My Level of Awareness

As you noticed, I didn’t blog yesterday.  It was, from a work standpoint, A Bad Day.  Again, the details of my work are not exactly fodder for breathless blog reading, but suffice to say it was a day that resulted in emergency contract renegotiation, meetings that resulted in more questions than they answered, and yet another in a long line of protocol revisions that leave me with nightmares of animal necropsies.

I didn’t want to just dash-off a quick blog, or rely on my usual standby of posting pictures of my oh-so-adorable-and-endlessly-interesting-cherub-angel-son, because I really wanted to take Sarah’s Quote Challenge.  It deserved a bit more than my usual snarky commentary.  I realize that naked self-examination in front of strangers is a stretch to my limitations, and it was going to have to take a few deep-breathing exercises that might alarm my co-workers.

 Accept everything about yourself — I mean everything. You are you and that is the beginning and the end — no apologies, no regrets. ~ Carl Moustakas

I think fifteen or twenty years ago, this would have elicited a more in-your-face response.  I was still in the painful throes of figuring out that person I was supposed to be accepting.  I think I am not unique when I say that we spend a lot of our youth from the teen years forward in an angry demand of “Accept me! Respect me! Above all, NOTICE me!”  Yet we really have no idea WHO we are really asking people to accept.   The hypocrisy of the situation is glaring in retrospect.  We demand acknowledgement for every extreme act of absurd self-actualization we put ourselves through - the tattoos, the piercings, the clothes, the lifestyles, the music, and yet we are the people that have the hardest time accepting who we are.  Some people never outgrow this, and it has the effective air of an 80-year-old woman in pink lipstick and a miniskirt.  Yes, there are a few that can carry it off, but for the majority, it’s just rather sad.

As I entered middle age, I will admit to developing an eye-rolling impatience with the shock-tactics that screamed “Look at ME!”.  But in that period of self-evaluation that comes when more of your life is statistically behind you than ahead of you, I developed the realization that so much of the bluster is a plea for self-importance, a need to look inside and find yourself without the worry that what you will discover is that you are nobody at all.  We cannot live with the fear that we will pass through life transparently.  Even if people roll their eyes at me, they notice me.  I exist.

People who resist growing up are under the mistaken impression that growing up is giving up the person you always wanted to be.  For some, who never manage to connect the person they are inside with the image they build on the outside, this may, indeed, be true.  But in the very best of the human journey, becoming older is simply becoming more yourself. Necessary to this is the acceptance that we are not the only arbiters of that self.  We come with a baggage of genetics, culture, and perceptions that we can no more deny than the number of fingers we were born with.   If we spend a lifetime fighting the uncontrollable manifestations of our past, we will never really know ourselves.  We will grow old grasping for an image of our own creation, but never wholly owning that creation.  Understanding where we came from allows us to accept it, embrace it, and move beyond it.   We can only drop the baggage that we realize we are carrying.

As self-centered and self-glorifying as our culture has become, at the root, it fights that acceptance.  We are taught simultaneously to hide our flaws in the relentless worship of perfection, while maintaining the illusion that we are selfless.  The roots of Puritanism simultaneously deny self-love in favor of the love of the other, while insisting that outward perfection implies divinity.  Virtue is all about the sacrifice.  And sacrifice is the denial of the self. 

But Divine love can only come from self-love.  Only when we recognize, accept, and embrace our own flaws, can we tolerate and accept the flaws in others.  I love my friends, not in spite of their idiosyncracies, but BECAUSE of them.  They are what make them unique and loveable.  They are not icons of immeasurable goodness.  They are people.  People who make me laugh and cry, who frustrate me and enchant me.  And, most magically of all, even though I know I am a rigidly linear-thinker with an absurdly dry sense of humor, and who suddenly displays passionate attachments to the abstract at supremely inappropriate moments - they love me too. 

I am who I am.  And really?  After 42 years I am nothing like the Buddha, but I am okay with that, too.

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I know, I know, I normally reserve these for MySpace.  But, it’s been slow lately. I have had a lot of work to do.  And trust me, you do not want me to blog about my job.  Unless you are a completely entrenched insomniac.

 So, stolen from Sarah, who stole this one from Bub and Pie . . .

