*defriends*

Defriending someone on LJ is great. It's like deleting them from your mobile. Once you've done that, they don't exist!

Prove to me that someone with a flocked journal that I can't read exists. Go on, I dare ya. I can't tell. Prove to me that someone whose name no longer shows up on my info page (and therefore my flist) exists. I don't know this.

Defriending someone is the best way to remove them from your mind...if they go away.

I hasten to add, in case anyone's minded to rush off and check, that I haven't defriended anyone in a week. If you saw the post about anger that I made yesterday morning (okay, sort of about anger...) you're still friended. If you use an RSS feed to read my journal, you didn't see that one...but I haven't defriended you.

Wow, there was ego. Me thinking that a discussion of defriending would lead to mass hysteria.

Especially since, if we are all playing along in this game we call life, everyone knows that the only thing that causes mass hysteria is an apocalypse brought on by releasing ghosts from their containment unit for environmental reasons. And speaking of which, when I'm done with this, I'm off to check imdb, because I can never remember who that actor is, and I saw him in something recently.

And back to the point. I currently have defriended (or never friended) a serial adder, someone I roleplay in the same game as and have a lot of similar interests as but have never, ever, not once, interacted with (if I have the right person/journal matchup) and someone who I used to be friends with but we turned out to be too much alike or something and it just didn't work out and I got tired of the sense that I was being judged on criteria I should be able to live up to even though they weren't mine.

I realise that it shows an unhealthy interest in your flist if someone deletes you and five minutes later you say "Well fuck you too" and delete them right back because that will show them, the bastard.

However. At what point do you decide that, despite the lack of a comment saying "You know, I don't know why you defriended me and I want to keep reading you and would like you to read me," you should add them back? I'm currently going with "never", but I can't figure this out. If you don't want to read what someone has to say enough that you comment to them at least once (and I think even I, with my notoriously 1337 commenting skills has managed that, except for someone I added a few days ago) why don't you just defriend them? Is it part of the process of making someone bugfucking insane? Is it really to have a flist that is increased by one? Is it some emotional reason I don't understand, like that you want to read them but you'll be damned before you crawl through the mud to say that?

It's a quandary and probably not one that anyone sane (read: anyone else, ever) has ever gone through. But I think about things like this. And I should probably just ban_set, but then all that does is remove their names from my info page. As we all know, anyone can comment to my journal because I don't care enough to set it to friends-only commenting.

Also, if I find soy to be such an irritatingly overhyped under-researched and essentially unhealthy food, why am I eating soy nuts? I don't even like them! They're all promise - there they sit, in the package, shiny and slightly greasy, and they promise wonders previously unrecorded in the progress of human events, and then they taste like crap. And grease. And salt. And admittedly, I would happily whore myself out for salt. I love salt.

But good god are soy nuts awful.

EDIT: William Atherton.