Corrections

I'm getting into this idea of keeping a blog. Whenever I hear something interesting, instead of thinking, "Hmm, that's interesting," I think, "Hmm, that would make a good blog topic." I think that's healthy.

Anyway, for the sake of honesty, I feel the need to update my first two posts:

1. I have shared the address of this blog with two people. Granted, I haven't plastered it all over the place, but it's no longer fully anonymous.

2. My headset didn't really break - HOORAY! It turns out (as I discovered after one visit to Radioshack, three to Sprint, and three to Verizon) that it was my phone that was broken, and the good name of my trusty headset should hereby be cleared.

These corrections beg the question: What is the role of truth in a blog, or really in any sort of semi-anonymous communication? When I set out for my freshman year of college, my dad and I drove a third the way across the country with all of my belongings. (I always picture my 4 foot tall stuffed-animal penguin tied to the van like a masthead, but we didn't actually do that, we just thought about how amusing that would have been.) As we were nearing Boston, my destination, my dad turned to me (I was driving -- we thought it was poetic for me to drive the beginning and end bits) and said, "You know Jude, you could go by Hillary and no one would ever know that's not your name." It was such a crazy thought. I was going to a place where I had no history and no context, and was essentially starting anonymously. There were a few details on google that I could never escape. But other than those, I could completely remake myself.

The idea never appealed to me. It would have felt so hollow, and so deeply dishonest. I feel the same way about my writing. Sure, it might be more entertaining to create an alter blog-ego (blogego?), but I'm not trying to write fiction. In Steven King's book On Writing, the only Steven King I can read, King describes writing as a form of mental telepathy. When someone reads something another person wrote, s/he is reading the other person's mind and communicating directly. As I read that sentence, it really resonated. In my head appeared his thought. And I feel uncomfortable with the idea that I'm telepathing myself falsely. What's the point of writing as myself if I'm deceiving people by introducing them to a non-body, like those horrible 34 year old men romancing 12 year olds on the internet? What deception to think that I allow other people to read my mind, and purposely manipulate what they read to misrepresent my mind!

That being said, obviously I can't convey myself perfectly, nor would I want to be the sort of person who could be fully conveyed in blog posts. So, I will try to keep these posts both technically honest and true to myself. Even if I don't think of myself as a blogger.