1. You can flip a switch that will wipe any band or musical artist out
of existence. Which one will it be?

Wow. Only one? Hmmm.  I would say Jessica Simpson.  I am interpreting the term musical artist very, very loosely.

2. You have the opportunity to sleep with the movie celebrity of your
choice. We are talking no-strings-attached sex and it can only happen
once. Who is the lucky celebrity of your choice?

Tough choices, tough choices.  I am going to say Heath Ledger.  Because all my other faves are close to my age, and in my fantasies, I might just have a shot.  But Heath is so far out of my league and age group, I can’t even fantasize.  Demi Moore, I am not.

3. You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your
choice. Who do you pick?

I’m with Sarah on this one - Harry Connick Jr.  Plus I dig a New Orleans accent.

4. Now that you’ve slept with two different people in a row, you seem
to be having an excellent day because you just came across a
hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. Holy shit, a hundred bucks! How
are you gonna spend it?

Toys for my son.  I have a list right here…

5. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart
right now. Where are you gonna go?

Rome.  Spirituality, art, food and fashion rolled into one package.  Mama, mia, I couldn’t resist.

6. Upon arrival to the aforementioned location, you get off the plane
and discover another hundred-dollar bill. Shit! Now that you are in
the new location, what are you gonna do?

Trattoria and some good Italian food.  I can’t help it - I grew up in New York.

7. The Angel of Death has descended upon you. Fortunately, the Angel
of Death is pretty cool and in a good mood, and it offers you a
half-hour to do whatever you want before you bite it. Whatcha gonna do
in that half-hour?

I would write a letter to my son, telling him how I will love him forever and how he was the best thing to ever happen to my sorry life - because otherwise he will never remember me. Then kiss my son and my husband goodbye.

8. You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good,
and what’s even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of
your choice! What’s it gonna be?

Healing.  There are so many sick people in my life right now.

9. You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can
only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you
like to experience again?

Wow. That’s tough.  I’ve had a good run of it.  Hard to pick one half-hour event.  I would have to pick a half hour on the first date I had with my husband.  It was a very, very good date.

10. Rufus appears out of nowhere with a time-traveling phone booth.
You can go anytime in the PAST. What time are you traveling to and
what are you going to do when you get there?

11th century Scandinavia.  And I am going to knock down rich people and steal their clothes to bring back.

11. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?

I would like to say Katrina, but the aftermath was more complex than that - I am not entirely sure I could erase it.  I have one other horrible experience I would like to erase, but I am going to keep that to myself.  It involves old lovers, and trust me, you don’t want to know.

12. You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling
heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check
out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world!
Bitchin’! What country are you going to live in now?

Spain. It would give me a chance to refresh my Spanish skills and spend hours in the Prado.  

13. The constant absorption of magical moonbeams mixed with the
radioactive vegetables you consumed earlier has given you the ability
to resurrect the dead famous-person of your choice. So which celebrity
will you bring back to life?

Either Martin Luther King, Jr. or Ghandi.  Because the world needs a peacemaker right about now.

14. What’s your theme song?

I have been told Killer Queen, by Queen, but I didn’t pick that.  Probably “Gotta Be” by Des’ree.

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I am having another GRRRRR moment.  But this time, the object of my frustration was rather unexpected.

I have been a happy LL Bean customer for over 20 years.  Yes, I know.  I am terribly unhip.  But the clothes are usually elegant and largely timeless, the quality is excellent, and with the exception of their jeans, the fit is always perfect.  I had a tweed blazer from LL Bean that I wore for years and with a change of accessories, it never went drastically out of style.  And a good black turtleneck is like a little black dress - perfect for a myriad of occasions.

I was thrilled to death to get a gift card from my mother for my birthday.  It was a bit belated, but I was in desparate need of clothes and could just not squeeze the budget enough for a new blazer and winter sweaters to pop out.  I placed my order carefully - and everything I liked was on their Sale page.  I was a happy birthday girl. 

I had a flash of disappointment when the confirmation email came and one of the sweaters I ordered was out of stock in the color I wanted.   I called Customer Service.  Now, for anyone who does not have experience with LL Bean’s customer service, I can tell you that it is normally a pleasant surprise.  First, a real, honest-to-god person answers the phone.  Every time.  They are pleasant.  They are helpful.  And they know their merchandise.  No problem, she tells me, they have my size in four other colors.  I pick a nice ice blue - it will bring out the blue in my eyes, she assures me.  Okay, so now I am excited again.  I like ice blue.  I tell her that I bought it with a gift card.  No problem, she says, just give me the number and we will get it taken care of.

