> > Ok... I can understand that.... it just seems like the newbies have been jumped on a bit lately. I guess I overreacted. Sorry...
>
> Now here's me overreacting (especially since the above post is a perfectly nice "let's just leave it at that" retraction). I'll admit to being a thoroughly nasty person, whatever you like, but I *refuse* to accept this implication that I'm nasty to newbies on general principle. I don't care if somebody's been hanging around here for five years or one second. I'm pretty sure nobody else does either. I respond to what they're posting, I don't refer to some sort of secret list to see whether I like them or not.
>
> I don't think I've ever posted so many aggressive, opinionated, whiny and/or personal posts in my whole time at Rinkworks as I have in the last few weeks. Rest assured that it has little to do personally with anybody here. I'm trying very hard not to take out stress on Rinkworks but sometimes it shows through.
>
> Brunnen-"not feeling very cute or sweet"G

I just want to make sure no one gets hurt for commenting on my personality. Don't anyone get defensive on my account. In fact I happen to have a very distinctive lack of self-esteem which usually does not cause me to giggle but does cause me on many, many, many, many, many occasions to tell people that what I do is not that great, that it is really bad, that I have no talent, that I really don't deserve to be praised etc. I recognize this as a problem. As of yet I have not sought psychiatric help with the matter because I have had three psychiatrists already tell me how normal I was and how I didn't need help. Hmmph. Anyway, I am not glad that people got mad at my joke, but it is informative to know what sort of joke stems from my lack of self-esteem and what sort of joke actually has merit. I am so sick of people in my life who tell me how I don't have any personality flaws that I am almost ready to puke. Especially when they then turn around and treat me like a worthless human being. Brunnen-G is actually very nice to me, especially in chat, if she remembers me.

However, I do not think it was my horrible lack of self-esteem which got my last post deleted. I was sort of thinking at the time that Sam might have gotten mad about some of the things I said while arguing that vegetarianism was bad. *shrug* BTW I am not a newbie. I've been here for about a year or two. You can look me up in the archives if you disbelieve. I believe one of my first posts was on Kurt Vonnegut.

Since I'm posting anyway and I don't want to waste too much space posting elsewhere Thank you to everyone who posted with books. I was very afraid that everyone would get mad at me for bringing up a subject which had been broached so many times before. Again low self-esteem perhaps. *shrug* I noticed that some people posted authors which belonged on the Good Authors list that I had forgotten. This is not horribly amiss actually. It confirms my belief that many Rinkies have the same favorite authors as me and can be helpful. Therefore I am very likely to check out the other novels I hadn't heard of before. Again thank you. And to those of you who said, rightly, that summer is not of books only made, I agree. Unfortunately I understand books a lot better than most of those things. If it helps I usually walk around town while I read :P

In case anyone wonders, the cute and sweet thing was mostly a crack about myself. In real life I am not cute and very, very far from sweet. In fact I would go so far as to say I am scary (6'1" girl, and not slightly built either with a cutting personality to match, perhaps in a bit of a self-defense mechanism). But that is not important. I thought maybe I would just try to clarify that in case it was not just my low self-esteem at work but actually vaguely humorous.

Despite the fact that I said this was supposed to be only one post to save space I will probably post again on this thread. The idea of talking about good books is just too tempting. In the future, I will try not to be so obviously lacking in self-esteem :)

Mel"I did mention I was 16. It is hard to have self-esteem at 16. Well... Maybe it's just me..."anie