interests

Honest question. Am I wrong to take interests form another person’s listing, if it’s something I enjoy too? I got the following letter today, and below is my reply.

Hello Scott.
I was looking at people who matched my interests today, and couldn’t help
notice you have 84 of my 121 matching you. Now I put a lot of time and
thought into my interests, and while I’m flattered that you added some of
mine to your list, you kind of took away anything that made me original. I
put a great deal of thought into my into my interests page and made sure I
had a lot of things listed that no one else had. I felt that said something
about my creativity. Things like: Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, beach glass,
blowing bubbles, criminal psychology, cult classics, comforters, flora,
forensics, hemp products, hugging and kissing, and soft fuzzy things. Those
were the ones that were just mine, I didn’t copy down the ones that only had
one or two others.
Now if you wanted more things on your interests list, some ideas I’d give you
would be do a random search for people and look at their lists, or go through
your friends interests, and take one or two things from each of their lists.
But you did copy quite a lot of things from mine, and things that I phrased
so as I would be the only one, you now appear on to. I’m not mad, but maybe
if you rephrased them, it would make you just as happy, without you seeming
like a follower.

my response-

It wasn’t my intent to detract from your originality or sense of being
unique, those are acutally things I enjoy. Honestly, No harm was meant. I
farmed around and picked up some higgledy piggledy. For what it’s worth,
blowing bubbles, forensics, and numerous others were on my list well before
seeing yours. As the interests idea was primarily to find people of similar
‘interests’ I figured that keeping the wording the same would make the
search for like minds simpler…not trying to be a follower, but more of
keeping the index consistant. If you’d like something more along a ‘one of a
kind’ vein, perhaps the bio or the journal itself would be more expressive
for your needs?

If it causes you anger or any sort of stress, I’ll be happy to remove like
entries on the list, or if you have some especially personal ones, I’ll
remove just those.

Let me know, and I’ll do what’ll make you most comfortable.

So, was I wrong to bow in, or perhaps I’m not doing enough? I didn’t see any kind of problem until it was brought to my attention.

::shrug:: I’m going to wait and see.