Funny day. I woke up and found a dozen of personal messages in my Chatterbox. Most of these were sent by people who sounded quite disturbed by my last w/u. Here's my favourite:

Klaproth says I ate your writeup Throw The Jew Down The Well. Absolutely not. I know it's supposed to be satire or shock, but it's still offensive and doesn't belong here. Aim higher, please. Node Heaven will become its new residence.

This was followed by another, friendlier message from dem bones:

We can have this writeup resurrected, let me know when it hits your node heaven. Sorry.
The editor in question took things a bit too seriously, which is exactly Ali G's intent ... we'll fix it.
You need to edit this for spelling however - and grammar/tenses etc. Post it to your scratch pad when ready for a repost.

Thanks!

I really appreciate it, really really ! :)
Let me explain: This was not a matter of pride or testosterone. But I had some really unfriendly messages about it.
It also cost me a lot of XP... That I simultaneously regained by voting, which consists of neither:

• Randomly plus or minus-ing a w/u's reputation.
• Nor using my mood instead of my reason to do so.

Important message follows:

I was however interested by constructive messages I also got:

• These showed me that my write-up indeed was poorly written. Due to office pressure, I might have produced it too quickly and I apologize for it. A new version of this w/u has been noded as The Infamous Song: In My Country There Is Problem.
• Most editors also take their work seriously but also deontologically. It's good and it's the reason why, even if I remained silent for some time, I never left.

E2 is a great place.

Hi everybody! I hope you're doing good!. My Interest Fair went ok but I didn't get first place for my exhibit on the History of Coffee. Mostly I got three's and fours and the winner got all fours. I was a little disappointed but I'll do better next year.

Last night my dad was listening to John Lennon and the song "Give Peace a Chance" came on and I got to thinking about traveling in time to when there are no wars. I wrote a poem about it called "The Time Traveler". I hope you like it!

The Time Traveler

There is a time traveler that lives somewhere
And it's not a he and it's not a she
There is a time traveler that lives someplace
And sometimes I think that maybe it's me

The time traveler can go from place to place
And it doesn't need any kind of machine
The time traveler can leap from year to year
And it might be large and it might be lean

It might be here and it might be there
And is always watching to make the peace
All it wants is for things to be right
It's a blanket of comfort made from fleece

The time traveler cannot be seen by me or by you
It is only something that lives in our hearts
We all have the power to travel too
We always have, from the very start

Bye!

/me says Standard disclaimers apply

On a side note, if I ever start getting down on myself and my writing tends to get a bit too depressing or too introspective, I need you guys to do me a favor. Just point me back in her direction will ya? Sometimes I need a gentle reminder to get my priorities straightened out.

Thanks and love, Bob & Anna

I guess, at times, life is a pretty funny thing. You do some things that you can be awfully proud of as you meander your way through it. But then again, there are those times when you can't believe some of the stunts you pulled.

I wonder what makes those times, the times you did so good, so different from the times you've behaved in a way you'd rather have not. What is the signal that fires in your brain in that split nanosecond that lights off something that causes you to do one thing and not another?

It's probably something very simple but when you get down to brass tacks, most usually things are.

Yes, I've romped among the innocents
Because they weren't hard to find
They're young and unsuspecting
They're willing and they're kind

Yes, I've crawled among the guilty
I've crouched and stooped so low
I've told them things they needed to hear
It's the truth they'll never know

Yes, I've played the role of victim
And probably made some of my own
In another time and another place
My seeds of doubt are sewn

Yes, I've wrestled with my conscience
Those ever nagging thoughts
They pound away inside my head
I'll rue what I have wrought.

Yes, I'll take them to my grave
These things that I have done
The good, the bad, the ugly
The sorrow and the fun

I may be preaching to the choir, given the liberally-minded (generally) community here, but this proposed ban on Nazi symbols - like the swastika - or any racist symbol in the EU really bothers me. I know I do not live in Europe, but this has global implications. I am not speaking about this as an American, but as a member of the human race. Sure, these symbols represent the depths of human stupidity, hatred, and intolerance, but we cannot try to forget about them. Ignoring that those dark sides of humanity exist only gives them more power.

The symbols can be used in a wide variety of contexts with no intentions of inciting violence or hatred (not to mention that the swastika inparticular means a lot of other things, see the node about it for more info), but my objection to the ban is not only about freedom of speech or expression. Like them or not, these are symbols of our past, a dark past, but our past nonetheless. We must always remember them and what they stood for and what they still stand for with certain people today. Most of us hate to look upon them, but we must not forget. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. You cannot combat racism or intolerance by sweeping them under the rug. It's difficult to fight an enemy you cannot see. Keep them out in the open. Confront them directly. Point to swastikas when with your children and say "See this? I'll tell you what this is and what it stands for and how wrong that is and why."

Education is power.

Ignorance is folly.

My head is full of murder. Yesterday, all I wanted was to move on. Now it's 10am and all I want is to get drunk. Not drunk. Obliterated. Kill brain cells until I can't even remember the past three years. I want to punch him and knock him out. I want to know how you hire a hitman.

