This makes me very sad. I've come here as a refugee not just from the original Chez Tremblay and the BBM Board at IMDb before that, but from an online community I've posted to religiously for the last eight years and met and spent face time with several members thereof. I ultimately stopped posting there because several of them were emailing or PMing me and telling me I was taking "things that don't matter" too seriously. "Things that don't matter" being the results of the 2004 election, the mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and most recently what happened on Black Sunday, otherwise known as March 5, 2006. I felt so utterly misunderstood and conditionally cared about. I still do and still feel kind of betrayed by those people I thought were my friends - several of whom have visited and stayed in my home. I really thought I was going out of my way to be respectful of their opinions about these matters when we posted publicly about them - they thought I was not. I'll still never know if I really was at fault - I re-read my more combative posts and honestly couldn't find any venom in them. I just ultimately decided it wasn't the place for me - for whatever reasons, I just could not get along with these people without feeling like I was repressing the very essence of myself.
I don't know what posts Surfie's referring to - I must have missed them somehow. But I'm sorry he's leaving. I do totally understand it in relation to my own experience ('cause, hey, it *is* all about me, after all
) but I'll miss his opinions, most of which I enthusiastically agreed with even though I didn't always say so, and the way he often made me laugh out loud with his ascerbic (and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible) wit.
For what it's worth, I love all of you. There's not a one of you here that's pissed me off yet. And that's saying a lot!
I don't always agree with the opinions expressed, but I find them all thought-provoking and delivered for the most part with a great deal of respect and consideration. Some of them have even managed to make me change my mind, which is *really* saying a lot. And maybe some of you have relatively normal families, but mine could win an award (maybe not from the Academy) for dysfunctionality. If you were like my biological family, some of us would be refusing to talk to some of the others and then using me as buffer/go-between.
I'm here to tell you that there are some things that are thicker than blood and stronger than DNA. Have I mentioned that I love you all?
Sorry, again, to see you go, Surf. I understand, but I'm sad, too.