Sunday
Mar112007
The Mob Is Fickle, No? My Advice Is: Fuck'em
I have snapped back into fine form and my newly acquired perspective is locked into place like a brand new seatbelt. Here's hoping it stays firmly fastened.
I've received quite a few emails from you asking what in hell my last post was all about. If you are confused let me explain. And if you have a low tolerance for Soap Operas and couldn't make it through an episode of 90210 or Party of Five, you best sit this blog out. It will give you a headache and if you don't smoke, you may take it up. What follows is the Cliff Notes, believe it or not.
What happened was this; In December Serge's ex-girlfriend started a blog on which she writes only about me and Serge. Initially, I tried to take Caroline's website with a grain of salt. After all, I have written about her on this site. Not very often, mind you, and only when provoked by nasty emails and such from her. And once, I wrote a very self-deprecating story called The Click By in an effort to apologize to her for leaving a snarky comment on an old website of hers. And then we made nice. Many of you may even remember her commenting several times on this website.
The nice lasted a few months. Then, a year ago, she sent my husband a degrading email about me, accusing me of looking at her MySpace page too much and, God forbid, making friends with some of the same people that were her MySpace friends. I know, it's just silly. And childish. I can assure you I am completely embarrassed to have played any part in any of this. Caroline's nasty email to Serge prompted him to respond in my defense, of course. A flurry of negative emails were exchanged and then all communication with Caroline was over. For good, I hoped.
Last November, out of the blue, she emailed me again.
This email really weirded me out. Emailing someone for looking at your public MySpace page? Who does that? Sure I looked at her MySpace page from time to time, as people do. Because, well, I guess I thought folks are on MySpace, creating profiles, so people look at them. I have a MySpace page and I know she looks at it from time to time because that's how she found this blog. It's MySpace, not a secret Pentagon website and I don't have the time nor the inclination to monitor who looks at my MySpace page, or this blog, for that matter.
Caroline's MySpace profile wasn't a private/personal page. It was a page for her music, for people to listen to the songs she has written. I just couldn't understand her obsession with whether I had an occasional look at her page. After all, she read this blog every day from nearly the moment I started it. As for the song that she accused me of copying off her page? We're both girls of the same age and are likely to have some similar taste in music. And, come on. What was the point of emailing me that?
In retrospect, I think that because she analyzed my blog so much she assumed seeing my IP address on her MySpace page meant I was analyzing hers as well. In all reality I was just popping by her page and dozens of others for a few seconds while bored. I can't imagine the time it would take to daily monitor IP addresses on a MySpace page. Everyone is linked to everyone! There've got to be a thousand strangers that wander by your site every day. I was also really surprised that she would contact me again. Nine months prior she had already sent that rude email to my husband about me, dragging him into some juvenile email war when the last thing he wanted was to communicate with his ex-girlfriend from three years ago. It seemed she wanted to ignite a similar exchange by calling me out for looking at her page. At this point I didn't know if she still read my blog nor did I care - it is on the internet, after all. I had learned my lesson from prior tangles with her and I did not reply to her latest email.
About two weeks later she started the blog about me and my husband. It seemed a bit obsessive and excessive, but she could have blogged her little heart out and I would have never been the wiser. Yet she began linking to many of you and anyone else who had ever mentioned me or linked to me on the internet, including the hate bloggers. You all immediately saw through her pseudonyms, which is what she wanted, of course, and you emailed me with the link.
I was absolutely gutted when I clicked over to her blog. She was writing very personal things about Serge, his brother, his band, and then she was attacking me, my writing and my marriage to my husband. All of this hate and anger so she could portray the fact that she thinks I look at her MySpace page too much? Because the other stuff, my rude comments on her website, we'd resolved that nearly two years prior when I apologized to her. I had been stupid enough to think we'd cultivated a sort of friendship. We'd exchanged a few emails, she was commenting on my blog... Little did I know she was gathering information to use against me in a public blog she would start all about me.
My apology to her in 2005 was genuine. I felt so bad for what I'd done that I didn't feel the need to justify my behavior by letting her know I had always been aware that she was posting on Serge's message board under a pseudonym. She was asking about herself, making weird comments and linking back to her website. That is what ultimately ignited my comment on her site. At that time I simply apologized for what I'd done, she accepted and we both let the matter drop. I thought. So her vicious portrayal of me on her blog two years later is just stunning, to say the least.
