I’ve been rather amused (as I think some of you have been, too) by the comments exchange on the previous post, though I was somewhat disappointed to find that three of the dissenters were, in fact, the same person. That doesn’t help the angry mob image I’ve conjured in my mind, though one very angry person, perhaps a mob of sorts we can make.

Which brought me to the days of flame wars on IRC and on message boards. These days aren’t over of course, because as long as you have humans you will have conflict, but I remember a time when people treated cruel words online with much shock and unhappiness. It wasn’t inline with appropriate, uh, (forgive me for using the word) netiquette to do so. And that people had to even come up with that concept—and that awful neologism—in the first place.

But that’s what you’ll get. I wonder sometimes, if people enjoy conflict and unhappiness just for the sake of it. Just to dip themselves pruny in self-pity and stew in their self-inflicted confusion. (Though speaking from experience, I have to say that confusion, self-inflicted or otherwise, is often the same. Or I could have been confused. Ho ho ho.)

I have friends who will b**ch about their other halves to other friends. I don’t know; I can’t complain about mine unless I were really upset or needed advice badly beyond my limited scope of view (and how limited it has shown itself to be in the past).

But there are some who will just complain to get friends on their side and not their partners’. Why is that? Personally, I’m afraid of saying too much negative stuff about mine in the heat of the moment, because there will be listening ears who will stir up bad memories and be complete wet blankets in your later moments of happiness, eradicating any chance of truly revelling in them.

Which brings me back yet again to the concept of people just not quite being able to be happy or enjoy someone’s happiness—most of the time someone else’s, but sadly, sometimes their own too.

And while people will wield the oft-used cliché, that they “just want to be happy”, you’ll find that they don’t. By driving by your ex’s house, convincing yourself that catharsis will come through continued attempts to contact the other, writing poem after poem, you’re just picking at a wound.

Worse yet, it’s getting bigger each time you rip off the scab. Worse yet, you like it.

I don’t have the answers. But I do know I genuinely want to be happy. I just have to find a way to cement it down, unshakingly, now that I’ve grabbed it. And I will be doing everything I can to lay the brickwork. I “just want to be happy”, of course—then again, don’t we all?

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Oh and hey, Credit Suisse, thank you for reading me so regularly, even on your business trips. ;)