I carefully read off the number on the gift card.  She checks the balance, and informs me that, unfortunately, there is a zero balance on the card.  No way!  I tell her that my order total exactly came to the amount on the card WITH the out-of-stock sweater.  I should have a balance on the card equal to the amount of the sweater.  She checks again - nope, no balance.  She pulls up the original order and finds out that, lo and behold, they CHARGED my gift card.  For an out-of-stock sweater.  A sweater that will not be backordered and I have no hope of ever getting.

Okay, then I tell her. just credit it back to the gift card.  Sorry, I can’t do that.   All right, then, credit my LL Bean Visa (yep, I’m a geek).  Sorry, I can’t do that either.  Okay then, just how do you propose you are going to CREDIT me for the money you just took from me?  Just a moment, let me get Customer Service.  Wait a minute, I thought you WERE Customer Service.  Apparently, there are layers of Customer Service.  I am, apparently, on the outside of the onion.

Brief hold.  A man’s voice this time.  He is very apologetic, but he says that they must issue me a new gift card by mail for the difference.  It should be at my home in 5-7 business days.  Is this going to be a problem?

Anyone who is familiar with LL Bean’s sales, especially around the holiday season, knows that at the sale prices, things sell out in hours, let alone days.  I carefully explain to the nice man that, yes, this is going to be a problem.  The sweater in the replacement color will be gone by the time the card gets to me, so his solution is completely unacceptable.  He asks me what I would like to see happen that would ideally fix the problem. 

Well, duh.

What I would like to see happen is for them to change the damn COLOR on the sweater I ordered and send it to me.  I don’t want a new gift card, I WANT THE DAMN SWEATER.  Okay,  I left out the word damn.  I am trying to be a nicer person.  But this was pushing my bitch button pretty hard.  I mean, just yesterday I had to prove my identity to a branch of “Homeland Security” who should jolly well KNOW who I am.  Why do I have to explain to this guy that I just want a sweater, that I PAID for, in a color that they HAVE IN STOCK?

Please hold a moment.  A longer pause.

We’re sorry, Dr. K—– (at least he used my title, not that it made my sweater appear), but we really can’t do that.  We can only issue you a replacement gift card. 

So, let me get this straight.  You are going to issue me a gift card for an amount of money you NEVER SHOULD HAVE CHARGED ME?

Yes, that’s right.

Which will get here so late that I cannot order an equivalent replacement item that you have, in your warehouse, right this minute.

Um, let me check stock on that item. (Brief pause, keys tapping).  Yes, Ma’am.  It will probably be out of stock by then.

And this sounds like an acceptable solution to you?  Issuing me a refund for something you did not have in stock, and never should have charged me for to begin with?

Well, we’re really sorry.

After over two decades of being a loyal customer, trust me, you aren’t nearly as sorry as I am.   This is a situation where your personal sorrow is simply not hacking it.

Could you hold another moment, ma’am? 

Silence again.

Ma’am?  To show you that we really feel bad about this mistake, we are issuing you an additional $10 gift certificate for your trouble.  Will this help?

Well, it won’t get me my sweater, but it’s certainly a gesture.

I think when I was younger, $10 probably would have bought my satisfaction.  I am a tougher nut to crack nowadays.  The price of my personal hassle has a higher price tag.  If I charged them my going contract rate for the time I spent on the phone, I could have bought five sweaters.

Another bastion of reliability breached.  I mean, when LL Bean’s Customer Service goes to pot, who can you believe in?

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I got a letter from FEMA today.

The letter informed me that now, after OVER A YEAR, they could not verify my identity, and unless I could prove that I do, indeed, hold my social security number, that I will have to give all the aid they gave me back. 

All the aid they gave me amounts to a total of $3,200.  Which sounds like a lot until you realize that rent on a fully-furnished 1-bedroom apartment is over $1000 a month.  And I had to have it fully furnished - sheets, towels, the works - because I lost everything and was prohibited by FEMA regulations from purchasing replacement goods with Rental Assistance money.  I lived four months in evacuation.  You do the math.