Although she is desperately trying to present a particular image on her blog, I have a pretty good handle on the woman behind the words and my husband knew her intimately for four years. Unfortunately, Caroline is a surprisingly good writer. She has obviously spent months carefully planning what she'd write and is able to successfully portray herself and the situation in a very strategic light. But neither Serge, who hasn't read her blog, or I believe for a second that her website was written with the rational intent of putting the situation behind her.
She can now backtrack all she wants, can wax poetic about how her blog is simply a way to put the situation between me and her in her past. That's just more of her usual justification for deplorable conduct. Behavior worse than any thus far in this sad, overly dramatized little tale. The situation was in the past. Until she tried to contact me again and then started her blog. How does writing a hurtful blog solely about me and my husband, linking to our friends, his fans and hate bloggers she knows write about me put the situation in the past? That's making it very present and very public. The words have been carefully written, the damage done. It's all there in black and white on her blog.
It wasn't what she was writing about me that upset me the most. I had already written about my mistakes on this blog, had apologized to her in several heartfelt emails. What I don't understand is why she feels it necessary to degrade Serge, his career, his music, his band and fans? Why, three years later, does she still care about my husband's world? Why does she need to use her time spent with him during what both describe as a completely dysfunctional relationship as ammunition to hurt his reputation? Why does she need to ridicule my looks, make fun of my writing, my marriage? Is that necessary to explain her 'side' in this whole melodrama? She is lashing out at anything she knows is important to us, laying it out in dramatic chapters written not with closure in mind, but an overall effort to hurt.
From the moment she became aware of the existence of this blog, which she found by monitoring my MySpace page, she has tracked me throughout the internet while she continued to monitor Serge, his band and fans. I couldn't write a blog post, make a MySpace friend or change my page colors without her assuming it was somehow directed at her. She has become lost in a world of internet monitoring, IP address tracking for three years now and it needs to stop. I knew she was reading this blog, logging on several times a day but I would never dream of emailing her about it. Ha ha, I know you look at my website. What is the point there? That's ridiculous and the only motivation behind that is embarrassment. What I do on this blog or MySpace, what colors I choose, what pictures I post - none of it should concern her. Period. If she's so worried about me or anyone else looking at her page she should make it private. Bottom line.
But she couldn't let it go. Couldn't stop policing. Once she got her blog rolling, she methodically tracked me, Marah fans and anyone who reads this blog across the internet in an effort to garner readers and embarrass me and Serge. Serge has never written about or spoken publicly about Caroline since their break-up, so her attacks on him seem especially vindictive. Her blog isn't an effort to "move forward" at all. It is a ridiculous analysis of everything I do on the internet, dragged out to publicly shame me. Yet she presents it under the guise of "closure" and "looking back". She knows the extent of what she's done, how far she's gone to get strangers, my friends and Serge's fans to read her repellent blog. And she knows why. In the end, this fingerpointing between her and I is just that. Fingerpointing. A she said/she said war that she's turned into a public spectacle. All that matters to me now is that she knows I know what she's done in an effort to hurt - and she knows Serge knows. The rest of it all is internet grandstanding for strangers.
So. What to do? It's difficult to react rationally when someone, a stranger, is so intent on hurting you and portraying you as a crazy person to your friends, your husbands friends and his fans. I've handled it well and I've handled it poorly, as you can imagine when trying to deal with embarrassments dragged out in such a public fashion. Respond/not respond? It's all so much internet posturing and ridiculousness. Still, not responding for the first month I knew about the blog was difficult. But I managed it. After all, what had transpired between us was silly internet shenanigans in which we had both participated. She was giving it her spin, of course, but for the most part, it was okay with me. Surely the fact that she has written an entire blog about Serge and me, filled with under-handed jabs and degrading characterizations about us speaks for itself, I thought.
The final blow came when she attempted to trash the career Serge has spent more than a decade working so hard for. She ridiculed Serge and tried to get as many fans of his as she could to believe he says horrible things about them. She then said Serge was cheating on me and she felt bad for me. Okay, I thought. Recounting our internet silliness is one thing, but this girl has done lost her mind, yo.
