In which we try not to admit that Stephen King’s Misery scarred us for life

[bodlon]

Some of you may be aware that I think S. Bear Bergman is pretty neat. I enjoyed The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You a great deal, and got to see hir speak this year.

I might have fanboyed hir a little. Very large values of a little.

Ze posted recently about hir experiences of having fans, but also of being one, and having to negotiate that weird space between being a fan while also being a peer (and, in this case, a would-be collaborator). This is odd territory, and a place I've been on occasion, and so I've been reflecting on the values I try to bring to those kinds of interactions.

After some reflection, I've managed to parse my feelings out into a sort of Pirate Code -- guidelines I try to apply (with varying degrees of success) in an effort not to be a creepy jerk. I can't swear I've always managed to uphold these, or that I haven't made ridiculous missteps along the way, but I thought it might be interesting to share them here:

1) Do not be ashamed of being a fan. There's nothing to be ashamed of.
2) Remember that you're a stranger, and that while you may know a lot about a person, you don't personally know him/her. Do your best to gracefully accept all the consequences of that, like not having a magical instant connection with someone, having your name forgotten, etc.
3) Sincerity and kindness in the moment is still sincerity and kindness, even if some of the hard lessons of #2 are also in play.
4) Be respectful of time, personal space, etc. Particularly bad choices include trapping someone in an elevator, grabbing, cornering, etc. If you would be alarmed if a stranger did the same thing to you, it's probably a bad idea.
5) Don't oversell -- or undersell -- yourself, especially if you're trying to establish a peer/collaborator relationship.
6) Be sincere. Don't treat the person like a means to an end, even if you really want that end.

I'd be curious to see what some of you think about this, especially since I know people who exist on wildly different ends of the spectrum. Thoughts? Additions? Hilarious and awkward experiences? Awesome outcomes?

~*~

- Jolene (of "Flat Jolene" fame) is doing an F U Cancer BBQ Fun and Fundraiser. You can read more about her experience with metastatic cancer here. (Note: you may need to have a Facebook account to read these links.)

- Randomly interesting thing from the 1700's: Instructions to Apprentices on Leaving the Foundling Hospital over at Georgian London.

- Bart Leib will shave his glorious curly locks for charity if Broken Slate sells sufficiently well on Friday. Check it out!

- Netflix is changing their pricing structure. Considering that I have to maintain DVD service because a) their whole library is not available for streaming, and b) my mother is a deafened adult without a gaming console, and is thus doubly unable to utilize their streaming service. I am less than delighted, and I think it's a bad business move, but the boycott rage I'm seeing in certain quarters strikes me as a little bit ridiculous.

- Good news: Congress is at least vaguely looking at the concept of whether DOMA harms families. Bad news: Republicans continue to reject actual reality and keep trying to postpone final repeal of DADT.

- Random Acts of Publicity Week is coming up! Anybody else want to play?

- You should probably quit your job. Reading this article made me incredibly angry. Not because it's wrong, but because I identify more strongly than I'd like with the problem of dreams deferred for things that drain us. (ETA: One of the things I'm seeing a lot of comments about is how this article comes from a place of privilege, and how doing "meaningful" things often involves doing other work to make that meaningful work possible. I agree wholeheartedly -- I'm a writer, and a day job is likely to be my way of life indefinitely -- and I probably should have included that when I posted originally. It just wasn't the place from which my own feelings were arising, so it slipped my mind as I was trying to wrap up this post.)

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com

Comments

[copperbadge]

The "Quit your Job" article made me angry too, mostly because it's incredibly entitled. TV News journalists make a jillion dollars a year, and Microsoft middle managers make enough to support themselves while they launch a charity. If I quit my job I don't have money for next month's rent. It also implies that nobody reading the article already has a meaningful job, and that meaningful hobbies and extracurriculars can't exist in tandem with a career.

Quitting your job to follow a dream isn't a matter of having "too much to do" for about 90% of the population; it's a matter of having to feed oneself, as you well know. That is, true, an "immediate problem", but I really don't like the implication that people are somehow lesser or weak for choosing food and housing over the dream. It's absolutely unfair we have to give up our loves for our lives, but that asshole seems to think we're giving up our loves because we can't stop checking our email or something.

(Am not cranky at you, obvs, but I had to vent somewhere :D)