note: “holoblomo” stands for Horribly Local Blogging Month, my response to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that happens every November. The NaNoWriMo challenge asks writers to compose 50,000 words in a month; I chose 10,000 as my goal. Enjoy.
So here we are.
Recently, I was told by someone I’d just met that he’d heard from people I’ve never met that I hated someone.
This struck me as odd. Not only do I not hate the person in question, but apparently total strangers are out there somewhere talking about my relationship with this person. Only, I don’t really have a close relationship with this person. I know this person and he knows me, but we’ve never had a conversation that’s lasted longer than a few minutes and we’ve had exactly one email exchange. I have a good deal of respect for this person, and if anything, I’m not sure how fond he is of me. But none of that actually matters.
Because I don’t hate people. Hate is a strong, dangerous word.
Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of things that I hate: intolerance, terrorism, irrationality, bullying, fear-mongering, evil, profiting from plight, cilantro... but these are just concepts and objects. People bring about different feelings: pity for the pompous and toxic ones, concern and sad nostalgia for those who have shifted to the dark side, nod-and-smile tolerance for the desperate show-offs, frustration for those who have unabashedly wronged me, impatience for the stupid ones who should know better, and love for the lovely. And yes, there is dislike for a few who aren’t even truly a part of my life (and some of these aren’t so much people as they are corporations with poor customer service). But true hate doesn’t fit in there.
Maybe if we decided to reserve our hate exclusively for things like bedbugs and cancer instead of people, we’d be able to bridge our gaps and experience the teeniest bit of unity. And even if there are people out there who insist on hating people who are different from them, I think we can all join hands and get behind some universal hate for bedbugs and cancer. That’s got to be a small step towards some kind of world peace, right?
Seriously, though, if any of you have heard that I hate you, I most certainly do not. Random idiots must have either misconstrued something I said out of context, or outright made that crap up. I don’t know why. Maybe it was so they’d have something to tweet.
I strongly dislike that.
And that’s 13,309 words.
Yes indeed. Welcome to me.
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