muckefuck | The other side of the mountain

The other side of the mountain

Late last year, when the members of the cliquish peer group who lured me to LiveJournal/were lured at the same time I was weren't posting enough to keep me entertained, I started doing some browsing. There was this guy

vianegativa who had posted a comment in a friend's journal and I followed it to his profile. When I saw his picture, I exclaimed:

"Holy Shit, it's Matt the Ewok!"

Like me, Matt's involved with the incestuous Chicago bear community. I don't run into him much now that I'm no longer such a major tramp, but we still occasionally run into one another. Out of curiosity, I started following links from his Friend's list and quickly recognised

drubear, and someone else from my Bear Naked days whose username (and real name!) I've since forgotten.

I had uncovered a bearish corner of LiveJournal--and the cultural differences were striking. Few people in my original friend group (or the nest of alumni I uncovered in another serendipitous bout of browsing) use pictures of themselves as LJ icons. Mine comes from a Chinese scroll my boyfriend gave me,

bunj's from a famous mannerist painting, and

rollick's from a variety of wicked cool art she apparently owns.

The bears, however, nearly all have faithful photos of themselves; some reveal a great deal of themselves. Almost all their usernames contain "bear" (or it's equivalent in other languages, like ursus) or "cub", whereas many of the alumni et al. use variatons of nicknames we've had for years. Almost immediately, I began to stumble across flamewars; I can only remember one uncivil argument in any of my Friends' journals, and that was obstensibly about politics rather than personalities.

So I pulled back. I've been keeping a very low profile here so I can feel free to talk about work and personal problems without having to worry too much about who was listening. A faithful reader could figure out where I work, for instance, but a casual one probably wouldn't find enough clues. Already, because of the presence of several close friends, there's a fair bit I don't feel I can talk freely about. (We're not exactly without our personality conflicts, after all, but, if anything, we're more nonfrontational about them now than we were in college.) If I were to be "outed" to the bears, my kvetching about issues with my boyfriend could become grist for the rumour mill. Who wants that?

But now, I'm starting to waiver. Every time I peruse Friends' Friends lists, I see people I'd love to reconnect with. (

sfkuma, who knew you were here?) Even more than belonging to the same listserv or newsgroup, LiveJournal gives one a sense of keeping in touch with someone with the absolute minimum of effort. It's tempting, so very tempting...

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One option is to do locked entries readable only to custom friends groups. (Like friends only, but aimed at a subset of your friends, so you could do bear-only or geek-only posts.)

Even more than belonging to the same listserv or newsgroup, LiveJournal gives one a sense of keeping in touch with someone with the absolute minimum of effort.

LiveJournal has the advantage that it encourages people to do generic updates on their lives and activities in a way that other sorts of fora don't. (Not that I generally take advantage of this; other than the Las Vegas trip report, I pretty much stick with random thoughts and observations at random intervals.) On the other hand, it drives me nuts that there's no better way to monitor new comments on other people's journals than to scan up and down the page and see if the number of comments has increased. (At least, I don't know of any-- if there's a view option that will show all unread comments, I'd be interested in knowing about it. What I'd really like is a Usenet-style interface to LJ, with each user treated as a separate newsgroup and a list view that says "2 unread entries and 16 unread comments in

rollick's journal" or whatever, and brought up only the unread material unless I requested otherwise.)

BTW, is "obstensibly" a clever portmanteau of "obstinate" and "ostensibly", or just a typo?

I know about the Friends groups options and I've been meaning to experiment with them, but I get the feeling it would be confusing in practice--not to mention a little limiting. I mean, if I don't want certain people to see one of my entries, why am I posting it at all?

I hear you on the Usenet-style interface.

As for "obstensibly", that's actually the way I say the word. So it's not a typo as such. Be generous; call it a quirk.

The one I really liked in your post was "nonfrontational." It sounds even wussier than "nonconfrontational," somehow.

Of course, part of it may just be that we're all old enough to know that Exposing Our Honesty to each other seldom actually helps anything, or old enough by now to have grown ossified in our personal failings and callous toward those of others we know, or old enough by now to not consider personal conflict exposure more important than the devoidance of same.

All strong possibilities. The thing about the laissez-faire approach is that it only works until there's a serious conflict. If one does and there are no communication channels available because everyone's decided that even the most respectful confrontation is Plain Icky and Not What Grown-Ups Do, then it becomes easier to let the relationship wither than put effort into fixing it. It was through being nice and non-confrontational and distant that I almost lost my friendship with my father, since if I didn't talk to him at all, then I didn't have to put up with any of his annoying personal failings.

The thing about the laissez-faire approach is that it only works until there's a serious conflict. If one does and there are no communication channels available because everyone's decided that even the most respectful confrontation is Plain Icky and Not What Grown-Ups Do, then it becomes easier to let the relationship wither than put effort into fixing it.

This is also true, O Socrates. I didn't mean to imply that laissez-faire devoidance was the right (or wrong) thing to do, just that I think it correlates strongly to age. The level of emotional energy that any of us possess to deal with relationships outside the primary one generally dwindles as we get older -- and whether the concomitant nonfrontationalism is merely making a virtue of necessity or if it's What Grown-Ups Do may be hard to tell from any perspective.

I think there really isn't a single right way to handle all possible relationships; some are worth the fracas, some are worth being laid-back about. (And annoyingly, even if person A thinks it's worth a fracas, but person B has silently resolved "one more fracas and I am so gone," they may well both be right.)

You could always start a secret lj unconnected with this one to keep in touch with this other set of folks. Granted, that might be just as confusing as having "friends groups" (which I didn't even know you could do until I read this). I've got extry codes if you need one.

Actually, I've toyed with the idea of starting a new journal that's totally anonymous and "outing"

muckefuck. But that also strikes me as a lot of trouble, keeping two journals and having to decided what goes in each. I mean, I might as well just make Private entries--which I have done a couple of times already.

Well, I selfishly hope that you won't move all of your Hot Bear Sex posts to a separate journal or friends group, since I like the cultural tourism experience.

And I definitely agree with

lhn about the need for a usenet-like interface for comments. The current setup is really annoying, though I have to admit that it would be less annoying if I weren't looking at LiveJournal about 50 times a day.

See, this is what I mean. How would I have known in advance that

prilicla should be in the Hot Bear Sex Friends group? I'm currently involved in an extensive discussion of language in the journal of a bear friend; would I miss out on such experiences in the future if I ghettoised linguistic posts in the Sad But Social Geek Friends group?

As for the Usenet thing, LiveJournal was clearly designed to be first and foremost an online journal and only secondarily to host discussions. I sometimes get the feeling people don't know what to make of my interest in running debates.

Well, different journals mean log-in log-out. Unless they use different clients.

Custom friends groups help in some ways. I've made executive decisions on what to put in what journal. Plus I have subgroups in my main journal.

I know one person who asked what type of post people wanted to be able to read. "what will you put up with?"

Glück!

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