Week 1 minus several months
152 lbs

“You herpetic whore. Hope you ooze to death.”

This really wasn’t why I created a Google Alert around my my name.

I am an up and coming librarian, as far as librarians can up and come. I go to conferences regularly. I socially network. I write letters to the professional journals. I post to the listservs. In short. I am engaged. I am socially networked – not just online. So I have Google Alerts for many subjects. But I really do like to see when people are mentioning me or my library. It gives me kind of a buzz and helps me do my job better.

I mean, isn’t that why most of us are spending half our lives tapping out our opinions and making them “public” so that someone will read them and ooh and ah over our brilliance. Hopefully before they find some other version of the same concept. Because frankly thousands of people are having the exact same thought at the same time and are all posting and tweeting their thoughts as fast as they can think them.

We, or at least most of us, certainly aren’t getting paid to write this stuff. And we hopefully have a job that pays for the medical bills we are going to get for our carpal tunnel syndrome related to typing all day at work, and short sightedness related to staring at the screen, and obesity related to not moving from front of the computer, and back problems related to sitting hunched over the computer, and the vitamin D pills that will hopefully compensate for our never stepping out into the sunlight and…

Thus it was a shock to read an online tirade denouncing me in some exaggeratedly revolting terms and and suggesting that I was a herpetic whore putting out green slime from orifices I knew were not oozing anything. But it hurt. It did hurt terribly. What had I ever done to this person to deserve this? What could I do?

In retrospect I can laugh and feel pity for the man. But when everyone is talking to you about freedom of speech and glumly telling you that you have no recourse but to ignore it – the tears do flow. And the tears flowed so long and so hard that that my nose, which turns a shiny swollen red in response to any tide of emotion,  took on the look of a lighthouse beacon guiding boats into the harbor for several foggy days.

I tried to distract myself. I tried to console myself. Everyone I shared the post with, agreed that the writer must have been off his head when he wrote it. But no one seemed to think I could be hurt or suffering. None but one offered me a word of sympathy.

I was in a strange haze for many days. I was angry and bitter. I kept hoping I would hear that this person had been run over by a bus. I kept hoping that all the people who told me to suck it up/ignore it and move on with my life would be the brunt of this man’s crazy rants and then I would see how they took their own advice to ignore the rants. But the worst of all, I began to doubt myself. I must have done something to deserve this 5000 word diatribe.

Two weeks of moping around in the hope of sympathy and revenge is really not a very long time. But it was enough. Suddenly I shook myself off and the world of cliches began to fill my brain: Get a grip. Such is life. Life is too short. Geez, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Living well is the best revenge.

And all of a sudden I had a vision of this man’s family – his wife and kids and thought how much worse their lives must be than mine, if they had to live with him everyday. And I promised myself that I would never become that man. And I would never hurt anyone like that. I was going to delight in the world around me. I was going to focus on things that gave me and people around me pleasure and forget about the nasty.

And that is how began my adventures with the fine art of living the good life.