How to lose friends and alienate people

[j4]

I'm giving up IRC for the time being. Partly because it's taking up too much work time, and partly because I think generally it's currently doing me more harm than good.

Newsgroups and mailing lists have been getting me down. I'm so, so tired of everybody assuming that if I say "I feel..." or "I believe..." what I really meant to say must have been "I think you are evil and bad and wrong if you do not..." or "I despise you for failing to realise that...". It's just so wearing to have to preface everything I say with "I think, personally, for me, personally, in my head, NOT YOUR HEAD, MY HEAD."

I've been terrible, utterly terrible, at replying to email recently. Not because I don't have time, but because I just start to feel stressed when I think about replying, and then I put it off, and the longer I put it off, the harder it becomes to 'get round to' replying, because the layers of I'm-sorry-I-haven't-written-for-ages become harder to negotiate, and so on, and so forth.

I'm being an intolerable housemate and a crap friend to sion_a. I'm still filling his house with rubbish that just weighs him down and makes him unhappy, and it's not even making me happy, but I don't seem to be able to get round to getting rid of stuff, even the stuff I've already marked out for selling / giving away. And he's always unhappy, and there's nothing I can do about it; I don't know if I make it worse, because he can't say, but I feel sure that I do.

I feel as though a lot of my friends are going through awful times at the moment and there's nothing I can do to help; posting "*hugs*" on LiveJournal feels so futile, so patronising, but not doing so feels as though I must appear not to care.

I'm being a crap girlfriend, but I Don't Talk About That.

I'm so tired.

Comments

[nja.livejournal.com]

Made I laugh. And j4, I think you're being patient beyond reasonableness with Alex at the moment, certainly beyond my level of tolerance for his idiocy. And if you think you have a lot of crap which needs to be disposed of but you're too pathetic to do it, you ought to see my front "bedroom".

That's two sentences starting with "and". And that's not good, is it?

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Wot AJN said. You are being an Angel. I don't know, and this might sound strange, but I would guess that Alex is also thankful for your patience and your time.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Even after explaining that crap joke? :-/

Humour is so hard to explain. I mean, I could witter on about metaphor and intertextuality and juxtaposition and what-have-you but it feels rather like plucking the feathers off angels.