Passive aggressivity

I stumbled across the site passiveaggressivenotes.com a while back and while it is kind of a cousin to Post Secret and therefore very interesting, it seems to leave me with a decidedly different taste in my mouth than does Post Secret. Whereas Post Secret will frequently make me laugh out loud or feel sad or jubilant or somewhere in between, passiveaggressivenotes.com usually leaves me feeling a bit uncomfortable and sometimes, a little bit mad.

While they are funny, especially the note left on a diner counter in ketchup and mustard after the customers had no service for 30 minutes, sometimes I think that these notes reveal the worst part of us. It's the part that gets mad at people and then won't do anything overt about it to try and solve the situation. Instead, we'd rather engage in a game that explains how we feel about a situation in a tangential way that the other person may or may not get and is usually designed to hurt the other person in a way that simply confronting a situation would not.

I've had people describe themselves to me as "Mr./Mrs. Passive-Aggressive" as if this were some sort of badge of honor. Truthfully, there's not much more that drives me crazy about dealing with other people than those that are passive aggressive. This, undoubtedly, means that I am almost certainly at least a little bit passive-aggressive myself as that which we hate most about other people is usually a mirror for something that we ourselves are. And I think my general dislike for passive-aggressive behavior is the reason that I am getting closer and closer to removing passiveaggressivenotes.com from my Google Reader. While they are funny, if you look at them closer, they really just upset me. And that's not something that I need to invite into my life as there is enough in the real world to upset me as it is.

And really, when you think about it, aren't "notes" by their very nature passive-aggressive?