I'm scared. In all my life, I've never hated anyone this much. I don't know that I've hated anyone at all.

I'm stuck in the dream I had when I was a kid, where the vampires are attacking from every side and I'm running with my family but then they disappear. When I find them again, they're vampires, too. Most of the people we know, it seems, knew what was going on. I was the only one not in on the joke. Maybe I'm the loser. Maybe infidelity is fun and cool and I just don't get it.

I'm trapped in this town by a job I'm also trapped in (cause I'm sure as hell not in any condition to interview now). I'm trapped in that grim apartment with his furniture and his shit pressing in on me. Suffocating on tears and memories and imagined visions of the shit he's been doing that I can't stop.

I always really identified with some intangible aspect of the movie Eye of the Beholder, which was almost universally panned. Fuck all the alternatives. I want to get on a bus and disappear. Start over in some no-name town where the cost of living is low and they've run short on waitresses. That is the thing that's in my blood, the built in fallback mechanism, the old faithful Plan B. My family have always been runners, escapers, women who slip away unnoticed in the middle of the night. I wouldn't be in the fucking mess if I hadn't let myself grow roots. I don't want to belong to a place. I want to belong to a cloud of dust where a Roadrunner used to be. Something you see out of the corner of your eye.

Trouble is that I was ready to settle down. Really, I already was. But I got the carpet yanked out from under me. I won't be making that mistake again.

Just to be clear, I don't expect you to feel sorry for me. It's just very cathartic to get this shit out. And I know this is likely not the best forum, but please, humor me. I promise it won't go on for more than a week.

Seventeen months have passed since Matthew died.

Seventeen months today.

That is forever and it is yesterday.

I think about him and wonder if he would be proud of what I am now able to do? Or if he would resent it.

Resent me moving on. Or trying to. Resent me being back at school, getting the second highest score on something I put four hours work into while everyone else worked diligently for a month? Resent me being in demand, on the catwalk, in photographs? I know he hated it whenever I had a shoot, and he would always persuade me to cancel. I think it would anger him that now I am able to be a semi-functional person, seventeen months after he died.

Before he died, months before, he said something like, 'oh, if anything happened to me, you'd go running back to James.' Well sweetheart, I'm not anywhere near James. I haven't seen fucking James since before you fucking died. I hadn't seen him for over a year before we got together.

I haven't seen anyone til somewhat recently. I spent months crying over you, mourning you. And even with this new person, it looks like it's going down the crapper so I'll be alone. Does that satisfy you? That I am desperately unhappy and you're not here? That I am struggling to make money, to stay in school, to hold my life together?

I don't think you ever cared about me. I don't think you did. And I think you have fucked me up so bad that other people can't care about me. I don't think you could have done what you did if you cared about anyone. Me. Your mum. Your brothers. Your dad. If you had love in your heart, I don't think you would have been able to do it.

So since your heart was cold you had to go and break mine.

Whatever pain you felt, whatever misery and despair that drove you to it, I feel a million times more. Because I am still here. I suffered through the past seventeen months and you were gone.

I miss you at the best of times.

I'm starting to be able to let you go. I cannot however let go of the fury. Not yet. I do not forgive you. I don't. I am not in love with you anymore. I fell out of love with you in September when I realised that I can't be in love with someone who can't return my love or even reject it. I can't be in love with a dead man. You gave me some of the best times in my life but You also gave me the absolute worst. So for that I cannot forgive you. For taking over a year of my life away from me. I can't let you go, and I can't let you have peace. because I don't have peace.

I wasn't able to sleep for months. I wasn't able to eat. I was looking at pictures of myself from the month after you died and I looked like a goddamned skeleton. Even though I wasn't sleeping I took to my bed and had nightmares and flashbacks about you.

You didn't just take your life but you took a lot of mine. I think you cursed me. You did something shitty and horrible and selfish and because of that there are people who hate me because of it. There are people who blame me. Who harass me. That asshole that was related to your former work colleague, he won't stop calling, emailing and im-ing me, blaming me for you dying. He keeps saying your ghost is visiting him. He is demented and is after me. And that's because of you. It's your fault the police keep calling and asking the same questions. The same stupid questions.

And it still affects me. Constantly. Did you think that once you died it would just be over and taken care of? That there would be no casualties of your death? Everyone has someone else to blame. And I have no one to blame but you. I have all this anger for you and nothing I can do but cry. Those people find comfort in hating me. And I hate no one. But myself, for falling in love with you in the first place. I can't believe you'd do this to me. I can't believe you did this to me.

Thank you for the post-traumatic stress disorder, the debilitating anxiety and the crippling depression.

I remember you always but tonight, I remember you with anger and resentment.

It's been almost two years since I wrote anything on E2. I can't even remember how to link something. Seems pointless to update my life really. In some ways I guess it hasn't changed much. Hmmm. Was gonna say, "In some ways she has changed everything," with a pipelink for "she." But like I said...