Despite my husband's constant advice to ignore her, even after she took shots at his band and fans and our marriage, I emailed Caroline in early February. I felt like she needed closure that maybe I could help provide. I'll spare you the agony of reposting my email here, but once again I apologized for ever hurting her feelings. At her request, I took down anything I'd published on the internet in which she was mentioned. Her response? A new chapter on her blog about how certain she is that I copied her MySpace colors and her YouTube videos and a few other juvenile accusations about my writing.
I can't say I was surprised. What has shocked me is the lengths she has gone to in order to publicize her negativity. Because I avoided the internet for most of February, I only recently discovered all the hate she has generated, all the negative comments she's collecting and fabricating about me. There are websites dedicated to trash talking me. Websites where folks read old entries in this blog, copy them to message boards and dissect them, using the fact that I've had an abortion when I was 17 or dated a guy that was married when I was 19 as an excuse to butcher my credibility as a human being.
Overwhelmed and not sure how to deal with the whole thing, I posted a response to Caroline on this blog. I quickly took it down because it seemed like I was perpetuating the situation. After reading all the atrocious things strangers were saying about me, Serge, and our marriage I felt like total shit for about a week. Tears, anger, frustration, rage, the whole nine. I decided the best way to move forward was to just get off the internet for good, which I'm still not sure isn't the best route, at this point.
But I'm okay now. Just saying the sentence, my husband's ex-girlfriend writes a blog about me cracks me up now. I tried to explain it to a friend of mine who had no idea what was going on.
"So she started this blog where she only writes about me--"
"Wait. What! She has an entire blog about you? I've known you ten years and even I don't have that much to say about you. I could maybe swing a chapter or two on your tired ass. A couple funny incidents while trying to buy nachos at 7/11 when we were stoned. And there was the time you danced on the ---"
"Stop!" I laughed.
"Point is, she's never even met you! What could she possibly have to say about you? " "Well, remember how I posted that message on her website?"
"Yeah but she has a blog all about that? That was years ago!"
"Kind of. It's complicated."
"Dude. She has a blog all about her ex-boyfriend's wife?" He dissolved into laughter.
At first I adamantly kept trying to explain. Slowly, I began to see the humor.
"Shit. She and I need to get together and write a fucking screenplay!" I grinned.
So, yes. I am gaining perspective. Which is not to discount the complete mindfuck of the situation at large. Because it has been very strange and very upsetting. More than you know. Everyone advises me to ignore her. Fuck that, I say. It's something that's going on in my life, a small part of it, yes, but it has hurt me and so I'll be honest about it here.
On this blog I have written extensively and honestly about my abortion, my relationship with a married man, my marriage, debilitating depression, religious struggles, my issues with my family, problems in past relationships and I am not ashamed of any of it. Quite honestly, in the grand scheme of things, a few comments I left on someone's website two years ago just don't register. I apologized and moved on, which is more than I can say for her.
I am now hopeful that this whole awful fiasco is coming to a close. I'm pretty sure Caroline is winding up her "chapters" about us. And that's probably wise. To continue writing about us at this point would be detrimental to the internet persona she has worked so hard to create and I suspect she's aware of that.
So, to all you new readers that my husband's ex has so graciously steered my way, the ones that say horrible things about me, post comments on this blog under fake names, write mean things about my husband and make Caroline "laugh so hard her teeth nearly fall out of her head", as she so eloquently phrased it, to all you anonymous pussies who in all actuality are bigger trainwrecks than either Caroline or myself; you can move on to the next wreck. If I'm such the shitty writer Caroline and you all have said I am, you'll be bored with my "narcissism", obsession with zits, Roseanne re-runs, nipple hair and red wine. Or maybe this post will be fodder for y'all if it's a slow week in internetland, which is fine too. Ain't like you're gonna type anything about me you haven't already. Whether or not either Caroline or I am crazy is up for debate but there is no question in anyone's mind, including your own, that you guys are bottom feeders.
Yeah, anonymously making fun of people you've never met... that's awesome. Good luck with that.
