*sigh*
sigh
It’s been an interesting weekend. On Friday, I had a reunion with an old friend, who has moved to Japan and came back to get married. It was a lovely time, until we had a difference of opinion about relationship styles. Never one to just leave the fuck alone, I went a little bit too far in defending my choices, and the meeting ended badly. Live and learn, I suppose. The details aren’t that important, but my takeaway is that my usual raft of cohorts must cut me a lot of slack when i get on a roll, and perhaps I have been taking that for granted. While I was waiting for them to come out to visit, I was surfing about and made a comment on a LJ page from someone who had been a friend in high school. After 28 years, who knows what “friendship” has moved on to. It wasn’t an entirely positive assessment, having something to do with pictures of cats and kids with whom I have no connection. The heart of the matter, as I remember it (my original post is lost to the internet bit bucket), was this: Pictures of cute kitties/kiddies are mostly of interest to those who are attached to the kids/cats in question, but otherwise are just pictures of other people’s kittens/kids I prefaced the comment with “not necessarily a popular comment”, mentioned that this was a comment on cute cat/kid pics in general (the kind where you don’t know the particular beasts in question) and finished with “your mileage may vary”. By the following morning, my comment had been expunged. Today, another comment to the same blog, apparently referring to the (now nonexistent comment) said (BOLD added by me):
Knowing these kitties as I do, I think the look of earnest innocence is priceless. For the record, I enjoy looking at pictures of the children and pets of my friends. These family members are important to them, so they are important to me. In my personal experience, the people who are indifferent/annoyed by them are usually so self-absorbed that they have absolutely no interest in anything that doesn’t affect them personally. Just my two cents.
This seems to agree with my assertion that the pics aren’t necessarily meaningful if there isn’t a personal connection. I’d been thinking of posting some pictures of my oh-so-cute cats being silly stoners around some catnip, but hadn’t really gotten around to it. In the last week or so, some of my favorite web-site haunts (boingboing.net in particular) saw fit to post pictures of cute animals, while being apologetic about it and stating that they usually don’t go that far See http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/01/puppies.html, http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/02/internet-catfight.html, http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/02/kittens-in-a-barrel.html, http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/02/ducklings-in-a-batht.html, http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/03/video-crossspecies-l.html. Finally after a week of this, this one http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/06/wont-someone-please.html in which the editors of the site described their content “degraded” (their word, not mine) to the level of cute kitten videos. After pondering this, I found myself agreeing that “degraded” wasn’t entirely an inappropriate word. FWIW, while boingboing often posts pics of strange animals (http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/04/bugs-have-creepy-fac.html), and sometimes hand crafted things like oh so cute plush Chthulhu’s, handbags in the shape of D12 (and how to make them), etc, they don’t usually post many picture or videos of cute animals. To say that they never post such things would not necessarily be accurate, but they’re not normally a daily staple as they were during the first week of July this year. Apparently pictures of cute animals are popular judging by the number of emails I get from various random people (but usually the same ones that send out all kind of things such as the military records of Mr Rogers, and the latest Blue Star Tattoo scare which is usually debunked on Snopes.com) this kind of thing is popular in certain circles. As I said on my (deleted by the owner of the blog) post, I didn’t mean this as a dis towards these particular cats, but I’d been pondering the idea of cute kitties (and in my mind, the onomatopoeic resemblance of to kiddies) had me realize that this isn’t just about cats, but could be extended to kids, too. Do I hate kittens or kids? Nope, as long as they don’t get in my face. I like pictures of kids I have met, or are somehow attached to people I know. I carry some pics of the kids who consider me “grampa”, but I’m not about to whip them out on unsuspecting strangers unless someone wants to know. What did I do wrong? Near as I can tell, what I did wrong was post this opinions to an audience that I wasn’t entirely sure was open to my opinions. Shame on me. While we have a tradition of freedom of speech and opinion in this country, at least for a little while longer, this privilege doesn’t necessarily extend to private spaces like LiveJournal blogs. New policy: my opinions will mostly stay on my own blog, and perhaps will be friends only, and maybe i need to reassess the “friend”. Dissenting opinions are welcome, and will most likely be left alone (but perhaps commented upon) because I prefer freedom of speech and opinion. If you disagree with me, that’s cool, maybe I’m just out of touch.