I had to re-evaluate my feelings about someone today. That doesn’t happen all that often, because I take my dear sweet time developing feelings of friendship, camaraderie, respect (and so on) for people I run across on line. It’s different than with people I meet face-to-face, because I am extremely good at reading people, and my gut instincts have yet to prove wrong. On line though, all I really have to go on are people’s words and any on line actions. So, it takes some time to get a bead on people.

Over the last year or so, maybe a little longer, I had been reading on line commentary written by this person on their web site and various message boards/forums/blogs. I came to think of them as intelligent, educated, level-headed, and someone I could, if not look up to, at least consider a peer … someone with a heart and brain who used them both at the same time (something I try to do myself, though the heart usually wins out more often) and with whom I shared several interests, fields of study, and ethical/moral values. The sort of person who I might have one day eventually attempted to develop an actual meaningful friendship or networking association with once I got over my usual shyness about getting overly friendly with people I only know on line.

But then today, as I was visiting my usual internet haunts, I read some commentary by them which threw off everything I thought I had come to know about this person. In a split second, my feelings about this person went from interest in friendship to never wanting to see their name again anywhere and sort of wishing they didn’t even exist on the planet at all. So I reread the commentary again, just to be sure I hadn’t missed some sarcasm or a well-hidden joke. I hadn’t. It had been written in all seriousness, and so I had to go with my gut instinct ad change my entire view of this person. I am finding that somewhat disturbing. I thought I was a better judge of character than that, even on the internet, and now I am wondering how many other people I know on the internet are people I really wouldn’t give the time of day, if I knew that one little thing about them that I hadn’t seen or which hadn’t been brought forth before.

It’s not that I am judgmental and make snap decisions about people based on limited information, but there are a few things I simply will not tolerate in humans I have contact with, at all in any form. I’m not going to tell you what those things are, even though I could since there are so few of them. 99% of the people who are reading this know me well enough either in real life or from reading my blog to have some idea of the kinds of things I don’t tolerate well, and for everyone else, I really don’t want to tell them how to cover up any huge personal flaws when communicating with me. Trust me, it’s better not to lie to me and just be who you are. If I don’t like you, I will actually be quite upfront about telling you that as soon as I realize it. Or … I will just avoid you altogether if I can. If I can’t avoid you, I will be fairly openly hostile when I have to be in contact with you. That’s just the way it works with me. If you lie to get me to like you, you do not want to know how openly hostile I am capable of becoming. Really. You don’t. I’d rather find out early on that someone has some huge character trait I find offensive and just go our seperate ways than to be led on. But that’s not what this post is about. This person didn’t lie, per se, at least I don’t think they intentionally kept anything from coming out or intentionally twisted the truth of themselves. It’s just that the subject hadn’t come up before, and so they never had to exhibit a reaction before. It was their reaction that brought out the very worst in them, and shocked the hell out of me. Though who knows, maybe they have been actively keeping character flaws hidden on purpose. At the moment, I’m not sure what to believe about them.

Anyway, I’m just sort of shocked that this person who I had thought I had pretty firmly placed in the Good Guys/Gals List is in fact, a secret jerk and asshole. Maybe not so secret, but at least it had never been brought out before until today, and I am really upset that this is true. It’s created something of a feedback loop in my brain. “This person is really smart about things I enjoy, I like hearing what this person has to say, and they seem really cool,” vs. “Who the hell cares how smart this person supposedly is or what they have to say, they have no heart and totally lack empathy!”

I’m going to go be sullen and dyspeptic for a while and mull this over. There isn’t anything much to mull over as far as my feelings are concerned, but I do have to reorganize every thought I have ever had about this person, get it straight in my head, and put them on that other list … the list of people I never want to meet in person no matter what. Good thing we live very far apart.

If you are reading this, it doesn’t apply to you. I have been purposely vague about it all, not because the person in question might read my blog (they might, who knows) but because I know that some people who know both of us do read it. Not that the person in question is likely to give two wits how I feel about them, but I’m not looking to start anything with anybody.