Have you seen these?
A Year in Books - 2009-12-27
Skip Tracer, Loan Detective - 2009-11-22
New Job - 2009-11-03
The coleslaw got served. - 2009-10-21
Probably a new job. But maybe not. - 2009-10-08

Come on, Arthur! Get Meta with me!
2006-11-30 12:43 a.m.

I've been a little obsessed with my stats log recently. Twogood friends are both here now, maybe. (Click on Acheron a few times. He's a self-proclaimed megalomaniac, so seeing his MySpace hits counter go up by 10 or so people will probably make him happy.)

Surely they noticed that my personal MySpace is basically just a pimpfest link to here. Surely by now they have basked in the wonder that is ana-ng.diaryland.com. That's great. Welcome, to both of you. Feed my ego. I update more or less weekly! Only 90% of my entries are whining about my job! Love me!

That's not even really the main reason I'm checking the stats, though. The potential-someday-maybe-almost-in-laws might be here too. (I'm not even sure what to call them. Rijid's family. Legally right now, they're not really anything more than the family of the man I love. I'd like to think they're a little more, but what do you call that?) Anyway. The almost-in-laws are here. Maybe.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Rijid's parents drove up here. We somehow got on the subject of blogs. S said her older son has one, and his ex-fiancee has one, and for a while there was all kinds of craziness there, which I'm sure we can all imagine. Eventually, DreamKing locked his blog. Here, said S. This is my password.

Of course I looked. Wouldn't you? But then I felt guilty. I e-mailed DK and told him I had a blog too, here it is, and I won't look at yours again till you approve me because I realize that as the mere girlfriend of your brother, who you've never even really sat down and talked with, reading your most personal stuff is a right I simply don't have.

He wrote back, agreeing with me. Yeah, my brother's girlfriend doesn't get to read this. Don't worry, I've got it all filtered different ways for different groups of people, and you won't see anything you're not supposed to see.

I'm a crazy person, so I took a little offense at this. But but but! It took me FOUR YEARS to admit to my parents that I was doing this, and here I made this huge step and invited you in basically on a whim, and now you're telling me no?

I realized fairly quickly that I was being irrational. The main problem is that "blog" is a made-up word. Words like "green" or "pencil" are words we all recognize, and they mean basically the same thing to everyone. "Blog," however, is a relatively new word. There is no consensus definition of it yet, so it means something slightly different to everyone who uses it.

My "blog" is a collection of personal essays, for public view. I discovered at Sarah's wedding that I had no problem at all with finding out my mom's best friend was apparently a fan. (She said I was right, a short dress was the way to go. I went, blinkblink. Oh, ok. Cool. It actually led to a whole drunken epiphany about how my parents' friends actually fulfilled the role of aunts and uncles for me while I was growing up, in a way that the biological ones, for philosophical or geographical reasons, couldn't. But I digress.)

When my mom asked if she could tell my cousin about it, I said sure. Right now, I'm at the point where absolutely everyone is welcome to read. Tell your friends!

I wasn't always at this point, though. It doesn't help matters that even though "personal but public" is my usual working definition of what I'm doing here, sometimes I get all Meta and stuff like this entry shows up. Then I think too much about how I think too much. I don't just have issues, I have subscriptions, ba dum bum ching.

The point is, for DK "blog" means something entirely different. I can't get all pissy just because his head, and his method of coming to terms with what he finds there, aren't just like mine.


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