My Xanga fans didn’t follow me here. Good.
Dad had this annoying habit while I was growing up: The Air Force would send him off someplace for a week or two, then he’d come back and one of the first things he’d ask us kids was “Did you miss me?”
To you, this may not sound like an annoying habit, but you’d have to understand the circumstances. Dad is a lousy parent, and not having him around was one of the all-too-infrequent joys of childhood. Whenever Dad was around, we kids were either annoyances or projects. “Annoyances” meant that we made too much noise; that we played too roughly; that we lacked proper decorum in front of Dad’s friends; that I hadn’t brushed my teeth 10 times that day like I was supposed to (a little obsession with cleanliness on Dad’s part); and so forth. “Projects” meant that Dad wanted to put in some “quality parenting time,” so he’d play ball with us, or teach us something, and it inevitably ended in misery because whatever we were doing, we weren’t doing it right.
You know how nostalgia works? The brain has a tendency to remember the good stuff and, as a defense mechanism, blot out the bad stuff. That’s why, even though high school sucked, people attend high school reunions. (That, or to show off their worldly improvements, both real and imagined.) So most people remember only the good parts of childhood. But—sad to say—I have no good memories of Dad from childhood. None. The only good memories of him that I have came after I grew up and moved out of the house.
So when he said, “Did you miss me?” what on earth was I supposed to tell him? I didn’t miss him. Half the time I prayed that the Air Force would make his trips longer.
I don’t really miss him now, but it’s different. I expect that if I hung around him all the time I would be very annoyed with him. Brief visits keep things reasonable.
I bring this up because Kerry has lately developed the annoying habit of going someplace briefly, then returning to ask me, “Did you miss me?”
She didn’t grow up with Dad, so she doesn’t understand how loaded a question that is for me. (In part, she does. Dad still asks that question.)
But let’s be realistic. She was gone for a day. Sometimes two. Sometimes two hours. Did I miss her?
Honestly, no. I was doing other stuff during that time. I would have been doing that stuff whether she had been here or not. Had she been here, I would have been doing my thing; she would have been doing her thing; it might have taken three hours; no missing anyone would have taken place. I would have missed my iPod more.
The trouble is that there is no polite way to tell people that, for any stretch of time, they were irrelevant to you. There is only the honest way, which annoys them because they were hoping for some ego-boosting paean on their return. Really, what kind of screwed-up question is “Did you miss me” anyway?
This is not a self-pitying entry. In fact, the subject amuses me.
Since I switched my blog from Xanga to Blogger, the number of comments I have received dropped dramatically. Which is great. I don’t need praise from the choir, and I don’t need critiques from the ignorant. What I need is a place to vent, which is the reason my weblog exists in the first place. In fact, as some of you may have noticed, I got rid of the comments on this blog entirely. (If you want to make comments, you’ll have to settle for email. I may post even ’em if I think they’re relevant, but they’d better be pretty darn relevant.)
Yes, I found the praise annoying too. I always find praise annoying. Want some reasons why? Okay:
- I feel praise is better spent on God, who deserves it much more than I do.
- I don’t need to be told I’m great. I’m an egomaniac, and so I already believe myself to be great. (If anything, we egomaniacs need to be humbled, frequently.)
- Sometimes the praise is of things that I don’t like about myself, like my tendency to be sarcastic, snide, rude, obnoxious, and so forth. I don’t need my bad behaviors to be encouraged. I don’t care how much it entertains you; there’s something wrong with people who are amused by bad behavior.
- There are many Christians who are involved in “encouragement ministry.” That is, they feel called to cheer other people up. I believe it’s a legitimate calling; too often people don’t get enough praise. (Unfortunately it’s often because they can’t hear God, so they can’t hear the encouragement he regularly gives us.) Also unfortunately, a lot of these “encouragers” aren’t very good at it. It feels forced, stretched, fake, or shallow. And since I’m already an egomaniac, all the praise they give me is nothing compared to how I already feel about myself, so… they need to minister to someone else.
- Worst of all: Whenever I get fan mail, the result is an unconscious tendency to pander to the fans. Which is illogical; it wasn’t by pandering to the fans that I got fans in the first place, but fans tend to make a person forget that. (This is why bands tend to suck when they release their second CD—they and their record label forget this too.) I don’t need to be self-censoring for fear of alienating my fan base; I need to RANT, dammit. I need to rant like a crack-addicted street preacher. If I don’t, I can’t be the happy, cheerful, positive guy that you don’t see on my blog.
But that last one brings up the amusing part about fans: They’re all an illusion anyway.
Anyone remember Luke Perry? He used to be on some godawful teen soap opera called Beverly Hills 90210. He had tons of fans. Then his show got cancelled. What’s he doing now? I don’t know. Where are his fans? Well, his show got cancelled, so they starting watching other TV shows and forgot about him. He’s not yet willing to do The Surreal Life, so I’ll betcha he doesn’t miss the stalkers.
I make no claims to be better or worse than Luke Perry, but I noted that once I dropped off Xanga I lost pretty much all of those so-called “fans” on Xanga who were telling me that they couldn’t live without my blog. (I doubted these statements from the beginning, anyway. If I believed any of them were true, I’d have stopped writing for a month just to see how high the suicide rate climbed.) Of course they can live without my blog. They can also live without their favorite TV shows, music, movies, and Jesus. How can I compare to any of that? I’m just a blogger.