I was mortally offended this morning, so steamed that by the time I dried off around noon, my socks had shrunk. This happens every day. I am running out of socks. It is torture being an easily offended person, also expensive.

This weekend alone I was offended for a banner of reasons: by my mother (she hurt my feelings), Shopbop.com for a slow refund, 18 strangers online, a book by Nora Ephron’s unfunny sister, a guy who said “rad” and “awesome” and referred to the city of Chicago as “Chicawg,” people who hork on the sidewalk, writers who use the words “iota,” “folks” and “tad” and an American who wanted The Colbert Report cancelled because she didn’t get one of its jokes.

The last, Suey Park, is a “hashtag activist,” which on Twitter is a good thing but in real life is simply a person who didn’t get a joke. She now says she didn’t really want Colbert cancelled but I think she’s being ironic here and I choose not to get that. I’d rather be offended. It’s more fun that way.

Last week, comedian Stephen Colbert’s corporate Twitter account, not the real one, @StephenAtHome, repeated one of his anti-racist lines. He had been mocking the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, which seems to have been founded so its owner could keep trying to retain the racist “Redskins” name.

In response, Colbert established the “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” Park, 23, who has had a lot of success with her #NotYourAsianSidekick hashtag, part of a continuing quarrel Asian feminists have with white feminists, took the joke literally and without context. I am surprised this woman is not Canadian.

She set up #CancelColbert, which briefly caught on. Mainstream media — humourless people who missed years of this Colbert running gag — seized on it because it was as easy to cover as a missing airplane. They speculated wildly. Is Colbert racist? Can planes hide on the dark side of a mountain in Kazakhstan if the passengers have a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome?

Here’s the result, as Colbert described it: “A web editor I’ve never met posts a tweet in my name on an account I don’t control, outrages a hashtag activist, and the news media gets 72 hours of content. The system worked.”

I am summarizing here. The actual quarrel was mind-tangling. The New Yorker’s website ran a stupefying blogpost by a specialist in “Korean male anger” on “America’s ongoing diversity drama” and Park and then Kanye West, and then he lost me.

But that’s the problem when people get offended. You try to straighten the delicate tendrils of their feelings only to realize too late that you’re caught in a net and the result is too boring to explain to readers who had a normal weekend.

Colbert plays an idiot on his show, “an egomaniacal right-wing gasbag.” Nine years ago, even he did not think his show would succeed and he somewhat regrets the fact that he didn’t change his name before it became a hit. He doesn’t allow his children to watch the show lest they catch their father being “insincere.” Park was being an idiot about an idiot.

Truly, Twitter has eaten itself. Meta beyond belief, the Colbert frenzy has made me comment on a commenter who commented on the reaction to a tweet by a commenter who commented on a comedian playing a character who joked about a remark by a racist reacting to comments by football fans on the name of his team. And I’m boiling it down here.

All this would be worthy if I were commenting on actual racism, which is probably the worst virus going around. The expression of pointless racial prejudice has caused hundreds of millions of early deaths and soured countless lives. That said, can we not concentrate on damage caused rather than feelings felt?

When Colbert makes a joke and I don’t find it funny, I berate myself. The fault lies in me, I think. Has the universal dull-check of life under Stephen Harper left me unfit to live?

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Oh, I have feelings, most of them hurt. I am soaked in their wetness, their sweet tang. But I don’t create a hashtag #raisedbyscots and go to town on it. #notthatsilly.

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