Things make sense

I was going through a bunch of files and emails here on the com­puter in the past cou­ple of days as part of my cur­rent orga­niz­ing kick, and hap­pened across a ISGB Mem­ber­ship update from March. God­dess knows why I saved THAT par­tic­u­lar mes­sage because I usu­ally don’t keep those emails. It stated:

I am sorry to inform you that we have reluc­tantly accepted the res­ig­na­tion of our Direc­tor of Mem­ber­ship, ***** ********. (name deleted here even though it’s pub­lic record)

With that one sen­tence, a lot of events in the past year sud­denly made an insane sense, where before they had just seemed like ram­pant insanity:

• the past year’s extreme inter­per­sonal hos­til­ity on TAM and other lam­p­work­ing forums
• the cur­rent inter­nal drama within the ISGB involv­ing the cur­rent board of direc­tors in heated con­flict with other long-​time ISGB mem­bers; drama which has esca­lated into a poten­tially very ugly sce­nario from a num­ber of viewpoints
• the recent estab­lish­ment of LOLA, the League of Lam­p­work Artists, by that same per­son who resigned as the ISGB’s Direc­tor of Membership

I, Min­cot, and sev­eral other friends found our­selves neck-​deep in the forum hos­til­i­ties with­out know­ing any­thing about the under­cur­rents. All we knew was what we saw out in the open, and it made us into unwit­ting tar­gets for some of that hos­til­ity. Now it seems cer­tain that all sides of that fra­cas used our igno­rance to manip­u­late us in that con­flict as well as the ISGB conflict…and I don’t like being manipulated.

I have so far hes­i­tated to join LoLA, even though on the sur­face it’s exactly the kind of orga­ni­za­tion we’d sup­port. Some­thing didn’t seem right (actu­ally some­thing smells quite rot­ten) about it; appar­ently intu­ition was dead on target.

On the other hand, those events spurred me to estab­lish The Glass Haven — a deci­sion which was clearly a good one in light of this. Not every­one wants con­tro­versy, drama, and to get sucked into other people’s war­fare with­out ade­quate history.

All in all, though, I feel blind­sided after the fact, used for no good rea­son, and very, very dis­gusted by the behav­ior of a lot of chronologically-​but-​not-​maturationally adults…