catapult magazine

i’m dissapointed in cino. i feel like all the discussion is very out of ourselves. about michael moore, and war and peace. i feel like in the uck thread i tried to move the conversation to more personal things. about my own struggles with life. about how i am attracted to a very married woman. but to no avail. in stead we talked about how unchristian this heathen is. and how i was trying to break the fabric of cino. it is true that i was trying to stir the pot a little, but i also had, needed, to write. and i did, and some pretty hard emotions and thoughts came out. it felt like they were dealt with like there was no human at the other end of this computer. so i guess what i’m trying to say is that cino feels very official, very well thought out, and when something not well thought out comes out you (plural, not all) don’t handle it very well.

in a way i feel a little ousted from this community. like the weird uncle who we invite but don’t listen to.

if this is unclear in any way, or you don’t get what i’m trying to say, please ask, it’s interesting when people speculate on what i’m trying to say, but it’s also annoying. i understand that if you have to guess about part of what i’m saying you make that leap and run with it. but it is possible that the assumption is wrong.

i am sounding like a pompous, arrogant, concieted little jerk. pissed off cause he didn’t get his little way. shoot man. i don’t mean to.

for me a message/discussion board is a place to throw some thoughts around. a place to try out some new ideas. a place to think out loud. and here i hope to get responses from fellow christians. what is a discussion board to you? and what is this discussion board to you?

-enok (banana man)

I don’t mind discussing personal things, if I can understand them in their written form. In order to be heard, you have to be able to communicate in ways in which people understand. I was distracted from your main point (the married woman) by the subsquent nonsense post, and I apologize for not being more aware of what you were trying to say.

Now, as for being attracted to a married woman. You’re not a heathen. You’re an imperfect human like the rest of us. But man, you have to stay away from that. When I was single, I was infatuated with a married man who knew enough to leave my scintillating self alone. It eventually occurred to me that if he indeed HAD decided to return my affection, he wouldn’t have been the man I admired and wanted. And I would have turned into the type of woman who encourages another person’s sin. And I didn’t really want an adulterer as a boyfriend.

I’m not a really integral part of this community, but I still like visiting this site because there’s always something stimulating to read, and even though I know some of the people here from Dordt, I’m not investing a great deal of emotional stock in it.

enok, I think you expect things out of cino that maybe isn’t part of its character or capacity. A web community operates via some strange rules that I haven’t quite figured out myself. It has something to do with the fact that we are all interfacing with a screen and can’t see the whole package of facial expressions and tones of voice that are often a crucial accompaniment to text. And of course every web community is slightly different. Here we have a lot of intellectuals with more of a restrained white midwestern background. I think I can speak for most people here when I say that I don’t feel very comfortable with intensely personal outpourings in such a public forum. We simply don’t know you well enough as a person to be able to respond appropriately. Maybe a group of friends you can talk face to face with would help with things like that.

Throwing out new ideas is excellent. Keep it up. But it’s important to remember the context of the community you are writing to. If the character of this board really disagrees with your style, maybe this particular forum is not for you. Just to qualify one thing though— it’s good to stir the pot too. But you need to make it clear what you’re trying to do if you don’t want to be misunderstood.

I like that cino challenges me with different viewpoints — yet I think if I am after viewpoints that fall outside the range of Christianity, I owuld probably look for abouther community.

I like that cino is a community willing to hold up moral judgements, even though I often don’t believe them.

I wonder, though, whether we could have some kind of new thread — like an art thread — not to talk about art, but to create something invented collectively. I am not sure what it would look like or how we would get it going, but it is a possibility. I think the uk thread, though very interesteing to me, because it appeared in the context of typical cino stuff, ended up being more of a limited experiment in what cino currently is. If we could frame it in some other context (essays and poems about life or something) maybe different things would happen.

For those of you who wonder, I decided to edit what used to be in this exact spot because there wasn’t a lot of grace in it. enok, I honestly wonder if there are any changes that can be made to cino that would make you happy. I feel like your victim status is self-imposed rather than the result of anything any of us have done to you. Not many of us know you in person, but we’ve gotten to know you at cino as someone who posts contextless freeverse poetry followed by complaints. I don’t know anything else about you. If we questioned what you were doing, it’s because we’re confused and we don’t know you.

Is there anything cino people can do to make you comfortable here, or are you most comfortable when you are complaining? It’s an honest question. Because if you just enjoy complaining and confusing people, that’s fine and then we can move on. But if you actually want to see change, you’re going to have to give us some ideas about how cino can better include you.

PS-Just because I post a lot doesn’t mean I speak for cino, so please don’t construe my remarks as representative.

enok, why do you feel like the odd man out? It seems to me that what you say, that *cino seems very well thought out, and serious, etc. represents, in a general way, the personalities of many of the *cino members. I guess I don’t understand if you feel left out because of the way your posts are treated, or the way people respond, or is it something else entirely?

If it is the way people respond, I can’t help but echo some of the sentiments posted by others—a community is made up of individuals, with varying opinions, but in order to be a community we do have some generally accepted ways of being, or posting I think. It’s not like you can’t express yourself, but I do think there are limits on what you can demand of others’ responses.

Is there something specific you want to see happen in the *cino community, or a specific way that you could feel more included?

i just added a new forum, freeform, under which idea meanderings, word flow and general creativity is encouraged (impromptu poetry, improv free association, etc.).

i know this doesn’t address everything you’ve brought up, enok, but it is something we’ve needed to do for a while and the most concrete thing i can do at the moment.