No.

(Lyrics for this song can be found here.)

It’s been a long time since I’ve made a per­son­al update here. In a nut­shell, I’m fair­ly self-con­tained and don’t tend to look out­wards much for atten­tion or val­i­da­tion. It’s not that I hate peo­ple, it’s just that as an intro­vert I’m attuned to my sens­es and lean toward soli­tude in a way that has me putting time into things I can do with­out rely­ing so much on oth­ers. It’s been my style since child­hood and as long as I can remem­ber. I love study­ing, read­ing, cre­at­ing things, and expe­ri­enc­ing what won­ders the world has to offer. I love the time I spend with my fam­i­ly, my friends, my read­ers, and all those who are close to my heart.

Con­verse­ly, if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past year, it’s bound­aries. One thing that real­ly both­ers me is any­one who con­sis­tent­ly fails to make a seri­ous effort to learn from the world around them and solve their own prob­lems. What both­ers me even more is any­one that adds an extra veneer of com­pli­ca­tion and stu­pid­i­ty on op of this by start­ing dra­ma, seek­ing a fight, seed­ing sus­pi­cion, spread­ing gos­sip, or basi­cal­ly act­ing like an ass­hole. That, dear read­ers, is why I’m mak­ing this post.

When I first made the deci­sion to relo­cate to Vic­to­ria, one of the fringe ben­e­fits was that it cut a hand­ful of tox­ic peo­ple out of my life, a trio that had tak­en to harass­ing friends and cowork­ers of mine after I closed the book on them for their dis­gust­ing behav­iour. I won’t waste my read­ers’ time with the details; for one, it’s already been dealt with, but most impor­tant­ly, bul­lies don’t deserve free publicity.

What caught me off guard — more recent­ly, mind you — was find­ing out the truth about a friend of these indi­vid­u­als in my new city who’d been try­ing to befriend me, ask­ing offen­sive ques­tions and doing things you just don’t do to a per­son you care about. Giv­en time, I fig­ured out what was going on, and it was­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult to deal with the sit­u­a­tion and sim­ply cut this indi­vid­ual out, but at the end of the day I won­der why some peo­ple can’t seem to avoid start­ing chaos or neg­a­tiv­i­ty every­where they go.

This brings me to the point of this post: if you act like an idiot, I’m not going to put up with it. Nor do you get to be a per­ma­nent fix­ture in my life. I wear shoes high­er than your stan­dards, and soon­er or lat­er you’ll feel one of them kick­ing you to the curb because you could­n’t be both­ered to act con­sid­er­ate in the first place.

Over the past cou­ple of years, I’ve accom­plished a fair bit: changed employ­ers, met new peo­ple, made friends, held on to friends, got­ten back into the dat­ing scene, rebuilt my web­site, and begun to rekin­dle my inter­ests. Most impor­tant­ly, I’ve tak­en a strin­gent sec­ond look at who I want to include on my jour­ney. Life’s too short to ride the Dra­ma Lla­ma straight into the ground, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let any­one’s bull­shit ruin my day.

When the dust has set­tled, you’ll see me stand­ing tall with the fam­i­ly, friends, acquain­tances, con­nec­tions, and lessons that rein­force the pos­i­tive in my life. You’ll see me putting my ener­gy into things that are productive.

You won’t see me wast­ing time on peo­ple that aren’t sin­cere, or who don’t want to improve their sta­tion in life. Pre­pare to be excised.