this entry, if anybody does, will quickly take notice of that. I'm making ample note of this here because responses to my journal in the past, when people used to read it, seemed to indicate that most people thought I had no clue I was obsessing like this. I know I am. So if you were getting ready to tell me I'm obsessing, I already know that, and have known it for years.

Well...I noticed that almost every time right after I posted such an entry, I would get a one-star rating, of course with no comment. Almost without fail. I believe the last was after an entry where I expressed my worries about my premium membership (needed so I can POST that writing mentioned above) and about my family's poor financial situation. Yes--somebody came along, read that, and rated the entire journal one star because I dared to mention not only my selfishness, but my worry for my family. That was the last straw that really pissed me off and I went and made the whole thing unrateable. (I'm pretty sure it's spelled "unratable," but that looks funny, like it has something to do with rats, so I will continue misspelling it throughout this entry, thank you.) The way I saw it, if such people didn't at least have the decency to SAY why my admission of my selfishness, and of my worries for my family's future, upset them so much, then they shouldn't have the ability to rate, either. I mean, cripes, what would make them happy, me lying and saying I'm selfless and we're doing fine? Whatever.

That was not the only time; such ratings were par for the course almost every time I used my journal for its original purpose. (The very first short summary description of Skew? "Griping and gripes. Negatory! Negatory! Will Robinson!" See? I even admitted the thing was going to be bitchy. That was why I created it. I wasn't even going to POST any happy entries. When I started getting these ratings, seriously, it made me wonder, because what else did they expect to find here? :/ ) Even more oddly, whenever I posted HAPPY entries, I didn't get any comments or ratings at ALL. It was like these people read only the negative ones and then spited me for it! Very weird.

Well, I still kept Skew public, though its hits dropped dramatically. (Long ago the first version of this journal was the second or third most read on the site--any other journals with more hits were not rateable back then.) This was okay since I mainly updated it for the three or four people I knew cared to keep up on me. I read their journals too, and identified them as sort-of friends, because I don't really tend to make friends. We e-mailed now and then but they became busy with things, yet I felt they would get back in touch soon. I kept writing in Skew, and...eventually, the hits to each entry dropped to about two or three at the most, and those only came after the entries had been posted for several days. And then they dropped even more than THAT. I would post, and an entry would not get even ONE hit in several days of being displayed. What did this tell me? That, and the lack of any more e-mails, told me that the people I had *thought* were my friends were no longer reading. I waited for a few months, but the situation did not change. I even posted an entry appealing to these people and there were no responses, barely even any reads--what hits Skew WAS getting, were obviously from random visitors who probably stop by to laugh at my bitching. (Come on, we all do it.) And by October 2004, that finally proved my point. I made Skew private, because my friends were not reading anymore, and obviously were not the friends I had thought they were.

I had also been going through a severe depressive phase around that time and that just made it worse, finding out that I had been spending all these months thinking these people actually cared about me and that I was just being impatient, and should wait longer. I honestly blamed MYSELF for being such a bad friend. But how LONG is somebody supposed to wait...? I'm tired of hemming and hawing and offering apologies for the missteps of others--but real friends DO NOT JUST STOP CONTACTING YOU IN ANY WAY FOR MONTHS ON END. No matter HOW busy a person is, surely they have the time every once in a great while to offer *some* sort of comment that they still know you exist. And especially if you are feeling horribly depressed, or are even directly ADDRESSING them, they could speak up. ESPECIALLY if they KNOW you are the kind of person who gets to worrying when you do not hear from them for a certain amount of time. I had already been through this exact same process with these people, before. So to be put through it again was unforgivable. They knew how I must be feeling, and still did nothing about it...so I'm past the point of accepting apologies and waiting for it to happen again. All of this combined to make me feel that keeping my journal public on this site served absolutely no purpose since the people I had cared to keep updated about me were no longer updating THEIR journals, and they were no longer reading MINE. I had actually cared about them, too. Otherwise I wouldn't have gone to such trouble to try to reciprocate the attention they used to give me, and I certainly wouldn't have accepted their apologies the first time around. So I learned my lesson the hard way. I don't know why the hell they all insisted they really liked me if they were going to just keep disappearing for months with no comment, but they did. People are that way a lot of the time I guess. I can forgive, and I did, several times, yet I'm tired of being a dope and a doormat. I removed my ratings and deleted their journals from my favorites long ago and no longer care about them, since they do not care about me.

