Flotsam

Gorgeous Tertia’s post about blogging has sent me into a flurry of contemplation. Cecily had a discussion about the same topic last week, namely, the “most appropriate way to handle writing about real life friends and family in your blog,”
I haven’t given my blog address to anyone in my real life except The Nearly Fiance. Two of my acquaintances found it by chance, but as far as I know, no one else has. It’s not an issue with my mother, because she uses the internet only for work and to book airline reservations. People Magazine might as well be written in an obscure Mayan dialect for all the sense it makes to her, and she inevitably returns from the hair salon full of questions raised by the magazines in the waiting room. (“Did you know that what’s-his-name, from Top Gun, is a Scientologist? What is a Scientologist? And Madonna is JEWISH? I thought she was Italian!”) I am fairly certain that my mother has never heard the word “blog,” much less visited one.
But what about other, more technologically advanced, people? A little Google is a dangerous thing. Although to be quite honest, I do not much care about random real life people finding my blog. I am much more concerned about how I deal with writing about those that I love.
The Nearly Fiance is very, very, VERY private. I, on the other hand, am a non-fiction writer who frequently finds herself in the middle of a serious conversation with another person while thinking (evilly, I know it) ‘This would make a fabulous essay.’ Between The Nearly Fiance’s natural reticence and my exhibitionistic mining of the lives of myself and others for material…it is perilous terrain. I want to respect the privacy of those close to me, and I try very hard to do just that, but sometimes, after, oh, I don’t know, a fight with one’s significant other, when one is storming around the apartment swilling Vinho Verde and muttering dark threats to one’s cats because one is not allowed to mutter them to The Internets, well, one starts to wonder what is the point of having an online journal if one can’t pule and moan about one’s own boyfriend?
Part of what appeals to me about blogging is the honesty I have seen displayed by other bloggers, the willingness to talk about things that are not particularly attractive, and to do so in a deeply conversational tone. I have a few perfectionistic tendencies when it comes to my non-blog writing—I am what The Nearly Fiancé calls “Crazy” and I call “Meticulous.” In high school I edited my journals, and finally gave up keeping one because it was Too Much Pressure. It can take me 20 minutes to write a sentence. I am like Flaubert, only without the talent. Blogging gives me a place to practice not being perfect, not editing my every thought. Not that it is easy for me—as evidenced by a recent conversation between me and The Nearly Fiance:

“I read your blog entry”
“Oh?”
“You must have been really relaxed when you wrote it!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, you started a sentence with “And.”
“I do that a lot.”
“Not that I’ve seen—it was nice, it was different from your regular writing.”
“I’ll take it down.”
“No! That’s not what I meant, it was just…looser…like a journal entry.”
“I’m taking it down right now.”
…I left it up, which felt like walking jauntily into my office completely naked.

But I try to remember the shiny, understood feeling that can come of honesty. Last week I sat in my boss’s office, explaining that I would be gone in September for surgery.
“A laparoscopy,” I told her, studying the wall.
“Oh,” she said, “I just had one of those.”

I had never spoken to this woman about anything but deadlines and schedules and priorities. When I walked back to my own office twenty minutes later, after discussing things I had previously mentioned only over modem lines, I felt better than I had in weeks.
“Take as much time off as you need,” my boss had said, and I could barely stave off the impulse to kiss her. Sometimes you aren’t as all by yourself as you think you are.