Some Stuff Off My Mind. Beware.

A week or so ago, the writer of one of the blogs on my daily crawl asked her readers how personal they get in their own blogs. She asked that because she had recently decided to break one of her blogging rules. She posted a picture of herself. In reading her blog for the past... several months, I'm pretty sure that she uses her real first name and posts pictures of the place where she lives; she had never posted a picture of herself before that one day; and she doesn't post the real names of people she knows. (At least I don't think she posts the real names. Maybe she has and I just haven't noticed.) (Oh, you won't find her linked to the right. I don't really feel comfortable linking to the blogs of people I don't know without their permission, and I don't like writing to people who I don't know to ask. It's a strange system which really won't lead to a growth in links. Oh, well.)

This got me thinking about my blogging taboos. I don't use my real name, although I know I've used it a few times, once to find pictures of other people. I don't use the real names of anyone who isn't me; I use acronyms with no explanation instead. I don't post pictures of my real self, but I did, once, when I got my glasses, which seems like a long time ago now. I don't post pictures of other people, ever. I don't explicitly state what city/town I live in, but I think, for the most part, there are plenty of clues (like links to newspaper articles) if you know this state well enough, especially for Cowcity.

I guess my taboos are about honesty through anonymity, which is ironic because nearly everyone who reads this is someone I know personally; someone I've eaten a meal with; and, in many cases, someone I've seen drunk.

So, why the need to be anonymous?
I'm not sure.

The thinking about blogging taboos started me thinking about blogging purpose. (Which was another question that the blogger from the first paragraph wanted answered, but I didn't think about it at first. I had to get through that thought process first.) Since I don't do anything that would upset or disturb the people who created me (and, aside from the occasional "fuck" or "shit" placed in posts, wouldn't upset the people who created my parents), I try to use my blog to let the people I know and who know me know what I'm doing. (I think I used "know" too many times in too short a span in that last sentence, don't you?) Usually, that means bitching about work since that's all I do. (Okay, it's not all I do. I do watch too much TV, go to the occasional movie, very rarely see a play (although I think plays may be the most magical thing I'll ever be able to experience in my life), read books, and read lots of comic only me and one of my brothers care about. I doubt many of you would find me rambling about those sorts of things all the time very interesting.) So, I guess my blog accomplishes what I set out to do, sort of.

See, I don't always post how I'm feeling. Usually, when I'm not feeling very good, I either post something that is lightly informative that isn't about me, something funny to throw people off, or nothing at all. (It's there, if you're willing to cruise the archives, but I'm pretty sure that I'm the only person who does that.) Me being depressed and writing about it does disturb and upset family members, which I don't want to do. The worst thing is that the family members who get disturbed or upset about those posts don't contact me, they contact my parents. (To my knowledge, this has only happened once because after I was told about it, I began some major censoring. My mom told me about letters and phone calls suggesting that I go see someone for help. She was told that there are pills out there that may help me. One person asked her if I may be diabetic which could cause my mood to swing so low. The one time I was actually confronted in person by a relative about some depressing posts, I smiled and played it off as a joke, even though they weren't. I didn't want to be lectured and it was at Easter, which is always one of my best days and I didn't want to ruin it for me or him by having to explain why I always fall into a funk when spring starts.) My posting tends to be like me in real life, I've found that no matter how I feel, if I put a smile on, people just assume everything is okay. Blogging that way is even easier because I don't have to worry about if you can see how the smile isn't really reaching my eyes. People reading really have to assume that what I'm writing is what I mean and how I really feel.

Sure, I'll occasionally write something with real emotion behind it. (Read the post I made about why I'm not a Democrat anymore. Even more, check out the conversation between Johnny Logic and myself. I was hoping there would be more just to give me more of an opportunity to vent, but it was not to be.) But that emotion is usually anger or frustration. (There's at least one that's me being afraid, but I don't think anyone but me knows about it.) I'm not really an angry guy, but I am often frustrated. I'm more sad than people know. The stupid things that happen in the world make me sad, especially when I know I can't do anything about them, which seems to be all the time. I like to laugh as much as I can; I'm one of the few people I know who will laugh at the TV when I'm the only one there; more than once I've been in a movie theater and the only one guffawing at the action. I don't think I put enough of those things in my blog. I should. I'm not sure how to do that though. Wouldn't that make my already too random blog even more random?

