“Short Fuse” Revisited

The do-not-step-on-sex-workers movement needs someone who, in addition to many other qualities, has the temperament & tolerance of a wronged wolverine.  –  Tanya Charbury

Recently, I saw a gent who told me he’d followed me for years and asked if I’d unmute him on Twitter.  I asked why I had muted him, and he confessed to being a bit bratty to me a while back.  We had a laugh about it and of course I unmuted him before he left my incall, but it did demonstrate to me that it was time to do something I don’t often do:  revisit a question I’ve already answered, in this case the one from “Short Fuse“:  Is it just me, or are you less patient than you used to be?

The answer I gave then was honest and accurate for its time, but that was almost four years ago and a lot has changed since then.  As I said then, “I’ve never been patient with fools, trolls, ninnies, sophists, fanatics and the other assorted riff-raff who attempt to lay claim to my time and energy.  In fact, my impatience with such people is almost legendary…”  But while the set of such annoyances was at one time reasonably small, it has grown over time to encompass a lot of people who, while they aren’t completely blameless, are also not necessarily working at annoying me.  Regular readers know that the past three years have been extremely difficult ones for me, and my emotional reserves have been at a very low ebb; I need to ration my psychic and temporal resources, spending them on myself, my clients, the people I love, and my role in this war the government has been conducting on us for the past two decades (which has recently heated up dramatically).  And that means I simply can’t take the time and energy to deal gently with strangers who step on my tail, either intentionally or otherwise (such as by ignoring my clearly-stated ban on bootlicking or partisanism in my timeline); it’s much easier to simply mute them, with or without delivering a parting shot, and then move on.  Ideal?  Not at all, as the incident with the gentleman I mentioned above demonstrates.  But I’m afraid at this stage of my life, it’s either that or expend my precious energies on unproductive discussions that will drag me down while failing to make a particle of difference in the struggle to which I’m committed.  So for now, at least, my temperament is going to more closely resemble that of a wronged wolverine than a playful pussycat, at least for those who deliberately or carelessly stroke my fur the wrong way.