This is a flaw of mine, BTW. If you do not care about me--and specifically, if you do not care about my WRITING, since it's the most important part of me--then I probably won't get very close to you. It's not personal, I just can't empathize with people very well unless we share some important thing in common...and face it, when someone doesn't care about the most important thing in your life, it kind of puts a damper on trying to be friends. I only recently realized this, so to all the people who saw me talking about how I have no friends, and tried befriending me, and I seemed oddly cold and ungrateful, it was not personal, I just sensed that our e-mails would eventually boil down to "How are you? I'm fine. See you later"...and I've never been good at that kind of e-mail. I did you all a favor; trust me, you did not want to hear me blither about a story that would probably put you to sleep, since that's about all I can find it in me to blither about. Kids, boyfriends, jobs...I have no experience in or interest in those, sorry. >_< Things that DO make me start yapping like there's no tomorrow, in case you ever want to torture yourself trying to strike up an actual conversation with me?--Egyptian mythology (not so much anymore, but maybe). Ojibwa/Chippewa mythology and culture. Mackinac Island. My writing. That's really about it, I'm afraid. :/ That's also about all you'll find in here, just so you were warned...

Saving this so far since I'm typing it offline...

Anyway...that was when Skew went from unrateable, to private. Months passed and NONE of the people I used to update it for bothered showing up to ask for the passkey, which FURTHER proved my point. Eventually ONE of them did show up...to say that they had in fact been reading an offsite version of my journal for quite a while now...and though I did not let this person know back then since I really hate hurting people's feelings, no matter what they've done, that REALLY HURT ME. They had been READING it the whole time, even the entries where I had mentioned my horrible depression, and had even directly ADDRESSED them...and had NEVER REPLIED! What sort of friend does this?? I must not understand friends much because this just makes no sense to me...people always used to take ME to task when I would ignore people like that, and still do. So how come others did it so easily to me?? Repeatedly? And I am expected to keep letting it happen? Sorry but I am only human. Well, I addressed THAT in another entry, not that they read it, since there have never been replies and there never will be and bla bla bla, I was stupid to think these people cared in the first place. I really wanted to believe they did but proof says otherwise. Friends do not just stop writing to you for months, and then continue not writing to you even when you are crying out for help. It wouldn't have been so bad, if I had not known this person was STILL READING my journal. (Skew has several offsite versions whose links I deleted from the main page since I thought nobody knew of them, and when I made it private I didn't want any Writing.com members to find them.)

The offsite versions of Skew remained public because one of them can't be made private, and none of them have hit counters...the thing which was bothering me the most. Just writing entries in here and seeing them get no hits, no hits, no hits, day after day, and the occasional hit from somebody who was not one of my friends and didn't care about me as a person, really bothered me...but if I had no way to TELL how many hits an entry was (or was not) getting, then it didn't bother me so much. On one other site, however, it did bother me that the comments function was never used (nobody ever left notes), so I just did a similar thing, and disabled comments. On the other sites, I either get the occasional comment or else just do not care enough to bother. What I didn't know about the readers of my journal wouldn't hurt me.

So, here I am with my personal journal of four years on Writing.com, and nobody was seeing it anymore. Which was fine by me. I don't really read others' journals around here, anyway. I USED to, back when I thought people would reciprocate, but as soon as I learned that showing interest in another person does not mean they will show interest in you, I stopped. I do glance at a few occasionally but I will not say whose they are (I never mention names in here--it always comes back to bite me, whether I say nice things or bad things about somebody), and I don't read any regularly. At the moment there is ONE offsite journal I read regularly because the person has an interest in me and we have some things in common. I hope I did not jinx it all just by mentioning that, though I probably did. Again, my inability to much care about people if there is no common interest. (I also used to regularly read the journal of somebody on the site who whined even more than I did, in every entry, but they've apparently deleted themselves. Too bad, they actually made me look a little bit good. :/ )

Getting bored of and getting second thoughts about writing this, so am going to distract myself with a game of Tile Fall...

918!! NEW HIGH SCORE!! :D

Anyway...considering that the very REASON I had a public journal was to have readers (come on, people, why else are they public?--you may claim that you don't CARE if you have readers or not, but if you truly didn't care, then you either wouldn't HAVE a public journal, or you would make it PRIVATE, like I did for four or five months), and I obviously didn't have any except random nobodies, I found that incredibly hurtful, especially considering that I saw so many POPULAR journals out there with entries just as whiny and boring as mine drawing in tons of readers! Again, being a popular person has its perks, which I have never achieved despite my best efforts. (I used to read and review a lot...do it practically never, now. See an older entry if you're curious about that, too bored to go into the details again.) As I said, it was just less hurtful to KNOW nobody was reading, than to WONDER whether anybody was reading, assume they weren't, and not know WHY.