I've received quite a few emails from you asking what in hell my last post was all about. If you are confused let me explain. And if you have a low tolerance for Soap Operas and couldn't make it through an episode of 90210 or Party of Five, you best sit this blog out. It will give you a headache and if you don't smoke, you may take it up. What follows is the Cliff Notes, believe it or not.
What happened was this; In December Serge's ex-girlfriend started a blog on which she writes only about me and Serge. Initially, I tried to take Caroline's website with a grain of salt. After all, I have written about her on this site. Not very often, mind you, and only when provoked by nasty emails and such from her. And once, I wrote a very self-deprecating story called The Click By in an effort to apologize to her for leaving a snarky comment on an old website of hers. And then we made nice. Many of you may even remember her commenting several times on this website.
The nice lasted a few months. Then, a year ago, she sent my husband a degrading email about me, accusing me of looking at her MySpace page too much and, God forbid, making friends with some of the same people that were her MySpace friends. I know, it's just silly. And childish. I can assure you I am completely embarrassed to have played any part in any of this. Caroline's nasty email to Serge prompted him to respond in my defense, of course. A flurry of negative emails were exchanged and then all communication with Caroline was over. For good, I hoped.
Last November, out of the blue, she emailed me again.
I write because I think I'm right when I say that you still quite regularly visit my page. I pretty much always see an IP address resolve in Brooklyn. then recently there was one that resolved in Orem, and another in Durango, then Brooklyn came back again. I had a look at your myspace page today and your blog kind of cleared up my query as to whether it was you or not. But I don't get why... I also noticed the song you have playing on your page, kind of weirded me out a bit. I mean, I know you must know that song was on my original page for almost a year. Fair enough, music is music, it belongs to everybody, just seems like an odd choice is all.
This email really weirded me out. Emailing someone for looking at your public MySpace page? Who does that? Sure I looked at her MySpace page from time to time, as people do. Because, well, I guess I thought folks are on MySpace, creating profiles, so people look at them. I have a MySpace page and I know she looks at it from time to time because that's how she found this blog. It's MySpace, not a secret Pentagon website and I don't have the time nor the inclination to monitor who looks at my MySpace page, or this blog, for that matter.
Caroline's MySpace profile wasn't a private/personal page. It was a page for her music, for people to listen to the songs she has written. I just couldn't understand her obsession with whether I had an occasional look at her page. After all, she read this blog every day from nearly the moment I started it. As for the song that she accused me of copying off her page? We're both girls of the same age and are likely to have some similar taste in music. And, come on. What was the point of emailing me that?
In retrospect, I think that because she analyzed my blog so much she assumed seeing my IP address on her MySpace page meant I was analyzing hers as well. In all reality I was just popping by her page and dozens of others for a few seconds while bored. I can't imagine the time it would take to daily monitor IP addresses on a MySpace page. Everyone is linked to everyone! There've got to be a thousand strangers that wander by your site every day. I was also really surprised that she would contact me again. Nine months prior she had already sent that rude email to my husband about me, dragging him into some juvenile email war when the last thing he wanted was to communicate with his ex-girlfriend from three years ago. It seemed she wanted to ignite a similar exchange by calling me out for looking at her page. At this point I didn't know if she still read my blog nor did I care - it is on the internet, after all. I had learned my lesson from prior tangles with her and I did not reply to her latest email.
About two weeks later she started the blog about me and my husband. It seemed a bit obsessive and excessive, but she could have blogged her little heart out and I would have never been the wiser. Yet she began linking to many of you and anyone else who had ever mentioned me or linked to me on the internet, including the hate bloggers. You all immediately saw through her pseudonyms, which is what she wanted, of course, and you emailed me with the link.
I was absolutely gutted when I clicked over to her blog. She was writing very personal things about Serge, his brother, his band, and then she was attacking me, my writing and my marriage to my husband. All of this hate and anger so she could portray the fact that she thinks I look at her MySpace page too much? Because the other stuff, my rude comments on her website, we'd resolved that nearly two years prior when I apologized to her. I had been stupid enough to think we'd cultivated a sort of friendship. We'd exchanged a few emails, she was commenting on my blog... Little did I know she was gathering information to use against me in a public blog she would start all about me.
