Rambling post commenced as a displacement activity to distract me from thinking about important but distressing things.

I’ve noticed that the standard of post around here peaked a few weeks ago; Kissa's one about bowels - despite a lack of photographic evidence of her claims - being the apogee. At a S?ITYS general meeting informally convened over email (quorum = Kissa and myself), we lamented the fact that we had nothing sufficiently amusing but impersonal to blog about, and so S?ITYS would likely lay fallow for a bit, while we got our shit together.

This post won't really do anything to raise the tone and increase the level of traffic around here - in case you missed the title, I only started writing it as a displacement activity to distract myself from thinking about more important but distressing things. Well, maybe distressing is being melodramatic (Countess as Camille, anyone?), but some things that don’t really bear thinking about right now. And ‘important’ is an interesting choice of word, too… Clearly my work is not stimulating enough, or I don’t have enough of it. I reckon I just have an incredibly low boredom threshold, and my mind too easily wanders away from the human rights of others and onto the more salacious aspects of my personal life (and the personal lives of my friends, when they deign to share!).

I haven’t even got the same charge out of checking up on my favourite blogs today. Tho’ there’s a new tool on the block. I commented on a post he made about having a migraine for which he took aspirin (I know!), which was written in real time - as if he were blogging and suffering a migraine in the here and now. I'm a migraineuse, and there is nothing in this world more infuriating than some wanker complaining of a migraine when all they have is a bit of a headache. For future reference, if:

(a) the pain is relieved by aspirin; and

(b) you can perform other tasks like walking, talking and using a computer;

YOU DO NOT HAVE A MIGRAINE. YOU HAVE A HEADACHE AND ARE BEING A LITTLE SOOKY EMO-LISTENING BABY ABOUT A RELATIVELY INNOCUOUS AMOUNT OF PAIN. If you really did suffer a migraine, you would likely kill yourself if a headache makes you sob for your Mommy.

So I expressed surprise in his comments that he could in fact function while putatively suffering from a migraine, and that was not curled up in a ball in a darkened room somewhere trying not to stab himself in the head just for the modicum of blessed relief that would bring. And, as I community service, I suggested that aspirin was probably not the most effective medication to take, and mentioned that I had had some success with Imigran.

I promise I wasn’t being spiteful - I was genuinely trying to reach out and make contact with a fellow blogger. I received in response a bitchy - and dare I say defensive? - retort to the effect that he was in fact legitimately suffering a migraine, that the post was not written ‘entirely’ in real time and that he had taken something other than aspirin to relieve the pain, but didn’t want to confuse or alienate his international readers by namechecking a particular product that may have a different trade name in other parts of the world.

I’m not kidding. Is this guy a colossal tosspot for writing with an ‘international readership’ in mind or what?

PARTIAL RETRACTION: In the interests of probity, I revisited the blog in question and have discovered that my recollection of our brief exchange was clouded by the fact that I am delusional (and likely paranoid). For the record, the offending blogger was not bitchy or defensive in response to my admittedly belligerent comment. He was right, I was taking him too literally and I was in fact the defensive one, leaping to the conclusion that he was not truly migraneur because of my personal sensitivity on this issue.

However, he really did write of keeping his posts accessible for his international readers. And he has repeated this sentiment in other posts. I’ll apologise for everything else, but I still think that is really wanky.

Basically, mea culpa. My partial bad. Sorry for the vitriol, random dude who probably never stumble across my admission of regret.

What a pointless post. But it was a relatively effective as a displacement activity, for what it’s worth. You should try it some time.