Which lead me to my next thought, should a blog be more coherent or topic related? I look at the ones that I read a lot or stumble upon, and most people seem to be much more focused than I am. Even the ones to the right on this page seem to have more focus than mine. Heels has really become about being a new mother. Johnny Logic, although not much recently, has always had an underlying desire to discuss computational philosophy (I think that's what it's called. It's something that has to do with theoretical machines and the logic used to create the machines and some of the possibilities of using these logic machines in computers to increase processing and creating artificial intelligence, I think. I could be wrong. I've had him explain it to me before and I go away thinking I understand what's going on, but I don't have the basic knowledge to safely build to the peaks he's reaching for without having them collapse. Does that make sense?) as well as keep his friends and family informed a bit, but some of the searches that have led people to his blog, in the past at least, had to do with the philosophy thing. The green apron monkey used to be, almost exclusively, about his working at 'Bucks, after he quit, he hasn't posted much. Slackbastard used to be about slowly killing yourself with booze (and drugs, but he didn't post about the drugs much, even though it was, and probably still is, a big part of his life). SuziFitz is my mom and she writes about her life, but also about making beads because beads are the whole reason she started her website. JustLetMeRead is green apron monkey's sister, she was friends with my youngest brother, she writes about general mish-mash of things, but she's pretty funny. Altered Ego and Purplehobbit are my brothers, they write a general mish-mash too...

I've gotten off topic.

Really, my thought on focusing ones blog down to a more specific topic probably increases readership. I know that the only people who read this stuff on a semi-regular basis are people I know. Most of the time, I'm okay with that. Some days, I do dream of gain Wil Wheaton sized readership, but I know that's not going to ever happen. Maybe just a little bump in the numbers of readers. Someone accidentally stumbles on my blog and finds it interesting enough to come back. I don't think that's happened, though. No new lurkers here, that I know about at least. Which, like I wrote before, is something I'm usually okay with. But, honestly, who, occasionally, doesn't think of being well known by much of the public? Who hasn't imagined people hanging off your every word and waiting with bated breath for the next post, or speech, or whatever? I think that one way do that, or come closer to doing that would be to focus to a more specific blog topic. That'd let you find a group of people interested in that one thing who like the way you write about it and spread the word, or it'd make it easier for the search engines to hit your blog (as long as Congress votes correctly on Net Neutrality, that is).

I'm not going to change the way this blog is, though. If I did, it wouldn't be mine anymore. I'm not a specific topic kind of guy. To put it in ultra-geek, if I were forced to be a class in Dungeons and Dragons, I'd be a bard because they are (or were, I'm not up on the 3rd edition or the edition 3.5 rules) the only class that isn't a really a specialization. They play music and tell stories. They can cast spells. They have thieving skills. They're decent fighters. A Bard is, to coin a phrase, a jack of all trades. (Which sort of makes them useless in game play.) I'm a bard in that I don't want to specialize and become so specific that that's all I'm good at. (Does that make sense?) I find myself wanting to go to school to continue with the 3D animation I started with when I moved to Cowcity, but I also want to go to a culinary school and learn how to do all the fancy cooking, but I also want to just be settled and done with all that schooling. Those things don't really jive, do they?

I don't know what I'm doing. Period. (Funny?)

My life hasn't turned out anything like I thought it would from when I was little. When I thought that sitcoms and movies were fairly accurate reflections of life. When I thought hard workers and nice guys ended up with the good job and the right girl. I learned pretty early on that that isn't true, but I still wish it were or that I still believe it. That's not life at all, though, the hard workers are really only rewarded with more work while the assholes get by and the nice guys are all thought of as gay until they shave their heads, get a leather jacket, and learn to say mean things to women. (Those may be generalizations that aren't really true, but they feel true. As Stephen Colbert might allow me to say, those generalizations are full of truthiness.) At least, in the end we're all the same: dead. Death is the one thing we all work toward without even trying.

You want to know something that's sort of contradictory? I don't like to lie, but I don't like worrying people. Rarely are those two things exclusive. So, I have to ask: is it a lie if you don't tell everything?

My favorite answer, really the only answer I give, to the question "How are you?" is "Okay." I like "okay" because it covers from "I'm feeling the best I've ever felt!" to "This is the shittiest day of my life, but I'm alive." The best part is that the listener is the one who interprets what "okay" means. The listener gets to decide if "okay" means "better than the best person ever" or "I may as well be dead" or what ever is in between the two. Rarely does a listener want to interperate "okay" in a negative way. So, is it a lie?

I'm not sure, but I know I say "okay" a lot when I mean "Well, I'm still alive."

I keep thinking about times when I go out. Of which there aren't many.

I also keep thinking about an old friend who supposedly lives in the city and works somewhere near the park. I don't know if it's true. I sometimes think that I should take a day and just wander around that area hoping to see her or dropping into the stores and asking for her. I doubt I will, but I'd really like to see her and speak with her again. I trusted her and, although she may not have completely trusted me, it'd be good just to visit. Well, good for me. The last time I saw her, it seemed like I was part of her past that she didn't want to revisit. Is possible for two old friends to become friends again without the past getting in the way? I'm not sure.

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Okay, that's it for me. If you actually waded through all that, why?