Who We Really Are

I read about the murder of a successful young woman on Nantucket by her crazy boyfriend here and I thought about what Megnut might be saying about it, as she's one of our best bloggers and now lives on the same island.

She had a very interesting post about what she puts and what she does NOT put on her blog site anymore, how much of it is NOT recorded and she must keep a lot of private things to herself and something that struck me:

... so most of what I think and I do goes unsaid on this site, which for the most part is OK, except that when I look back on prior entries, sometimes I wish I had a better sense of what was really happening between the lines. So this entry is more for me than for you, because this week has been really been something and I need to get that down someplace.

Of course, this is what my blog was in the early days, when it felt like no one ever read it but me and three friends anyway. This is why I wrote stuff like this, about my dad's death, really personal stuff. (This link is messy, look around April 19, 2002, for "I'll Stand By You.") And then with getting divorced and starting to date, I really have not felt it was appropriate to be openly public about a lot of subjects. It always strikes me as amusing, since many people think I'm VERY public in my day-to-day comings and goings, but I'm not.

So as a blogger, I'm missing the one thing the blog used to be -- a safe place for me to let loose -- and I figure this is what Meg is referring to and I agree with her that we can't do that anymore very well. And it's a shame. There is a place, however, I still can let loose.

Last month, Robert Scoble and his wife Maryam were visiting Boston and I offered to pick them up at their friends' apartment and drive them to the airport. I had scribbled the directions to their place in my REAL DIARY -- a paper notebook -- and tossed it on the passenger seat of my car. After I picked them up, Scoble was reading the directions backwards for me to get us out of their neighborhood. I looked over at him and realized he was holding my real "blog" book with all my real secrets in it and said, "you know, that's my real diary." We both had a moment there and launched into a discussion of what blogging was all about. Best of all, from the back seat, Maryam said, "Can you two stop talking about blogs for a few seconds?!" She was right, we shut up.