Do any of you remember the rap in "When Harry Met Sally" about "high maintenance" vs. "low maintenance" when it comes to romantic relationships? I'm a fan of low maintenance -- certainly in a girlfriend or partner, but also in other things. High maintenance is just Too Much Fucking Work To Be Worth The Effort.
All of my extended family members are low maintenance. (With one exception, of course, but we cut her some slack because she's four.) No one needs a lot of constant stroking and complimenting to get through the day, which frees us to express such things when they're really appropriate, not when they aren't. Even my car is low maintenance. It's an old Peugeot 306 diesel that gets better mileage than many modern hybrids and simply refuses to stop running, and literally the only maintenance it has required in all the years I've owned it is a couple of new tires. My kinda car. Anyway, I kinda associate this high maintenance/low maintenance thang with personality types, too, which is what this rap is about. Some folks on FFL -- among whom I would include Curtis, Rick, Susan, Salyavin, myself, and a few others -- are pretty WSIWYG when it comes to their "image," whatever that might be. They're pretty content with What You See Is What You Get, and don't seem to waste a lot of time trying either to "project" a certain image, or "defend" it. My kinda people. They're more interested in "being" that in "being <insert carefully managed image here>," and that makes them more interesting. Low maintenance. Then there are those who *definitely* seem to have a strong self image, bordering IMO on narcissism. These folks seem to have a VERY strong image of who they are, what they do, what they believe, and WHY they do all of these things, and they seem to spend an inordinate amount of time both *projecting* and *selling* that self image to others, and *defending* it when someone on this forum doesn't buy it. They -- and in this group I think it is safe to include Judy, Robin, Jim, Ravi, and Ann -- seem to never tire of telling people exactly who they are and what their "real" motivations are. They also seem to get their buttons pushed BIG TIME when someone else's view of who and what they are and why they do the things they do doesn't agree with theirs. Some fly into rages and declare that the other person is LYING by not agreeing with their carefully managed image. Most of them DEMAND that the person who *doesn't* buy their carefully managed image "must" argue with them about it, so that (presumably) the affronted narcissist can either 1) convince the offending person that they are WRONG, or 2) they can convince an imaginary lurking audience that the person who disagrees with their carefully managed image is WRONG, and that only *they* are RIGHT. High maintenance. Just look at this weekend's posts. Judy felt the need to make 40 posts in two days, almost all of them falling into the category (IMO) of "image repair." I think most of them can be summed up as, "NO, that is NOT who I am. NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT. <insert angry stamping of feet here> I am who *I* say I am, NOT who these lying bastids say I am!" Ann made 20 posts of her own, many along the same lines. Dumbbutt made 18. And Ravi, lagging behind for once, made another 17. I would suggest (without wasting my time trying to check, naturally), that the majority of these posts fell *easily* into the category of "image repair," trying to deny my suggestion that these five people (only four currently posting) seem to spend MOST of their time here obsessing on a few obvious "enemies." In doing so, MOST of them managed to obsess on these same enemies even more than usual. :-) For some reason, it is *important* to these people that *they* believe that other people on this forum believe *them*, and THEIR version of who they are, what they do on a regular basis here, and why they do it. Clinically, this is called narcissism. Pragmatically, this is called boring. Their lives seem to have devolved into a constant struggle to perform "image repair," spending inordinate amounts of time claiming that they're NOT DOING what they are so obviously DOING. High maintenance. It all seems like an enormous waste of time to me. Especially because I don't think that anyone *except* the four of them actually believe their spin and their equivocations any more.
