Must contain rage at receiving passive-aggressive emails sent from spurned gentlemen suitors.

It's a double whammy. (Mmm... double...)

I blog a lot, I suppose, compared to the average blogger. I've had this blog for less than a year, and I'm almost at 250 posts. That's completely normal for me.

So, my other, now defunct, blog, on a bigger site with much more traffic, had a decent fanbase with a fairly equal male to female ratio.

Invariably, I'd get messages from men, usually in my area, telling me that I understood them better than anyone else, that we were the same person, that we were soulmates, that we had to meet, that I got things that no other person on this planet would "get".

In fact, the very first email I received because of this blog was exactly that message. And the man who sent it, long gone by now, reacted poorly to my "thanks, but no thanks" response.

This blog was never supposed to "go public". I was never going to use the account associated with it to make comments on other blogs. That wasn't the plan. It was supposed to be my quiet place to write and think.

But things changed.

I'm glad they did.

Anyhow, derailed.

Blog --> creepy emails --> annoyed V

It seems vaguely ironic to me that the men who have messaged me in the past with that declaration of similiarity are acting so far from what makes me comfortable.

But I'm polite. I'm always polite.

You sit there, staring at your screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard, wondering how you are going to compose your response. If I felt like digging into my sent messages, I'd toss up some examples. Mostly polite: "please stop re-inforcing your idealized image of me based off of text and the occasional image" combined with a "whoa there, cowboy" sentiment.

Sometimes they get bitter and angry. Easy to deal with.

Sometimes they apologize and want to get to know you, but that nearly always circles back round to their intitial desires and they're really doing a poor job of hiding it. You keep up a light conversation, but they'll keep edging to more, keep hinting, keep suggesting, until you finally decide that you're wasting time, not just your own, but his. And you stop contact.

But they keep emailing.

And emailing. Getting more and more snarky as their mask slips up.


Which is what I received today.

Just writing you to see how you were doing? I'm transitioning from my job. I think I first wrote you like a week before I got my job. 8 months later, I'm outta here. Strange.

But you probably don't care.

I just checked in to see if you had written a new blog posting.

And, to some, this probably looks like a mostly innocent email.

But since I've received prior emails, seen how he writes, see how he interacted with other readers, I can tell you it's very much not.

And it irritates me on two levels.

1. He has so little respect for me, that he's so focused on his insecurity that he's starting to lash out.

2. That I attract men like this regularly. I hate it.

You would think, with what I write, with the level of self-analysis that I go into (which I don't find to be that deep, but that's me), with my rants about men, about sexuality, about social/sexual interactions, about keeping your insecurities/rage/depression/psychosis internal and taking responsibility for the way you feel, that I would not get men who are convinced that I'm The One for them and then do exactly this.

So much of what I rant about, stuff that he's read, is contained in this letter.

And he's so caught up in his fantasty of me that he doesn't even notice. Isn't truly reading what I have to say.

"I'm transitioning from my job."

Transitioning has multiple meanings, all of which I would have to respond to in query, or flat-out ignore, if I chose to get back to him. Has more positive connotations than negative, but there is that potential of being laid off. He was writing, he was a writer, professionally (though not books), and he knows this fascinates me.

"I think I first wrote you like a week before I got my job. 8 months later, I'm outta here."

Not accurate. He emailed me a few months before he got that particular job. After he got it, he became more passive-aggressive with me, so I trailed off contact. He's referencing that silence here.

"But you probably don't care."

...I'm sorry, but I've got to call the wambulance for this one. Jeez. Could he be more of a little kid? Whine whine whine, pass-agress super-twin power activiate.

Who does that? If he hadn't gotten so creepy and fixated on me, if he had listened to me when I told him I wasn't interested, he wouldn't be in this spot.

"I just checked in to see if you had written a new blog posting."

And then the double-back! He's only there for me. He's only interested in the blog. Which is, and has been, dead for months. Will continue to be dead because of those types of emails.

I have this mild fear that I'm going to be running around Hollywood and Highland one of these days and he's going to spot me, recognize me, and accost me. Not physically, but verbally. Maybe physically. Maybe he'll tranq me from his balconey, drop one of those metal loops dog-catchers use over my shoulders, haul me up over the railing, and chain me to his bed.

Which would actually be kinda hot.