No cheap back door

I think I probably am going to stand firm on something. A couple of people in real life know that I have this site up, and that I talk about them here. They've also been pestering me to tell me how to find this so that they can read it, but realistically... I don't choose to.

I've been a longtime veteran of online journaling. Back when only a couple hundred people in the world were doing it, back in 1997, back when it was considered very daring to do it at all, I had a site up where I gave people a look into my life on a near-daily basis.

What I learned about doing that site these last six or seven years is that even though they insist it won't, there is no way those real-life readers can keep separate the things I write here and the things they want to talk to me about in real life. I hate when they do that -- if I had meant to talk about my divorce at work, for example, I'd have done it. That I mention it on a disk drive on a webserver in another country doesn't open it as a topic for conversation in Maryland, USA.

This page is an illusion... it's what I choose to tell you strangers about my life. It's not my whole life, any more than a picture of your ass is a picture of you. Few people seem to get that distinction, except maybe the growing number of people who do the online journal thing.

OK, fuck me, call it "blogging" if you newcomers want.

In any case, I am going to stand on this one. People in real life should get off their asses and ASK me what I'm thinking and listen to me when I tell them, not go looking for some cheap concentrated back door into an illusion of "knowing" me.