Stress? What Stress?

More years ago than I care to count my brother-in-law deemed me unfit to be taken anywhere in public. He did it because I entered a church bathroom, slipped on the floor, fell on my ass and swore. I wasn't the least bit quiet about it and he was in the men's room next door. By the time I got back to the gathering of mourners, they were all having a laugh at my expense.

See? I have this habit of getting myself into situations. In life, unlike the internet, I am usually given the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, I have had way more experience with life than I have with the internet and I tend to assume that everyone is essentially fair about misunderstandings because in life most people are. I keep forgetting that life and the internet bear very little resemblance to each other.

Someone that was a Twitter friend said something to Kurt Eichenwald, an editor from the magazine Vanity Fair. He immediately responded in an extremely condescending manner and in the 3rd person which is a little...well...crazy, frankly. She began to apologize and tried to explain that she meant her statement as agreement with his and not an insult towards him. He never responded and when I checked his feed I saw that he'd apparently logged off since there was nothing else said.

I had reached my 30 minute time frame so I logged out and then an hour later logged back in. That was my first mistake. My second mistake was when I attempted to be fair about what had occurred. In order to do that I had to remind my friend her tweet wasn't clear and he is bothered by many, many trolls. I honestly thought that he'd see her apology when he came back and try to clear the air with her. It also never occurred to me that she would feel I was calling her a troll. Hindsight is always 20/20. Too bad we don't have the same foresight.

Another friend began to defend her against what was perceived as an attack by me on her. That wasn't my intent and I still didn't understand what I'd done. I did see that I wasn't getting anywhere so I made a comment about an apology from Mr Eichenwald and dropped the subject. Which was too late. It was too late the minute I set words on screen to ask for fairness. I knew he'd been dealing with trolls and with his wife's breast cancer diagnosis, I just thought he was overreacting to something based upon his personal experiences, real life problems tend to creep into our internet whether we want them to or not.

Of course, I was wrong about Mr. Eichenwald making any attempt at clearing the air with her. Even if he has her blocked and is unable to read her apology, enough other people have brought it to his attention and he hasn't answered them either.

The upshot of this entire situation is that I now have probably lost a couple or more of friends that had value to me over someone that turns out to be undeserving of my respect. Maybe my doctor was right about limiting my exposure to the internet in order to help me control my blood pressure? I certainly haven't had too much luck with it being me.

Since I apparently can't be taken anywhere on the internet as well as in public, I am going to work very hard to achieve that 30 minute time frame the doctor said I should limit myself to. The less trouble I get into, the less stress I'll feel and the lower my blood pressure will go.