Of course, I can relate to you...

When I first logged on to e2 I knew I had found a happy little cyber home of sorts. Upon scanning the users list I located an Uberfetus and a hamster bong. I was overly excited...these were my kind of people. So I decided to stay and relay what little bit of knowledge I had to the public.

I didn't pay much attention to the other noders at first--E2 was more my personal playground than a collective consortium of various ideas. That changed slightly when I happened upon some of hamster bong's poetry. Two things clicked inside my head at that moment:
1I could use Everything as some sort of personal creative medium. I had written some humorous and slightly insightful writings, but I had never considered giving others a glimpse into my world.
2This hamster bong is eerily like me. This completely freaked me out. I've never had a person steal my thoughts from me before and it was a little unsettling. Realizing our resemblence also made me somewhat depressed. It seemed that whatever I could think of writing, or that I did write could in some way be misconstrued as having been authored by hamster bong.

I had a sick thought...a disturbing thought. What if others thought that I was hamster bong...that she had created a new user (albeit with not too much variation on her name) and was using it to vote herself up. I feel so ashamed admitting that. (I'm so sorry I thought that, dear. I hope you can understand my reaction. I know now that you would never need anyone to bolster your already established reputation and that you're not such a cunning being as to do something like that...although we hamsters are surprisingly surreptitous little creatures...). I was afraid people might downvote her evil offspring and whenever I wrote something I could imagine other noders thinking things like, "Look at how badly hamster bong writes when she poses as hamstergirl to make us think it's not her....tisk, tisk (or some other disapproving noise like that)" Or worse yet, they might think I was a seperate entitiy who was attempting to emulate her writing style and gain credit.

I thought I might leave because it was getting to be too hard for me to write things without those paranoid thoughts scratching at my brain. But then I noticed something I knew all along--for all our similarity, we are still quite different. I could never write poetry the way hamster bong does...so beautifully flowing and painfully truthful she gives a voice to the beauty of one's mind. And she could never write entirely like me or think like me or spend an hour trying to come up with a worthy reply to a very sweet write-up like me (i don't know...perhaps you can and do...).

But I'm still wary of cooling one of hamster bong's write-ups. It's that old fear and the fact that in the cool archive it will say written by hamster bong cooled by hamstergirl and people might misunderstand and accuse us of something devious. I really don't care, though. It's just someone usually beats me to the act or I'm never around for some of your awesome nodes (i have to sleep sometime...).

Hamster bong is one of the best writers on everything (hmmmm...did I just indirectly compliment myself?) and when I thought of leaving it was her affirming my thoughts of similairity which caused me to stay. I might always be in her shadow, but thats cool. Our creativity is not comprimised just because there is a slight semblence to our writing styles; if anything, our literary power is increased tenfold.

And when we rule the world everything will be ours.


07-18-00
Thank you for writing what I can't bring myself to write for whatever reason.