Originally Posted by
Retmeishka
Pardon the sloppy grammar tonight - I am having one of my chemical sensitivity induced mood swings. You will notice phases of relatively quiet and normal behavior alternating with days of extremely weird behavior, such as mania, and obsessiveness, and laughing too much and not being able to stop laughing, which is what happened after I read some of the things you were saying. In the real world, in a social environment, I don't talk the way I do online, and my online writing is more noticeably changed by the mood swings than my real world speaking is. I write WAAAAYYYYYYYYYY too much and too constantly, and it is only made worse by my having these reactions, and it is made even worse by talking to someone who actually answers.
You said that unbalanced or, I could call it, asymmetrical degrees of self-disclosure can cause one person to pull away. I kind of agree with that. Some of it depends on the context, and we're talking in a forum.
I chose to come to this forum because here, you would feel peer pressure to reply to me, whereas in email, nobody will notice if you ignore my emails. In the forum, I can potentially lower your social status if I say something that you are unwilling or unable to reply to. (Do I WANT to damage your reputation in some way, no.) It would be obvious to everyone that you avoided this or that. As long as my verbal confrontations were not so severe that they broke forum rules and were too abusive in some way, it would be viewed as a legitimate discussion in which I could rightfully expect an answer. ('Being weird' as such doesn't really break the forum rules.) So you are more likely to dutifully reply when I say something, because I'm saying it in front of a whole bunch of people and we can't pretend it hasn't been said.
I suppose you could click 'ignore member' or whatever that thing is - I'm offline and I'm not looking at it, but I think there's a way to stop seeing forum posts by a particular person.
You said that you give a delayed reply, or sometimes no reply at all, to many emails, because you receive a very large number of them, and yes, that would cause you to spend all day long doing nothing but answering emails, which would lead to more emails being sent back to you in return as it simply encouraged people to think they could get personal email replies from you, as a free service. I was actually surprised when I got an answer and I was like 'Wow! I got a reply!!!'
I had already figured out the thing about writing letters on paper, and have done that several times when it was necessary. That was just one of many parallels that I saw between my life and the things you had written on your various websites. There were several other similarities, but some of the things you did had a different cause or motive in your life than they did in my life.
I suppose I could go back to thinking about peak oil, but I would have to do a little rereading. As long as this post has the phrase 'peak oil' in it, then maybe it counts as being on-topic. It is still off-topic for being inappropriately personal in the middle of a public forum. This won't be as much of a problem in a couple of weeks because I won't have an internet connection at home anymore, and will have to use wi-fi or the library computers - yet another one of the similarities.
It turned out that the grammar wasn't too bad. I thought I would have a hard time writing. I will try to reread some now and go back to the topic. The next post from me really will be about peak oil. It will most likely be dull and boring anyway and not all that funny or weird, although sometimes, I don't know when I'm saying something that's funny or weird.
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