I Don't Belong Everywhere. Imagine.

I belong to a few webrings. Perhaps you've seen them hanging out in the sidebar to the right. Yeah. The font is small, but they are there. And boy-oh-boy, there are a TON of webrings out there! One or more for every shape, size, fetish, hobby, flavor and texture of person with a website.

Before I joined the rings, I surfed them to make sure they were worthy of having my blog as a member (whatever I mean by that, and even I'm not sure at all what I mean). Being an internet junkie of sorts has also made me a bit of an internet snob. So be it. I like what I like what I like. The rings I joined seemed expansive enough and were natural selections. I feel at home in them. With an exception perhaps given to the Crazy/Hip one. That's a bit of a stretch. I'm comfortable yet not completely sure I fit. There are some great sites to visit on those rings.

I once submitted my site for approval into the "Lesbian {something normal and happy and rainbowy that I can't quite remember and am too lazy to look up} Webring." I thought "Hey, I'm lesbian! I don't need to bother to look at the other sites on the ring! Surely I want to be a part of something with "lesbian" in the title! Yippee for lesbians everywhere! Yippee for lesbian webrings! Lesbians like me! I'll fit right in!"

Turns out I was wrong about that. If you've joined a webring before, you know it typically works like this:

1. Apply for membership by submitting your "vitals."
2. Put their webring-supplied code into your template so it appears on your site.
3. Wait for the Person-In-Charge-of-That-Particular-Webring to visit your site and approve your membership.

Simple enough! Except that between the time I applied for inclusion in the "Lesbian {something normal and happy and rainbowy that I can't quite remember and am too lazy to look up} Webring" and the time the little Person-In-Charge-of-That-Particular-Webring visited my site, I spent some time visiting other sites in that ring. Because they were all, well, lesbian and such. Yippee for lesbians everywhere! Yippee for lesbian webrings! Lesbians like me! I'll fit right in!

Yet those sites were nothing with which I would want to be associated. Nary a one. Oops. Can I describe why not without revealing more of my hidden personal nature than I truly care to admit? Well. No, probably not. So I slunk back to my template and edited out that ring. No harm, no foul. Later I got a "rejected" email because I had removed the webring html code from my site. Whew.

Since then, I've been more careful about joining webrings. I re-learned a lesson I'm pretty sure I'd already learned but had never had to apply in a situation like this before. I should look before I leap. I'm lesbian, but not all other lesbians are like me and I'm not like all other lesbians and I won't necessarily be able to relate to every single other lesbian in the world. No more than I can relate to every single other human being in the world. Imagine.

Gotta love that "L" word though, ya know?
Yeah.