Aborted Bio Attempt  Paint Shop Pro virtual dental work - no lidocaine, no braces.  Oh for Pete's sake, I am trying to doctor up a pic nicely enough to submit to the bio page of Daveworld, but so far, no luck.  None of them strike me quite right.  I'd like to use a recent one, but my recent ones...well...      Is it vanity?  Is it insecurity?  As far as meatspace world goes, I have learned to accept my looks, so why now do I have a problem?  And oddly enough, it's not a question of beauty or the lack thereof.  It's a question of weirdness.  I don't wanna come off as too weird.  Or ditzy, for that matter.      This is stupid.  I am weird.  Why should that be a problem?  Well there's weird, a pleasant kind of nuttiness, then there's scary weird, like stalkers and starers.  I don't wanna come off as scary weird, cuz I'm really pretty harmless, despite what the confessions say.      Ok there's a pic there, up above, have fun.  My original idea was to post my bio here and then reuse it for the bio page, but now there is drivel in here, and true to the nature of a diary, I don't really wanna delete it.  So I guess this can be a rant, and I will give it another shot tomorrow at lunch.      This headache has been pounding for three days now.  Is it the coffee?  Is it sinuses or dehydration?  Starvation?  I do forget to eat entirely too often.      Lotta question marks in here today.  Hmmmmmm.  ?????????????????????????????????????     There.  The question mark quota has more than been filled.  Anyway...this can't be a migraine, cuz those bring a huge amount of drowsiness with them, and I usually get visual effects before, and they go away with a good hard sleep.  Heh, mebbe it's a tooomaah.      I did a very stupid thing.  Back some time ago, I subscribed to the diary-l mailing list, several months after Zach said I should.  He wanted me to meet these wonderful people, but I was jealous cuz they took so much of his time that he used to spend doing stuff with me.  He had a lot in common with them and seemed obsessed with their journals, and this was a world that was at the time completely separate from me.  I read the journals of our mutual friends, and his of course, but that was it.  I didn't wanna get lost in that sea that is Open Pages, and thought diary-l was probably a way to do just that.  Then there was a big misunderstanding in there about his attitude towards gay people, and this wounded him so deeply that it affected just about every facet of his life.  This was very difficult to see, a loved one in such pain.      So, finally, finally I subscribed, with a hostile and skeptical eye, just waiting for somebody to attack my beloved.  But I guess the thing had blown over by then and rational (or humorous) discourse was all I saw at the time.  I actually unsubscribed once my worries were laid to rest.  Then he went through another one of his terrible "I need space" times, and not hearing from him for days on end began to drive me mad.  I subscribed again, to discover him alive and well.  So, I kept my mouth shut and lurked there.  I just watched from the sidelines.  And after we began to connect again, and things got better, I didn't tell him about diary-l.  In fact, I went to great lengths to hide from him my lurkership there.  I feared that if he knew I belonged to the list, he would stop posting there.  Especially during his "space" times.  These are the very times I most need to know he is ok, so if he didn't know I was there, he would probably post as before.      I really began to like the people and wanted so badly to interact with them, so I took to writing several of them personally, which was pretty pleasant.  I began to read their journals.  Very special folks in there.  And sometimes when I felt compelled to discuss a topic with Zach that was going on in diary-l, I said to him "Some of my friends who are in diary-l tell me that..."      Well.  Zach and this other guy got into a personal confrontation that went beyond what it should have, in arenas it shouldn't have.  I had just introduced a new journaler to diary-l, touting what a wonderful group of people it was, and when he subscribed, the first things into his mailbox were some of the most slanderous attacks and responses that I have ever seen in there.  Yes, I know IRC and usenet get worse, but still...after all the nice press I had given the list...      I told Zach that I had turned a friend on to diary-l and how unhappy I was with what the friend was being exposed to, and invited him to share that information with the list.      Well, he did.  And he identified me as a lurker.  He knew I lurked!  He probably deduced this from careless clues on my part.  So, the jig was up.  I wrote to the list apologizing for lurking, for using Zach as a vehicle for my comments, and for deception, and involving some of them in deception.      When Zach saw that I had been hiding from him specifically, this hurt him a lot.  He had known I was lurking for some time, but assumed I'd been hiding from someone else.  I thought until then that he knew why I hovered silently.  I tried to explain why I'd done what I did, but that's no excuse.  I spied on him, which was wrong.      As you can guess, I haven't heard from him since this revelation.  What I sought to avoid has happened.  He doesn't post anymore.  The temptation is strong to go hide in my little shell.  I may yet unsub from diary-l.      This soap opera stuff is so tiring to me, so upsetting.  Just the kind of thing I try to avoid, in meatspace as well as virtuality.      In other, lighter, news, Serendipitous and Johnny are due to get married today!! Really, in the flesh!  Happy nuptials to you wonderful people!  -- Spring  link o' the day: The Universal Translator