Voyeurism

One thing that I’m always left frustrated with about this blog is how, when it gears up into its more popular stages, people have a tendency to treat it like some back-door news feed. When someone mentions that they read it on my blog and didn’t hear it straight from me, there’s usually some level of intended guilt trip involved. It’s why I originally moved it, three months after its inception. Admittedly, that was just a lesson in understanding that the internet is not a private place and that blogs are not the place to bitch about your parents. But I don’t think the situation here is quite the same. I’ll get to that, though.

The point of this blog was, at one point, to make it easy for people that were interested in my life to keep up with it. It also served primarily as a hub for social connection between all of my friends, which is why it was once as active as it was, as it made it really easy to bring a lot of different people into one place. Especially when I was on my controversial topic kick, there was a lot of fun to be had in the commentary. I still get a warm feeling in my heart knowing that a forty-year old woman came trotting in with here three associate’s degrees (or sommat) to try and trump us. Those were good times.

While I’m happy to see the blog become a point of interest for lots of people again, it needs to be clear what exactly this is for. The blog isn’t where I come to talk about my day and provide regular updates about where I’m going and what I’m doing. I write about whatever interests me, and that has little to no correlation with the daily drama that life tends to engender, but is merely inspired and motivated by such. When I do invoke the details of day-to-day life, I do so in the hope that it makes my point clearer, not because I like to keep everybody on the same page of updates on my life.

There is no level of privilege to the information I share. Nobody deserves to hear or not hear anything I’ve said, it’s a freaking blog. As such, I find myself a little violated when I’m subtly berated for sharing any important information through this medium, in an attempt to make a philosophical point more clear while simultaneously clearing up some misconceptions about my plans. There’s also the simple fact that saying it here means I generally have to do it ten or fifteen times less than I would otherwise.

This is a personal blog, and I write with the intention of directing it towards you, my audience, and not any other. It’s not impersonal to learn about me through whatever I write here, because it’s exactly the same as what I would have told you in an email or in a conversation or over IM, but perhaps even more clear and precise due to the luxuries of time and proofreading. Hey, you’ve even got a means of public and private response. I find little weight in the idea that I’m required to share all personal information (what little of it I do share here) through seemingly private means.

On a practical level, I just hate it when the contents of my blog come up in serious conversation. This isn’t a news article or an encyclopedia. It’s a series of thoughts on life, not the de-facto place to know Tim and all that Tim’s about. I’m not that easily unraveled. As such, you, my faithful readers, would do well to understand that this is the most controlled medium in existence (or close, anyways). I’m letting you read exactly what I want you to read, and that too much inference is unhealthy. I also expect some kind of communicative integrity. I don’t like it when what I write here is transmitted to others without perfect clarity. It’s the nature of communication for accuracy to degrade as it falls from the source, but come on, it’s on the freaking internet, available for anyone to read. I don’t need to deal with unnecessary miscommunication crap. Ultimately, I just want people to understand that the blog is for my enjoyment, not as an obligation to anyone else.

With that, I’m headed back to sleep.