My apology to her in 2005 was genuine. I felt so bad for what I'd done that I didn't feel the need to justify my behavior by letting her know I had always been aware that she was posting on Serge's message board under a pseudonym. She was asking about herself, making weird comments and linking back to her website. That is what ultimately ignited my comment on her site. At that time I simply apologized for what I'd done, she accepted and we both let the matter drop. I thought. So her vicious portrayal of me on her blog two years later is just stunning, to say the least.
Although she is desperately trying to present a particular image on her blog, I have a pretty good handle on the woman behind the words and my husband knew her intimately for four years. Unfortunately, Caroline is a surprisingly good writer. She has obviously spent months carefully planning what she'd write and is able to successfully portray herself and the situation in a very strategic light. But neither Serge, who hasn't read her blog, or I believe for a second that her website was written with the rational intent of putting the situation behind her.
She can now backtrack all she wants, can wax poetic about how her blog is simply a way to put the situation between me and her in her past. That's just more of her usual justification for deplorable conduct. Behavior worse than any thus far in this sad, overly dramatized little tale. The situation was in the past. Until she tried to contact me again and then started her blog. How does writing a hurtful blog solely about me and my husband, linking to our friends, his fans and hate bloggers she knows write about me put the situation in the past? That's making it very present and very public. The words have been carefully written, the damage done. It's all there in black and white on her blog.
It wasn't what she was writing about me that upset me the most. I had already written about my mistakes on this blog, had apologized to her in several heartfelt emails. What I don't understand is why she feels it necessary to degrade Serge, his career, his music, his band and fans? Why, three years later, does she still care about my husband's world? Why does she need to use her time spent with him during what both describe as a completely dysfunctional relationship as ammunition to hurt his reputation? Why does she need to ridicule my looks, make fun of my writing, my marriage? Is that necessary to explain her 'side' in this whole melodrama? She is lashing out at anything she knows is important to us, laying it out in dramatic chapters written not with closure in mind, but an overall effort to hurt.
From the moment she became aware of the existence of this blog, which she found by monitoring my MySpace page, she has tracked me throughout the internet while she continued to monitor Serge, his band and fans. I couldn't write a blog post, make a MySpace friend or change my page colors without her assuming it was somehow directed at her. She has become lost in a world of internet monitoring, IP address tracking for three years now and it needs to stop. I knew she was reading this blog, logging on several times a day but I would never dream of emailing her about it. Ha ha, I know you look at my website. What is the point there? That's ridiculous and the only motivation behind that is embarrassment. What I do on this blog or MySpace, what colors I choose, what pictures I post - none of it should concern her. Period. If she's so worried about me or anyone else looking at her page she should make it private. Bottom line.
But she couldn't let it go. Couldn't stop policing. Once she got her blog rolling, she methodically tracked me, Marah fans and anyone who reads this blog across the internet in an effort to garner readers and embarrass me and Serge. Serge has never written about or spoken publicly about Caroline since their break-up, so her attacks on him seem especially vindictive. Her blog isn't an effort to "move forward" at all. It is a ridiculous analysis of everything I do on the internet, dragged out to publicly shame me. Yet she presents it under the guise of "closure" and "looking back". She knows the extent of what she's done, how far she's gone to get strangers, my friends and Serge's fans to read her repellent blog. And she knows why. In the end, this fingerpointing between her and I is just that. Fingerpointing. A she said/she said war that she's turned into a public spectacle. All that matters to me now is that she knows I know what she's done in an effort to hurt - and she knows Serge knows. The rest of it all is internet grandstanding for strangers.
So. What to do? It's difficult to react rationally when someone, a stranger, is so intent on hurting you and portraying you as a crazy person to your friends, your husbands friends and his fans. I've handled it well and I've handled it poorly, as you can imagine when trying to deal with embarrassments dragged out in such a public fashion. Respond/not respond? It's all so much internet posturing and ridiculousness. Still, not responding for the first month I knew about the blog was difficult. But I managed it. After all, what had transpired between us was silly internet shenanigans in which we had both participated. She was giving it her spin, of course, but for the most part, it was okay with me. Surely the fact that she has written an entire blog about Serge and me, filled with under-handed jabs and degrading characterizations about us speaks for itself, I thought.