Oh, and I can’t send them a copy of my social security card.  Because that isn’t good enough proof. 

I can send employment records.  And how does my employer get my social security number?  From the card.

I can send them bank records.   And how does my bank get my social security number?  From the card.

I can send them my tax return.  And who fills out that number?  That would be me.

Now, virtually all my paperwork prior to September of 2005 was destroyed in Katrina.  Thankfully, I ordered copies of my Tax Returns from the IRS (which, ironically, was the only consistently helpful government entity during the disaster), so that I have an old tax return connecting my name, my number AND my address in Louisiana.  Because folks?  If I had to order these things, 30 days would not have cut it.  When was the last time you got a replacement document, other than a driver’s license, in less than 30 days?

Now, just think a minute.  I ordered my tax returns from the IRS.  From the Federal Government.  In Washington.

FEMA is an agency of the Federal Government.  In Washington.

And that employer, who could have verified my identity quickly and easily?  The US Department of Agriculture.  An agency of the Federal Government.  In Washington.

Do you see a pattern emerging here?

Your tax dollars at work, folks.  Remember what I said about Big Brother?

I rest my case.

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Quite some time ago, I was introduced to the Twenty Things concept by Sarah.  The idea is to list twenty things you really, really want to say to certain people, but for various reasons you can’t.  Either they are too politically incorrect, too personal, too heartwrenching, or maybe they just plain wouldn’t make a difference.  But, after a while these things build up pressure to a point where the healthiest thing to do is just get them off your chest.  There is something to to be said for getting them off your chest in a way where maybe, just maybe, one of those certain people WILL actually hear them.  I wrote my first Twenty Things list some time ago during my short tenure on MySpace, and it was one of the most liberating experiences.  I felt my chest literally loosen after I hit the “Send” button.

Lately, the Twenty Things have shortened to Ten.  I prefer to think this is just a sign that it’s such an efficient stress release device that twenty is no longer necessary.  Anyway, lately I have felt the need to unburden.  I have said before, blogging is my low-budget alternative to expensive talk therapy. Soooo….

Here are my Ten Things.  If you think they might apply to you, they might.  They likely don’t.  I will never tell.  Chances are, however, I already have in so many words.  So don’t bother asking.

1.  The one thing that is holding you back is that ENORMOUS chip you have on your shoulder.  I have never seen such a walking pity-party.  Step back and gain a bit of perspective.  Please.  Or if you can’t, shut UP about it.

2.  No matter how much you exasperate me sometimes, I love you like crazy.  We have so much fun together.  Let the party never stop.

3.  One of the most satisfying things I have witnessed lately is watching you come into your own.  Be proud of yourself.

4.  There aren’t very many people in this world I despise.  In fact, you are the list of one.  You are everything that disgusts me - petty, self-centered, cruel and condescending.  I only pray that the people I love see the ugliness behind the pretty mask. 

5.  I don’t think I ever tell you enough how much I appreciate your friendship, and how little I have done to deserve it.  I only wish you were closer.

6.  Yes, it does upset me.  Yes, I wish you would stop it.  No, it’s not for the reasons you think.  And no, I would never tell you.

7.  You are lucky he loves you so much.  And I love him.  Because otherwise?  I would not give you the time of day.

8.  I wish we knew each other better.  I would really like to hang out more.  I just don’t know how to ask.  I really am that shy.

9.  I have so many mixed feelings about this project.  I want to go through with it, but I will be relieved if I don’t have to.  I just hate falling down on a commitment.  Show me an easy way out.

10.  You will never know how much you changed my life for the better. 

Ahhh.  Lighter already.

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I am tired today.  Scratch that - tired doesn’t quite sum up the complete lassitude of the limbs that I am immersed in.  I am sleepy.  Almost irresistably sleepy.  Sleepy enough that I have seriously contemplated closing my office door, leaning back in my chair, hooking a foot in my file drawer to keep from tipping over and catching a few winks.  When I sit immobile for any length of time this morning, that warm, relaxed, detached state creeps over me; that state somewhere between consciousness and oblivion, where I am only marginally aware of the sounds of the day around me, and far from caring about them.  I like to call it the “Sunday afternoon nap state”.  It is my favorite kind of not-quite-sleep.  I am not sure I have ever experienced bliss, but I think it closely resembles the feeling of laying on a couch in the warm rays of the long autumn sun, eyes closed, with nowhere to be, nothing to do, and the only sounds the faint white background noise of a football game on the TV, played very low.  I am sinking to a puddle in my chair just thinking about it.

