I guess if I shouldn’t pick on you, I shouldn’t pick on your music

It turns out that I can combine tolerance for other bands with Ask.fm, so I still really haven’t made a choice. There would not be a logical connection between Amazon Studios and defending Katy Perry, though, so we still have some suspense for tomorrow.

I guess the first thing to do is to reference once again that I am now connected to a lot of young people through Twitter. I don’t think I have really written that much in the blog about that, but I mention it a lot in conversations because it is always on my mind, and it is probably what is having the greatest influence on my life right now. I will get more into that at some point.

Anyway, part of that is that I am learning about things I would probably not encounter in other ways. One of these has been Ask.fm. It is a web site where you can register so people can ask you anonymous questions. A lot of the people I follow use it.

As anyone who has spent time on the internet knows, anonymity can bring out some horrible bits of human nature. There are occasionally normal questions and compliments, but there also ends up being a lot of vulgarity and a lot of harassment and some really crude harassment.

My initial response was disbelief that anyone would keep inviting these questions, but I do understand the need for contact. I do understand the desire to have someone be interested in you. Most of my bad spells come from that lack, actually. And yes, a lot of it is boredom too, where really, they should go read a book or something, but growing up along with this developing technology has resulted in a different mindset, and that will be interesting to explore at some point also.

So initially I would see these posts “Ask me something, please!” and have no idea what it meant, and then I got what it meant but would see all the sexual questions and suggestions to go kill yourself and name-calling and have no idea why anyone would put up with it, and just recently I have started asking questions, and trying to come up with good questions.

Honestly, it feels like a lot of pressure. Perhaps I should come up with a stack of questions that I can rotate through. I did get one “Best question” with an answer, though, so hey, I could be doing worse. (That particular question was “Superpower: super strength, invisibility, or flying?”)

The thing is, okay, I am at a point where I don’t need to invite questions. If I were to set up something like that, I would want it to be more in-depth or more for advice, because I have a different mindset and am at a different life stage and that’s fine. It doesn’t mean that their desire is invalid, and so if I can help gratify that, I should. This is new, I hope to get better at it, but for now, okay, it’s a reasonable accommodation to make.

Really, everything is new. Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my even getting on Twitter, and between following and being followed, they were all known, either personally or because I was familiar with their work. My first random young person came about through My Chemical Romance, and seriously, I am still not sure how that happened, but it was cool. Then I picked up an All American Rejects fan, and slowly it started growing, picking up a small number through them. Okay, it was still good.

Everything changed one Friday in October. I was thinking that Friday Follows are dumb, and then I thought, who am I to think that, and decided to follow all suggestions for that day, adding about 80 follows. Even then, that put me at 280, and I follow 437 now, again, often happening in ways that I do not understand.

At the time, we still all had pretty good taste in music, but as my contacts grew, some horrible tastes crept in. I have had to block Justin Bieber because Alyssa keeps retweeting him, and I care about her, but not enough to read his tweets. I have also had to block Taylor Swift and the more popular members of One Direction.

Okay, I blogged quite a bit about what I have against boy bands and pop princesses, and it’s out there, and it still hold true, but if it means something to someone else, I don’t want to rain on that.

I cannot stand Lady Gaga. I think the reason she has to be so bizarre is because no one would pay any attention to her otherwise. However, Mandi loves her, and she finds things that she needs in there, and when she posts about getting ready for the concert and how Gaga took the doll she made, I favorite those posts, because someone I care about has been made happy, and I am grateful for that.

Some of these kids get a lot of grief for their musical tastes. I have mentioned before that I was lucky that my friends and I were all supportive of each other, and of each other’s music. Of course, that was in the 80’s, when you could reasonably like everything, and also, in my group we just didn’t feel the need to be jerks to each other. There were other people who did, and probably some people who were not jerks in junior high started in high school, but that was not part of my experience.

So now there is in fact music that I find horrendous and makes me want to puncture my ear drums, and also, a lot of music that I have no idea what it is, or if I will like it or not when I finally listen to it. I can honestly say, it doesn’t matter. What matters is being kind to each other. If you’re doing that, you’re not going to be picking on each other’s music, or hounding them about their ex and encouraging suicide anonymously.

It’s not my job to tell anyone else how to be. I need to worry about how I am and the correct answer is always going to be kind and loving.

That being said, if I can help introduce some people to better music, I’ll feel good about that, but I’m not going to make them feel bad about what came before. People come up with enough bad feeling on their own. I don’t need to add to it.