Alright, let’s pull the car over to the side of pretentiousness turnpike…
(This is a response to Jeeber's last post. I am not posting it in my own journal in order to reach a wider audience or anything like that, but because I was honestly unable to post it as a reply to his entry.)

Mike, I’d like to question two facets of your entry: the logic of your assumptions and the motivation for posting them.

“Everyone I know aside from aforementioned individuals don't actually know what love IS, rather they lust after what they want.”
Are you truly qualified to make such a boastful statement? How can you begin to know the feelings and emotions of the people around you in regards to a covert set of behaviors such as “love”? In my experiences, I’ve found it’s hard enough to qualify one’s own feelings in a romantic relationship, let alone beginning to speak for another. I would be curious to know how to operationally define such an emotionally complex and messy concept as love, and qualify, quantify, and rank it such as you do here. And let’s say for a minute that your love for Amanda is as strong as you say it is… why does it have to be mutually exclusive with everyone else’s? Why can’t we each strive for our own level of happiness, each working to be content if our own situations, everyone reaching to attain our own conceptualization of “true love”? Why does your guys’ love have to be stronger than ours? Who are you trying to convince? And what about those people who aren’t looking for such things in the first place? Does that make them bad people? Does that make them incomplete?

All of these purposely rhetorical questions don’t mean a damn thing to me though, as compared to my fundamental problem with your entry: what on God’s green Earth would possess to post such a thing? Let’s go with the assumption that you actually believe every word you wrote… did you actually believe such arrogant statements would go unchallenged? I cannot imagine, no matter how much passion and intensity drove your entry, that you didn’t stop at one point and consider that your public statements would be considered inflammatory to the uninitiated reader. The only logical explanation I can come up with is that you were trying to provoke for some reason, or retaliate to some outside threat. Many times on Woohu, I’ve found that a user will encounter some distressing person or experience during the course of a day, and then fire back in an entry, projecting their frustrations into a sort of Woohu-black hole. But even that is the case (which I don’t think it is), it does not even begin to account for the vicious volleys that your entry shoots out in this seemingly unprovoked attack against the values, beliefs, and intelligence of your readers. Because I don’t see how your entry is anything other than exactly that: an attack. You are mounting an offensive against the self-perceived clueless inferior masses, in the process isolating you and Amanda at the top of the pile. Well, Mike, I hope you are as sure of your feelings as you say you are, because they say it’s lonely at the top and it’s a helluva long fall to the bottom. If your love is as strong as you guys say it is, then you two should be able to revel in that knowledge privately, without publicly demeaning your peers by stating that you think you are better than them. If you plan on sticking around with this Woohu thing, I think you’d be wise to take a page in Woohu-etiquette from our pal JediBumblebee. Here’s someone who presently has us all trumped… she just got engaged. But instead of trying to rub our noses in it as you are, Stef is quietly bemoaning the difficulty of putting a wedding together and asking our opinion on dresses. The thing that a lot of people don’t seem to grasp about Woohu, and all blogs for that matter, is that it is a community. It may be your journal and you are free to post whatever you want, but just like society at large, respecting other’s dignity and feelings is just as important as your own personal freedom. After attempting to extend that same courtesy to you in the past few paragraphs, I will now throw said even-temperedness to the wind in my concluding thoughts for effect:

“They can't help it though, they're a product of the society and situations they put themselves in.”
You know, in the past couple of years I’ve been accused, sometimes by the people closest to me, of having a pretty big ego. Whether they are right or not, I’ve always been able to justify it as a mechanism of my survival, a necessary evil to make it through the day. But in my efforts to build myself up, I have strove to never achieve such self-confidence at the expense of others, as you do here. All things aside, now matter how you may feel, that was an extremely pompous and asshole thing to say.

comment?