I had a bit of a problem with narcolepsy when I was in college.  It didn’t really have anything to do with how much sleep I did or didn’t get the night before.  By and large I was not a late-night-partygoing kind of student.  And it didn’t require any length of immobility to occur.  To give you an rough idea of how serious this was, I once fell asleep while pushing a vacuum cleaner at the boutique where I worked.  Fell right down on the floor.  I fell asleep during the middle of a very spirited argument on the phone with my boyfriend.  Embarrassment doesn’t even come close to covering my pitiful attempts to explain how little control I had over the urge to sleep.  I would try to get up to walk around and wake myself up, but the net result was that I just fell asleep while walking in strange places rather than safe in a chair.  It was one of the myriad of reasons I ended up having to drop out of college in my first attempt.  I am only thankful I wasn’t a driver at the time.

The problem spontaneously resolved itself in my early twenties, but I still found myself needing to take one day, approximately twice a year, to sleep for 24 hours.  It’s as if my body is on some kind of compressed hibernation cycle.  I don’t take sick days from work.  I take sleep days.  Common wisdom will tell you that it’s not really possible to “catch up” on sleep, but I think that this is one of those cases where common wisdom is wrong.    While I don’t find myself falling asleep while walking down a flight of stairs (another of my infamous “episodes”), I know that when I get that compulsion to burrow down, resistance is completely futile.  No number of double-espressos and chocolate bars will counteract the urge to snooze. 

As I have aged, these 24-hour sessions with with Hypnos have become more infrequently necessary.  It has been a couple of years since I have tucked into my bed and set my alarm for more than the next morning.  But I am starting to feel the fuzzy, heavy-headed indications that my wakeful mind is gearing down for maintainance.  New job, new toddler, eighty thousand things left on my to-do list - perfect timing, as usual.  Might as well go change the sheets on the bed.

I have to take my child to Gymboree tonight.  Hope I don’t drop right in the middle of “Itsy Bitsy Spider”.  That would be another $50 in the “Future Therapy for Harry” fund.

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I have really put this off long enough. 

The biggest problem I saw with this book:

Is that I am not sure she really had enough material for a whole book.  What she did have was good material that she stretched out - a lot.  Poison arrows. Okay, I get it already.

As a dilettante of history myself, I also have alarm bells at the liberal use of mythology to extrapolate into actual usage.  This is a bit of a slippery slope. To say because somebody can “imagine” something means that they actually “used” something, or even saw it being used can be a bit of a stretch. It may be merely an exercise in wishful thinking.  Think of Star Wars.  This is not to say that there were no convincing real-world examples, because the documentation otherwise was pretty good.  But we were running about 50-50 with mythology, at least through the first half of the book.

And the first half is all I can really comment on with any accuracy, because I pretty much skimmed the last half of the book and hit the highlights.  It’s not that the book was poorly written - it wasn’t.  The flow was pretty good.  It just got so repetitious through the first half that I kept nodding off.  It is almost vanishingly rare for me NOT to finish a book.  I read scientific journals for a living, so my standard of content leans toward the dry side anyway.  The book was, well,  a bit thin. 

Charlotte reports that it got better in the second half, and I plan on later finishing it up and finding out first hand.   But I will admit that a copy of “The Dante Club” fell in my hands, and I am a sucker for a good murder, sooo…

I never thought I would be so enthusiastic about the thought of reading Pamela Anderson.

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I was a fat kid.  When I say that, I don’t mean pleasingly plump, or chubby.  I mean fat.  At thirteen, I was 4′ 10″ and a women’s size 14.  A bookworm with glasses, poor, unable to afford anything approaching current fashion, and with no compensatory social skills, I was the object of all the adolescent torture you can imagine associated with that profile.  I hated junior high school with a passion. 

To complete the pretty picture, I was hunchbacked.  A large benign tumor was slowly strangling my spine at the cervical vertebrae, forcing my shoulders in a perpetual slump.  Ask me to show you the scar someday.  But, by some weird magic, after the tumor was removed, in the late spring before high school, I not only dropped weight like I was throwing stones out of my pockets, I shot up over six inches in the course of a few short months.  By 10th grade, I was within two inches of my full current height (5′ 7″), and about 98 lbs.  I think I dropped five sizes. 

