It's not you. It's me.

Okay. You may have noticed that I don't use my name. I do this because I don't want to be found. Oh, I know when you publish something on the internets hypothetically ANYONE could eventually find it. But not using my name was a way of not making it ENTIRELY THE EASIEST THING IN THE WORLD for any old person I actually know to have immediate access.

It's a space putatively "safe," then, not just for admitting attitudes I wouldn't want a boss to know, but also for working at identities I wouldn't necessarily be able to pull off in the same room as say my mother.

Just to pick one.

Which means that when you TELL people, especially when you tell my mother, about reading things on my website, you are cavalierly just busting my tiny bubble of grace period, my sense of safety. Yes, it would be all fabulous if we all could be exactly the same "in real life" as in our writings. And if our mother and us had that kind of relationship where we'd type up all kinds of blog entries, say about sex or say about her, and e-mail them to her for approval before posting.

BUT WE DON'T. Instead we are private persons, and we don't wear our hearts on our sleeves, and we never, ever show anything we write to our mother. Or to most people we know, actually. We are pseudonymous, not so much for professional reasons, but for private ones.

Which is why when our mother calls and says, this-and-such said she read such-and-such on your website but I didn't know you have a website do you have a website? we say no. And when she says, do you have a blog? we say no. And when she says, do you? have a blog? we say no again.

We are pretty sure we all know this is a lie.

But if we wanted to acknowledge this privateish space to our mother, we would have done so. Since we haven't done so, we're not going to fess up, because this would be seen as a personal hand-lettered invitation from me to READ THE BLOG which would then lead to MORE PHONE CALLS when she reads something she doesn't like or which doesn't match her official version of who I am or how I think about things.

This is not a post about my mother, by the way. It's a post about the paradoxical privacy of a public space peopled by strangers, by no one who actually knows you or has expectations about how you're supposed to think.

And about how much less safe a blog space feels when this paradoxical-public-privacy has been punctured.

Also, if my cat could please stop walking across my pillow early in the morning stepping on my hair with those delicate little flower-paws holding up all that god damn bulk. It hurts, kitty. And it wakes me up grouchy.

Thank you.