Oh Yeah... Life is Fair

"Oh yeah: life is fair." --Al Bundy, "Married With Children"

There is a tremendous freedon in writing for a blog that absolutely no one reads. There's no worry of condemnation from netnerds who decry your lack of pr0n and wArEz, no attacks from the woo woos, and basically there are no judgmental responses. While there's no communication, there's no risk either.

Yesterday I went to something called the St. Louis Meetup of Meretups. All of the special interst groups on the meetup website got together for a large picnic. About 200 or so people showed up.

It was a typical gathering of people, like many I have been unfortunate to see before. Everyone gravitated into their own little cliques, and if you were an outsider, forget it. I found that trying to start a conversation was like pulling teeth. I finally gave up in disgust. If I was going to be ignored, I could do it just as well at my apartment.

But you know, I found it interesting: I went on the meetup website after the gathering. There was nothing but praise for the picnic, with the usual banalities ("a good time was had by all" and so on). For a while I wondered about that: I couldn't have been the only person to not have enjoyed himself. And then it occured to me: these people wanted to fit in. At least some of them were lying. I did my part by telling the truth about my experiences. Hopefully some more brave souls will see my lead and follow suit.

Or maybe it's like that for every gathering I have been to: a good portion of the participants find the whole thing tedious. They don't say anything, and either keep going to the gatherings (suffering in silence) or giving up on them. And the people who organized them don't have a clue.

I suspect that it's also a result of the old throwing good money after bad phenomenon: people put time and effort into going to such gatherings, and rather than 'fess up and admit that they threw their time away, they keep going: in their minds, they figure that it's better to waste more of their time rather than admit they did something stupid.

Another onlibe group had meetings, a few of which I attended. I didn't particularly care for those either. I was told that it was *my* fault, and that I should keep going and going and going to thise meetings, and I would eventually enjoy them (apparently through some process of osmosis). I think the person that told me that was probably of the throwing good money after bad crowd.

For now, I am going to stick to surfing the web and future book projects. I get much more satisfaction out of those.

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