Good example? I once posted an entry about that whole gay bishop deal. Even posted it to some "diary circles" which are like plug pages for individual entries. Got no notes whatsoever. A few days LATER, somebody ELSE--a popular person--posted an entry ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME as mine...and got a dozen comments or more. See my point? Popularity helps, even if you have next to nothing to say. Entries entitled "GAY RIGHTS--READ ME!!!" and with some insipid text along the lines of "OMG why r all u ppl hating on gayz?? I mean, their ppl to! OMG cristians suck!! Stop shoving yur relligion in my FACE!!", when written by a popular member, will of COURSE draw a dozen notes of hearty endorsement, whereas entries with...more subtle titles (that is, no blaring "READ ME!!!")...and more carefully written text (that is, ACTUAL WORDS, spelled PROPERLY, and forming ACTUAL SENTENCES), which is also more carefully considered, when written by nobodies like me, get nada. Oh, I'm getting bored of my own damn entry! I don't even know by now if I'll go through with this stupid idea.

Well, to make a long story short...if I don't change my mind before then, I stupidly decided to just make the stupid thing public and rateable since nobody else really cares, so who cares. Seeing as the inevitable will eventually happen, however (probably right after posting this!), I have something else to say...

NONE, I repeat NONE, of the one-star ratings Skew has gotten in the past EVER, EVER came with a comment why. Not even a "You suck!" Nope...none of the people who were bothered enough by everything I said, to stop and rate with that, could ever say one word in response, to prove that they have more to say of higher quality than I do. In fact, aside from one comment from somebody who was soon after deleted, and one user I had a personal argument with long ago, nobody has ever offered a comment for a one-star rating on any of my OTHER items, either, that I can recall. Interesting?

On the other hand, OTHER items of mine HAVE been rated with 2, 2.5, 3, and 3.5 (come on, "There's nothing wrong with average!" is crap--if we all didn't care about being average, then why would we be trying to better our writing?--did you also get C's in school and smile and say, "Hey, there's nothing wrong with that!"?--I bet your parents, and the colleges you applied to, didn't)--and DID come with comments, helpful ones, that took almost ALL the sting out of the ratings. A long time back there was a user named Dormouse (I'll name him because he was deleted long ago) who regularly rated my stuff with threes, but he always offered comments why, and was polite about it, so I liked getting ratings from him even if he found my stuff average. Back when I had sunset pictures posted on the site I got an anonymous person rating them with two stars and saying why. I wrote an entry about that thanking the person because honestly, I agreed with them, and it was nice of them to take that time. While I'm here let me be consistent and say that unless I know who's doing the rating, good ratings with no comments irritate me, too. Especially since I post a note ASKING for no ratings unless the person comments, on ALL my items. (Seriously--I have to copy and paste that thing to every item. Kind of bothersome if somebody sees it and still ignores it, especially since it takes more time to rate than to not rate, and I was giving them a way to save time.)

As I was saying there though...NOBODY who has ever rated me with a one star has ever had the guts to say why. So by now, you should rather know what class I consider such people to be in.

I'm not going to bother checking back on Skew every day to see if there has been one paltry hit to my latest entry. In fact, I rather wish I could do away with the hit counter to individual entries. I'll just do what I do on the site where I disallowed comments--post when I feel like it (which is not nearly so often since I lost most of the people who used to read it), and don't even bother stopping by to look in on it when I'm not. It'll just be there. You can look at it if you want, and even rate it, though I don't expect you to. (And if you're not going to comment, I'd rather you didn't.) I have actual writing to work on, the rest of the time.

Just be aware: I won't lie and say poor ratings don't bother me because they do. But if you REALLY think that coming along, rating one star without a comment, and wandering off will make any difference in the way I post my entries...well, I just find that kind of strange and sad. I mean, I've been writing in the damn thing since July 2001 and I've had lots of people try to shut me up that way. It hasn't worked yet, and the most it did was just make me make it unrateable and keep posting. So honestly, what point does that serve? And you know what class I hold such people in already since none have ever clarified to make me change my mind. I mean, none of them have written even one word to convince me that they have so much more interesting stuff to say, so I have to assume that they're even more boring than I am.

This entry too long? Too boring? Did it bother you in some way? Well, that's how this journal always is. So you can find a more interesting one to read if you want because even if I make this thing unrateable and private again, I'm still going to be posting crap like this in it, just without your knowledge. That sounds kind of evil and creepy, doesn't it...knowing that somewhere, somehow, Tehuti is STILL typing up all that drivel, and nobody can do anything about it. I have to wonder if that really bothers anybody. If it does, that won't make me stop writing it, either. :P

And yeah, I reserve the right at any time to just shut the whole thing away from public view at any point in the future...like I said, I just had a stupid idea during my bath today. Maybe I'll show some reason and do that very thing later on today. And yes, the folder and journal descriptions have not changed despite this. Not going to change 'em. Huh, after making this thing rateable again I notice it has no ratings whatsoever, when it used to have at least a few. Sheesh. That's rather disappointing. :/ Oh well. Like it'll ever be popular again. I guess I'll have to learn to ignore that too.

I actually had a nice entry to share about history, but I'm tired after typing this, so maybe that will wait for another day. Like people are CRAWLING ALL OVER each other just to read it. Puh.