Regarde moi bien, je reviens...
je me suis perdu
Tous ces jours, mais je suis ici, je reviens.
Pour le meilleur et le pire je reviens.-Kaolin "Je Reviens"

Take a good look, I return...
I lost myself all these days, but I am here, I return.
For the best or the worst, I return.-Kaolin "I Return"

It seems there are some folks who misinterpreted my last post to be "I don't think some people like me, so I'm leaving." As if I ever considered the affection of others a goal.

I took time off not because "people don't like me" but because I felt like I had lost control of my ability to write. I knew I was going to come back to the blog, hence my comment I was taking time off, not rollin' up my blog and heading home. I wouldn't do that without a proper good-bye with a male stripper, a case of jamesons, and a pub crawl.

Over the years, I've gotten a lot of email over this blog. I've gotten some questionable quasi stalker emails and some random question emails and some old friends who sussed me out emails, but the one email about the blog I get over and over again is "Please don't ever stop writing." And my answer is always the same: that will never happen. I may stop blogging, but I will never stop writing. No matter how I feel. Because it is who I am before anything else. And it doesn't matter to me as a person whether you like me or not.

Or even better, I'm pretty open about the fact that I'm unlikable, insane, and generally a pain in the ass to be around. And those are some of my more attractive qualities.

"Allow me to be frank at the commencement. You will not like me. The gentlemen will be envious and the ladies will be repelled. You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as we go on." -The Libertine

Some of the best writers of their times were reviled. No one knows that better than I do because I TEACH those very same writers to students. I have always taught my students that if you wish to be a great writer avoiding offense isn't a legitimate goal. You may try to minimize offense, but at the end of the day, if you pursue greatness you must embrace offending others. After all where would literature be without Machiavelli's the Prince, Dante's Inferno, Huxley's Brave New World, Nabokov's Lolita, Joyce's Ulysses, Buckner's Woyzeck, Voltaire's Candide, de Sade's Justine, or Jarry's Ubu Roi. If these writers had cared about popularity, the whole of Western literature would be worse for it.

Generally, people like the comfortable and unthreatening. They don't like change or criticism, even if they know that a change can only bring improvement. My mother transformed a piece of crap hospital into a gorgeous state of the art facility, and she fought others every millimeter of the way. Now she is perhaps one of the most resented and hated, but successful women in her field because she improved a failing hospital. There was no way the hospital could have become worse yet every single innovation was debated for months upon months and usually came down to "Well we have never done it that way." And because of her strength and perseverance, hundreds of people now have a hospital they can rely on when they are ill or injured. And I am her daughter. People hate me because I'm her daughter, they hate me because I look different, hell some people hate me because I survived cancer. Don't ask me how but they do. But the one thing I've never done is given into that hate.

So go ahead. Hate me. But those of you who try to rally hate for me you better be damn secure. Because I've been made fun of and bullied since I was 5 years old. And this rapier wit of mine was sharpened out of necessity. So you want to bring it, I'm down with that. You just better be damn sure you can handle it when it's broughten. Because much like my literary idol Philip Roth, I don't take kindly to whiny hate mongering masquerading as legitimate criticism.


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