I woke up in a closet.

The top three people on the Internet that I am aware of being on the receiving end of “shit talking” are:

1. Keith Gessen

2. Emily Gould

3. Tao Lin

The top two positions are arguable, but I’ve been thinking about Keith Gessen a lot lately. I just groaned over typing “I’ve been thinking about Keith Gessen a lot lately.” I have to be honest, I’ve never read n+1 and I don’t plan on reading All The Sad Young Literary Men. I’ve read his blog. The blog annoys me.

The reason why reminds me of a little high school anecdote. A girl showed up to school dressed as Christina Aguilera (seriously, her hair looked just like that) for Halloween. When other girls started making fun of her wig and makeup in class, she looked to authority for help. The teacher called her out and said “No one told you to dress up for Halloween. How am I supposed to defend you?” Keith Gessen isn’t dressing up in drag, and I can’t say anything about his actual writing, but the annoying part about him is who teases him and his backlash.

I doubt I’m alone out here. I know there must be others who read Gawker, click on the posts about him, then think “why this guy? Why did someone get a cat for this guy?” Reading his blog, it seems that EVERYONE inherently hates him. He goes so far as to take up potentially insulting domain names on tumblr after someone makes up one called “takebacktheinternet.tumblr” which was not a “fan account.” I’d say, not only defensive, but paranoid. Based on the blogposts, it doesn’t seem like he’s “defeated” quite yet. Whatever defeated means on the Internet since there will always be Gawker or something like it.

“No Press Is Bad Press,” I suppose.

In September of last year, I sort of idolized Emily Gould. She was living in New York, writing, and had an active career as an editor at Gawker. I flip flopped between Gawker and Jezebel daily, and what made me admire Gould was her intelligence and her coining of the label “Scary-Sadshaws” for Julia Allisons and real-live Sex And The City women in New York. While I was interning for Jezebel, I had to go to the Gawker headquarters, and I briefly met her. She was holding a stack of n+1’s in her hands and I mentioned going to Pratt and Keith Gessen speaking to some upperclassmen for an intro to workplace class. She smiled waved goodbye and went back to the stack of magazines after a quick conversation. And because I’m crazy like that, I thought she was the coolest and hoped that some of her coolness rubbed off on me when she shook my hand.

Close to seven months later, when I read her NYTime’s article, I was panicked and I felt beat up and confused over the meaning of so many things: over-sharing, being an active writer in New York, being a female writer in New York, being under the scrutiny of Gawker (at this point I’m aware there’s no way to escape Gawker if you’re part of the literary world in New York). Mainly, I suppose that her article led to a little introspection of my own accompanying some serious questions as to whether or not I’d want to be part of this dog eat dog industry.

What’s more, I was afraid to admit that I imagined her leaning over her laptop in bed writing the article a la Carrie Bradshaw. I considered the “over sharing” and I felt betrayed that she was indulging everyone. I think writing about my feelings on the New York Times article warrants its own post, though.

I’m about to make a leap. Number three on my list of receivers of shit is Tao Lin. I’ve read Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed, and for awhile I kept up with his blog. I think he’s weird. Maybe weird for the sake of being weird — because being weird is what got him attention to begin with — but I think he’s funny most of the time, even when he writes obnoxious poems like this.

Skimming through Tao Lin’s blog, you can see that he was agitated by Gawker as well. And his revenge? Putting Britney Spears stickers all over the Gawker offices and advertising it as a show on his blog. While that’s an outrageous and childish act, I have to say I admire Tao Lin’s blog a little more. His relationship with Gawker takes the back seat to his still-intact world of weirdness. He continues to post interviews with himself and authors he likes, and he continues to post random You Tube videos of himself cooking. Maybe he’s a result of the new school of parenting where children are told to do whatever they want, to be free spirited. Maybe there’s some resilience with his youth.

In the end, I put Tao Lin and Keith Gessen on the same list because of Gawker and because of their blog reactions. Keith Gessen seems to be trapped inside a blogosphere of Us versus Them — probably a way too time consuming approach to the problem — and Tao Lin is basically a twerp who pulls pranks but ultimately he can go back to being a kid and writing non-Gawker or hate mail influenced posts.

So, what do you do when you’re aspiring to be part of this world that seems to have wars waged based on deep-seeded grudges from college or previous publishing? Defend yourself and your intellectualism or mind your own business with the occasional prank? What are the other options?