Equally magic, with the new profile, the torment stopped.  I was elected to Student Council.  People said hello in the hall and invited me to parties.  But instead of being relieved, I was disgusted.  I was the same person I was.  I had done nothing, suffered nothing, given up nothing to be suddenly slim, and yet I was treated like a completely new animal.  It tainted my opinion forever of the weight (pardon the pun) that our popular culture places on appearance.  This distrust was only deepened by a short stint working for the high-end cosmetic industry after I dropped out of college, to the point where I simply refused to care whether I was or was not in fashion, and decided never to bank my future on how I looked.  I dress for business when I have to for my career, but I have thankfully chosen a profession where admiration is faceless - most of my colleagues know me mainly through my name on scholarly papers.  I have moments of depression when petty-minded people have made comments about my appearance; too many childhoods hurts and snubs are evoked not to feel a bit of sting.  But, by and large, they are only moments.  I don’t judge myself by those standards.  I don’t judge my friends by them either.  People are beautiful or not beautiful to me by their words and actions, not by their weight or what they wear.  I know ‘that world’.  I have experienced it.  I hate it.

I would like to say that I battled the weight all my life, but that is not true, either.  I have not been that heroic.  Just after my first marriage at 23, my weight settled at a proportionate place for my height, and I hovered around a size 8 or 10 for over a decade.  Athletic since college, a runner since grad school, I have never really had to fight my weight until after my 37th birthday when a combination of three SCA reigns, good New Orleans cooking, knee injuries and plain ole middle age, started a five year slow upward creep that hit its peak just after Harry was born.  I am the heaviest and largest I have been since childhood.

This has come as a bit of a shock, because I have resolutely refused to own a scale or full-length mirror.  I was stunned to see myself in a photo several months ago.  The person I saw was not the vision of the person I carry in my head.  Shocking a discovery as it was, by and large, it still didn’t affect my day-to-day life in any way.

Except one.

I had pre-eclampsia with Harry, and my blood pressure stubbornly stayed elevated much longer after his birth than it had any right to.  My liver enzymes rose with the blood pressure, and I had a moment of fear that I would leave a son that would never grow to know the mother that loved him so intensely.  It was an irrational fear, but one that recurs with every health scare I have had since.  In the months immediately before my son’s birth, I watched my mother struggle with the aftermath of breast cancer.  She had her last radiation treatment the day he was born.  In the sixteen months since he arrived, I have agonized through three cancer scares myself, all proving thankfully benign.  But my parents are in poor health, and my mind strays to a not-to-distant future where I may be caring for them at the same time I am raising my son - my son whose very promise of life my mother clung to during the dark days of chemotherapy.  I want to live to see the same light in my grandchildren.  I want to live to see them and be healthy enough that Harry does not lie awake with the same worries and concerns that make my nights restless. I don’t want him to feel the fear that worms its way insidiously into my thoughts as I watch my “younger” parents age.

And this means I have to start caring a little bit more about what the scale says.  Heck, it means I had to go and actually buy one.  I have to actually use that expensive stationary bike sitting in my living room. I have to get my 42-year-old ass outside once in a while and back in my armor.  Nothing like beating men half your age into submission to work up a good sweat and lose a few pounds.  To give you an idea about how seriously I am taking this, I have actually spent money on a diet.  Me.  A notorious skinflint.  I amaze even myself.

So far, it’s working.  I have dropped five pounds in less than two weeks, but that’s a drop in the bucket.  And I am fighting not only middle age, but decades of deliberate not-caring.  Old habits are hard to break.  I’ll let you know how it goes. 

Or just look for me in one of those Nutrisystem ads.

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Thanks, Ann, for the photo.

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Anyone who maintains a presence on the web faces the question of how much to really reveal about their personal lives.  While there are some who use the blog format for political ranting, artistic criticism, or popular commentary, I would warrant that for the vast majority of bloggers out there, this is a cheaper form of talk therapy.  We write about what we know, hoping that the act of writing, of forming words that may resonate with some other human soul, will somehow order our sphere of the universe into something we can control or at least understand.

