“Document contains no data”

Appar­ent­ly that’s most of LJ tonight—or at least, that’s what the servers tell me every time I attempt to com­ment on an entry, read what’s behind a cut tag, or read comments!

Like pat­greene, I’ve been told that some peo­ple con­sid­er me intim­i­dat­ing. I find that sur­pris­ing, some­what inex­plic­a­ble, and amus­ing all at the same time. I cer­tain­ly don’t make an effort to intim­i­date any­one. I do try to be civ­il when inter­act­ing with anyone.

I am told that some­one thought I was “dom­i­nat­ing the con­ver­sa­tion” last night at Choco­Laté and that I was inap­pro­pri­ate. Appar­ent­ly, a brief men­tion of my views on abor­tion (as an exam­ple of some­thing that a poten­tial SO should under­stand before we get sex­u­al­ly involved with each oth­er) and anoth­er brief men­tion of being a sex­u­al abuse sur­vivor as an expla­na­tion of some­thing else was “shock­ing.” Of course, this per­son did­n’t speak up dur­ing the meet­ing at all, nor did she raise these con­cerns with me. In fact, she did­n’t give any sign at all dur­ing the event that she was uncom­fort­able in any way.

She did bring a child to the meet­ing, which was inap­pro­pri­ate. We’ve been quite clear about the fact that there’s nowhere for kids to go hang out at these things, and our con­ver­sa­tion is like­ly to range into adult top­ics. I did­n’t say any­thing that I would­n’t have said in front of my child (now or when she was 9 or 10 years old), but I real­ize that some peo­ple will not talk about some very real top­ics with chil­dren present. I know that my con­ver­sa­tion, at least, was edit­ed a bit due to the child’s pres­ence — and the boy was bored out of his skull. I felt sor­ry for him.

Hey celtic­moni—did I dom­i­nate any­thing? I like to know. And I only go there with the con­sent of those involved 😉

The dif­fer­ing views regard­ing the evening’s con­ver­sa­tion do bring back some­thing I’d brought up as a con­ver­sa­tion­al topic—communicating direct­ly. I’d much pre­fer to hear, “I find you inter­est­ing and I’d like to get to know you bet­ter” than “Let’s do some­thing some­time.” I should think oth­ers would want to hear, “Sor­ry, the inter­est isn’t mutu­al,” instead of, “Oh, yeah—email me, okay?” from some­one who has absolute­ly NO inten­tion of ever even reply­ing to an email from that par­tic­u­lar sender.

It makes far more sense to me to say, “You are beau­ti­ful!” than to pre­tend that I’m not hav­ing a hard time avoid­ing star­ing at some­one. Oh—noc­ty­vampyre? You’re beau­ti­ful. I’m hav­ing trou­ble not think­ing of you as “Nathaniel,” though—you should read the Ani­ta Blake series by Lau­rell K. Hamilton.

Along the same lines, I’d have respect­ed this per­son far more had she said, “I find that inap­pro­pri­ate, and would like to change the top­ic.” (Not that abor­tion or child­hood sex­u­al abuse ever was the top­ic, but any­way…) In fact, had she said, “I am uncom­fort­able talk­ing about that,” I would have hon­ored her need for safe­ty and not men­tioned what­ev­er “that” was again.

Instead, she tri­an­gu­lat­ed by com­plain­ing first to anoth­er cou­ple who were there, then to sam­bear. While she has my email address, she has­n’t said the first word to me. Because of that pas­sive-aggres­sive behav­ior, I’ve writ­ten her off as some­one with whom I don’t care to asso­ciate and who I will not both­er get­ting to know.

Some out­spo­ken women have prob­lems with being around oth­er out­spo­ken women. That’s anoth­er thing I frankly do not under­stand. Who would want to be around mealy-mouthed peo­ple who don’t even devel­op their own opin­ions? How boring!

I think some of it goes back to some of the nasty soci­etal pro­gram­ming of females to always be in some sort of unspo­ken com­pe­ti­tion with each oth­er for male atten­tion. Until that crap is dis­card­ed, it isn’t real­ly pos­si­ble for women to have real friend­ships with each oth­er. In fact, fol­low­ing those old rules also inter­feres with hav­ing decent rela­tion­ships with men, because the oth­er side of the coin is that we’re taught that we MUST com­pete for AND WIN our man’s atten­tion con­stant­ly, or he’ll hie off with the winner.

And then again, I could be over­an­a­lyz­ing. But I can’t com­ment on YOUR posts, so I’m post­ing myself. So there.