Hostile Emails
Yesterday I received a strangely aggressive email. At first, since the person used an invalid email address and was unusually vicious, I was paranoid that it was the robber from last weekend contacting me from the business cards in my purse. With relief, I quickly realized that it was a person from a rather distant country. (Well, at least now I know that I'll have opposition if I ever open up a tea-leaf reading shop in Cork, Ireland!) But I still wonder how often fortune tellers get unsolicited harassment from the Internet? I know from the nine years my web-site has been live it has been infrequent. Most of the unwanted emails I get are of a sexual nature, and it's not impossible that this person had the same motivations. Blogger Mistress Matisse wrote an entry called "Public Woman" in which she recounts a similar incident. She writes that, "a comment like that suggests to me that he does want to reach through the Internet and scare her, just a little. It’s like saying, 'I’m not going to do anything bad – but let me just remind you that I could.' It’s a petty little power trip, designed to make sure he has her attention, and to make sure she spends some time thinking about him and how she might be vulnerable to him. And it worked, she did." Likewise, since the events of this weekend I've been jumpy. Below is my correspondence with the angry person, with names and email addresses removed.
Stranger: Tea-leaves? Oh, come on...there are better ways to spend your life. I mean, that's just silly. You cant reply to this address, if you want to reply; you can use [email address removed] But if fortunes were to read in tea-leaves, well, I'd read my own.
Me: Due to your contempt, I would advise you against trying tea leaf readings at all! Are you contacting me requesting an appointment? I'm not sure that I understand the purpose of your email.
Stranger: Well, I appreciate your reply, Alexandra. Thank you. The purpose of my email was, I suppose, to make known my total distrust (contempt is too strong a word) of people who practise divination. If you take money for this, then, let's be honest, you're just another chancer. (What's so important about money? I never had much, and it never bothered me.) Let us deal with facts: the future is not contained in tea-leaves. Like the earth isn't flat, unicorns didn't exist, God is a joke. Okay, maybe you make your living with this nonsense - but what a sad living! Preying on the hopes of gullible people. You wont like this, I know. But at least I tell it true, and you do not.
Me: I think you have a misunderstanding of what divination is, so I will respectfully have to agree to disagree with you. I hope that you feel better having contacted me.