And what we know best is ourselves.  We hope we can turn our inner pain, our inner joy outward and touch somebody.  We hope to hear the words “I understand, I feel that way, too.”  We hope, perhaps, to inspire.  Or just to share the burden of sorrow.  It’s a process that seems somehow less vulnerable with a bunch of faceless strangers than across a dinner table.  That’s the power of it, the seduction of it.

But, the most prudent of us realize that there needs to be limits on how much of ourselves we reveal. Some use nicknames for their children, their spouses and even their towns.  Most of us do not post the details of our neighborhoods, or pictures of the exteriors of our houses.  Because even though it takes a certain level of extroversion to “flash” our deepest personal thoughts to the world, we know that among those faceless strangers who share our vicarious lives, there are those whose interests are less than balanced.

I write this with the full realization that I am an odd person to judge what is “balanced”.  I dress up in armor on the weekends and hit people.  I re-create a medieval society, with all its Machiavellian politics and social interactions, in my spare time. For fun.  That being said, after 26 years of involvement, I can testify that the vast majority of people in the SCA are remarkably normal, everyday folks.  Professionals and tradesmen, lawyers, doctors, and computer programmers.  If you walk into my house, you would see the home of a middle-class professional with its subdued color scheme, leather sofas, matching bedroom suite, carefully chosen decor.  No suits of armor in the corner.  No swords on the wall. 

But I also know, that like the worlds of any virtual reality, by our nature, our hobby attracts the fringes of society, the escapists, the disenchanted and the flat-out weird.  I hit people with sticks.  I own at least four medieval gowns and two canvas pavilions.  When I say weird, we are talking a whole new level of weird. 

Lately I have had to face the concept that the intersection of my hobbies has resulted in a need to limit my internet exposure.  The theoretical has become just a little less faceless recently and has coalesced into an individual who is just imbalanced enough to have fantasized a relationship and a vendetta that simply do not exist.  This is not somebody I have ever interacted with before in any newsgroup, bulletin board, or at any gathering.  I have never seen their face.  This is not a misunderstanding of a past interaction.  I am just a person that, simply by virtue of my exposure, fell into the path of a dark dream that I did not help to create, nor am I able to change or dispel.  The level of disconnect evident in the exchanges I have had are enough to assign more alarm than I would have given in the past.

While I find the likelihood of this obsession manifesting itself in a physically malevolent way to be relatively remote, it is a likelihood I still must take seriously.  I have always ventured into cyberspace with a fearless abandon.  Personal security is something I have always taken for granted.  Physical fear is something, despite living for years in the inner city of two large metropolises, that I have never felt.  The one time I was mugged, my immediate reaction was one of infuriated resistance, an act of stupidity that made me shake only after the incident was over and I had time for the thinking brain to assert itself.  But now I have a young son whose safety I cannot take for granted, whose vulnerability I feel in my bones. Nothing like a good dose of parenthood to fuel suppressed paranoia.

So, I did something I have resisted doing for quite some time - I am deleting identifiers.  The pictures of my son and my husband, and the few of myself will remain.  But our town, surname, the name of my employer, the immediately traceable things are coming out.  I do not fool myself too much; a dedicated internet search could trace me fairly expediently if somebody knew where to look and put enough small details together.  My former career is too public by nature to be really able to suppress an imprint on the internet.  But I am no longer going to hand it to people fearlessly. 

There is a certain sadness to doing this.  I know I am only being prudent, even realistic, but I feel like I am capitulating to a kind of arrogant fear.  It always struck me as a bit presumptuous to assume that somebody would pick me, out of all the people on the internet, to fixate on.  There’s a level of vanity in that assumption that I have always found ludicrous.  My life is far too normal and boring to become the object of obsession.  The very idea is laughably absurd.  It is my own light-hearted self-deprecation that has been the very basis of my fearlessness all of my life.  To capitulate to the idea that I can (and have) been singled out is an excess of pride I am almost ashamed of.

So, here’s the rub.  The fickle finger of insanity can fall on anyone.  For any reason, or for no reason at all.  You choose the face you present to the world, but choose it with forethought.  The world of the web has made it easier for people to reach out, to find each other, to connect and to affirm.  But we have traded some of of our anonymity for the privilege of that participation.  Choose how much of that anonymity you will trade carefully.

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