So just before going to bed last night, I noticed someone had left a comment in an eight-month old entry on my livejournal (98% of which is the personal stuff reposted from here so that my non-nerd friends don't have to wade through my technical posts). In the comment, this person took me to task for suggesting that Britney Spears may, in fact, be a manufactured commodity.

In the words of the song: "Yeah, like... whatever."

Anyway. Curiously, I followed the back-link to this commenter's journal, and found what is pretty much a staple of the site: black background, a journal title of the form: "Nobody understands my pain", and two desperate cries for attention.

The first was, as one has come to expect from these things, about cutting.

I can't help thinking that one of the social effects the increasing prevalence of online teen angst blogs is going to have, is the elevation of self-harm to "that thing all the cool depressed kids are doing". The thing that you have to do to prove that your pain is worse than anyone else's. If you desperately want to draw attention to how bad your life is, why not cut yourself and post about it on your blog? That's what everyone else is doing, and it seems to get them ready sympathy and a sense of belonging!

This can't be particularly healthy.

I'm reminded vaguely of the Buffy episode, Earshot. Buffy confronts Jonathan and tells him the blunt truth: the reason nobody was paying attention to his pain was because they were all far too busy dealing with their own.

Which just goes to show: the answers to all of life's questions lie somewhere in old Buffy scripts.