What is wrong with me?

[dougo]

Last week, aroraborealis hosted her annual LJ Confessional where people were encouraged to post their confessions, anonymously or not. There were a fair number of Post Secret-style deep dark secrets, but many of them were about crushes (it being the week before Valentine's Day). After I posted a comment on someone else's confession, someone anonymously commented that I was hot. It was flattering, of course, but it made me realize that I was actually more interested in getting negative comments than positive ones. (That was the only one I got either way.) It may just be my natural pessimism that makes me believe negative opinions more than positive ones, but mostly I feel I can learn more from criticism than from compliments. I always want to improve myself (I may not always be capable of it, but I always want to), and learning about a perceived fault of mine gives me more actionable information than a perceived strength.

So with that in mind, I am hereby inviting you all to say something negative about me here, anonymously or not (IP logging is off, as always). Constructive criticism would be preferred, but if you just want to insult me, go for it—as long as you really mean it! If you can't think of something to criticize, tell me something about myself that I might not know. If for some reason you don't want to broadcast your complaint, you can email me at dougorleans@gmail.com, perhaps using an anonymous remailer or something (just make sure it doesn't look like spam).

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Yes, this entry is really true. It was an experiment to see what kind of response I'd get. (No one has emailed me so far.) I would take serious criticism seriously, but this doesn't mean I would act on everything. Ideally, I was hoping to find out that there's something I'm doing (or not doing) that I didn't realize and would be easy to change. Like, "you talk with your mouth full", or "you don't smile enough". Except, those are kind of lame examples, which is why I was asking other people.

But even if it's something I already know and don't want to change, it's still good to know how people perceive it. Like, I don't actually remember your criticism about television, so it's good that you mentioned it. Except I'm not sure exactly what you mean by it; if you mean that I spend too much time on solitary entertainment, as opposed to being more social or productive, then I mostly agree with you (although I'm still on the fence about the leisure vs. accomplishment question), and I think that will change soon. But if you mean that, as a solitary entertainment option, television is inferior, then I'd probably disagree with you; I don't think it's really any different from watching movies, or playing video games, or reading blogs, or reading novels, or stamp collecting, or whatever. And, "watching too much television" has connotations of plopping down and vegging out to whatever happens to be on at the time, but with Tivo I am always watching whatever I most want to see at that moment; yes, that includes a fair amount of brain-rotting stuff like Survivor, but I also watch a lot of indie films, documentaries, and Charlie Rose. And these days the best mainstream dramas are as good as the best movies, if not better because they have a lot more time to develop their themes, plots, characters, and settings.

You're right that being more specific would be more likely to get responses, but I don't have anything specific in mind at the moment. Mainly I wanted to see if there was anything on people's minds and they were just waiting for an opportunity to tell me. Also, asking about specific things feels a little close to "do these jeans make me look fat?" and I certainly don't want to go there.