If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say...

...come sit next to me. I must say, I am quite good at keeping secrets, but is that person you just told your secret to, trustworthy? This is the essential thing to keep in mind in terms of gossip, venting, and secret telling. Now, we've always been told gossip is bad, one shouldn't spread something that might not be true, and I agree with that, HOWEVER sometimes, you deal with a person that infuriates you to the point that you must, must vent about your feelings, or risk exploding. When that happens, it is best if you find someone you can trust implicitly to vent to, so that you know your emotions, which may hurt someone's feelings, will not be gossiped about to the infuriating person. It is not polite to hurt someone just because they are being their infuriating selves. You can't change a person, so venting helps, but remember, that person has feelings, and you would hate for someone to tell you about your own shortcomings, so remember that the person you hate right now, might not know they are driving you crazy. The same goes for telling a secret, if you have one about yourself you want to share, please, make sure you are telling an appropriate person and not the town gossip.

Now, all of the above rules, which apply to real life, should also be employed on the web, particularly on blogs. As anonymous as it seems, there are people with very real feelings out there in blog-land, and one should remember that in writing missives on the internet, very real people are reading them, and the rules of etiquette apply even if you never meet someone in real life.

Of course, I try to keep to the missive that I will never say anything about someone that I would not say to their face, and it generally works in most situations. Remember, when you are polite you come out looking like the winner in these affairs, the person who is "above it all," and that is worth the price of filtering your true thoughts.