the illusion of privacy

if you have a secret, don’t write about it on the internet.

i mean, it makes sense, right?  there is no privacy in the world any more–no information people can’t get if they really want to get at it, so it seems silly on the one hand to bother trying to hide things and ridiculous on the other to give anyone more than the minimum.

but i have a compulsion to put stuff out there in writing, like sonar out into the world to see how i really feel about things versus just how i think i should feel about them–lately it’s been disturbingly difficult to tell the difference between those things, so i thought a new journal might help.

i don’t generally write about things that are secret, except when i forget, but some things aren’t really secret, they’re just private.  they are things that are on my mind that i would like to write about and think about and spit it out to the world to see what it looks like from a distance.  you might know that i have a great big window in my living room that looks out into an elementary school playground–i’m on the third floor, but my window is just slightly above ground level for the kids, so we’re only about fifteen or twenty feet away.  i can see and hear everything they do and say pretty clearly, if i try, but  i have this little fiction in my head that somehow they can’t see me just as clearly.  i love to have the light and air of leaving my windows open, and i just hope they respect my coping mechanism.

if you are interested in reading what i have to say, awesome!  please read all about it and tell me what you think via email or a comment…but it’s about me and not about you and it’s not something i want to talk about, you know, in person.  please don’t bring it up.  if you don’t like me, either out in the world or from what you read here, just don’t read it anymore.  it’s better that way for both of us.

so, you know, manifesto!  read or don’t read, agree and disagree, but please keep it all right here and respect my illusion of privacy.