The final blow came when she attempted to trash the career Serge has spent more than a decade working so hard for. She ridiculed Serge and tried to get as many fans of his as she could to believe he says horrible things about them. She then said Serge was cheating on me and she felt bad for me. Okay, I thought. Recounting our internet silliness is one thing, but this girl has done lost her mind, yo.
Despite my husband's constant advice to ignore her, even after she took shots at his band and fans and our marriage, I emailed Caroline in early February. I felt like she needed closure that maybe I could help provide. I'll spare you the agony of reposting my email here, but once again I apologized for ever hurting her feelings. At her request, I took down anything I'd published on the internet in which she was mentioned. Her response? A new chapter on her blog about how certain she is that I copied her MySpace colors and her YouTube videos and a few other juvenile accusations about my writing.
I can't say I was surprised. What has shocked me is the lengths she has gone to in order to publicize her negativity. Because I avoided the internet for most of February, I only recently discovered all the hate she has generated, all the negative comments she's collecting and fabricating about me. There are websites dedicated to trash talking me. Websites where folks read old entries in this blog, copy them to message boards and dissect them, using the fact that I've had an abortion when I was 17 or dated a guy that was married when I was 19 as an excuse to butcher my credibility as a human being.
Overwhelmed and not sure how to deal with the whole thing, I posted a response to Caroline on this blog. I quickly took it down because it seemed like I was perpetuating the situation. After reading all the atrocious things strangers were saying about me, Serge, and our marriage I felt like total shit for about a week. Tears, anger, frustration, rage, the whole nine. I decided the best way to move forward was to just get off the internet for good, which I'm still not sure isn't the best route, at this point.
But I'm okay now. Just saying the sentence, my husband's ex-girlfriend writes a blog about me cracks me up now. I tried to explain it to a friend of mine who had no idea what was going on.
"So she started this blog where she only writes about me--"
"Wait. What! She has an entire blog about you? I've known you ten years and even I don't have that much to say about you. I could maybe swing a chapter or two on your tired ass. A couple funny incidents while trying to buy nachos at 7/11 when we were stoned. And there was the time you danced on the ---"
"Stop!" I laughed.
"Point is, she's never even met you! What could she possibly have to say about you? " "Well, remember how I posted that message on her website?"
"Yeah but she has a blog all about that? That was years ago!"
"Kind of. It's complicated."
"Dude. She has a blog all about her ex-boyfriend's wife?" He dissolved into laughter.
At first I adamantly kept trying to explain. Slowly, I began to see the humor.
"Shit. She and I need to get together and write a fucking screenplay!" I grinned.
So, yes. I am gaining perspective. Which is not to discount the complete mindfuck of the situation at large. Because it has been very strange and very upsetting. More than you know. Everyone advises me to ignore her. Fuck that, I say. It's something that's going on in my life, a small part of it, yes, but it has hurt me and so I'll be honest about it here.
On this blog I have written extensively and honestly about my abortion, my relationship with a married man, my marriage, debilitating depression, religious struggles, my issues with my family, problems in past relationships and I am not ashamed of any of it. Quite honestly, in the grand scheme of things, a few comments I left on someone's website two years ago just don't register. I apologized and moved on, which is more than I can say for her.
I am now hopeful that this whole awful fiasco is coming to a close. I'm pretty sure Caroline is winding up her "chapters" about us. And that's probably wise. To continue writing about us at this point would be detrimental to the internet persona she has worked so hard to create and I suspect she's aware of that.
So, to all you new readers that my husband's ex has so graciously steered my way, the ones that say horrible things about me, post comments on this blog under fake names, write mean things about my husband and make Caroline "laugh so hard her teeth nearly fall out of her head", as she so eloquently phrased it, to all you anonymous pussies who in all actuality are bigger trainwrecks than either Caroline or myself; you can move on to the next wreck. If I'm such the shitty writer Caroline and you all have said I am, you'll be bored with my "narcissism", obsession with zits, Roseanne re-runs, nipple hair and red wine. Or maybe this post will be fodder for y'all if it's a slow week in internetland, which is fine too. Ain't like you're gonna type anything about me you haven't already. Whether or not either Caroline or I am crazy is up for debate but there is no question in anyone's mind, including your own, that you guys are bottom feeders.
Yeah, anonymously making fun of people you've never met... that's awesome. Good luck with that.
Introspection