I’ve been thinking about this a lot for several days while I meticulously scrub half a decade’s worth of internet history after having been outed (again.) I have no idea how this comes across to other people, but I know several folks who know me online have gently asked what I have to worry about? Would it really be so bad if people in my life knew about my extremely tame and boring blog where the worst thing that really happens is an occasional spree of blasphemous cursing? Well, yes and no, because the problem is, when you ask that question, you’re talking about a lot of people.
I’ll get into that more behind the read-more, but the short answer is that public anonymity is impossible for me in any way beyond blogs like this, and I don’t think I’m odd or wrong for wanting something that so many people in the world take completely for granted.
So what kind of celebrity am I in real life? Not one, honestly. Or at least not one officially. I’ve been active and obvious in a lot of very large, very public local circles of people over the course of my life, and I currently live in the same house I grew up in. In high school, I was in the news so often for both athletics and academics that I was on a comfortable first name basis with all of the sports reporters in my not-at-all-small hometown and several from the larger metro area. Before media attention, people throughout the athletic community I was part of knew me in passing all over the midwest. After media attention, people I’d never met and who knew nothing about me recognized me on the street.
I went to college and deliberately fucking vanished, but then I moved back home and started working at a public library. I also started writing for the paper, so the strangers-recognizing me thing basically started back up without missing a beat; I remember being in the 24 hour grocery store at 1 in the morning and the sole other shopper in the place wound up in the checkout line behind me, and said, “hey aren’t you ...?” I was. Regulars at the library recognized me in public too, as did regulars at gyms I went to, and of course, there are always the 40 odd members of my extended family, all but a handful of whom live within 20 miles of me, most of whom are avid church-going socialites with huge circles of their own.
Once an old college boyfriend came to stay with me for a weekend, and we ran into somebody I knew literally everywhere we went. It was awkward as hell, obviously, because none of them had ever met him, but when we got back to my apartment, he was like, “wow, you . . .really do know everybody?”
Which wasn’t really true: other people know *me.*
There are a few other facets to this, but if I’m bored writing about them, I feel safe assuming everybody’s bored reading about them, so I’ll trust that I’ve made my point.
I’m never anonymous in public. Somebody always knows me. I’ve been halfway across the country on weekend get-aways before and ran into somebody I knew. Why is that important? Why can’t I just enjoy privacy on my own time, in my own space, and not worry about little things like running into judgemental relatives or vindictive former bosses while I’m buying beer on Friday night in a city where I don’t even live? I don’t know. Maybe if you’ve always been able to take anonymity for granted, or if you’re the kind of person who wants people to notice you, it’s hard to understand. I never get to just be some schmuck on the bus with everybody else. I always have to be a person that other people know. It’s exhausting.
When I get on tumblr, or some other blogging platform, I don’t have to be anybody in particular beyond the person I really am. I can think an actor is cute without having to defend my position (no, really) and if someone does demand that, I can block my knowledge of their entire existence with a single click. I can be out about religion and politics without worrying about which relative is going to stop talking to me, and how that decision is going to shake out across my interactions with several hundred people, all told, after they’ve all said their piece to all of their friends on facebook. I can be out about my sexuality without worrying that I’m going to be harassed for it at work or worse.
But basically, I can just be a mediocre dumbass without having to hear about how much potential I’m wasting or how I should have lived an entirely different life or how my atheism is making the baby jesus cry. I can share opinions and interests and fun with other people, and none of us ever have to know who’s really bad about checking their bank balance or who has chronic coffee breath or who just broke up with their 4th boyfriend in 3 months or who has debilitating insomnia and just got fired for missing work, unless one of us specifically chooses to reveal that information, because anonymity makes it safe to acknowledge that we’re normal fucking humans.
So I don’t get online under a screen name and post things publicly because I want to be private. I do it because I want to be anonymous. And I want to be anonymous because I want to be allowed to be my self. Which is not something I will ever be allowed to be under my real name.
there are 3 people on the entire earth who know both my tumblr handle and my given name, and the only one of them who has ever been to my home in person persists in tagging me in a post and then tagging the post with my real fucking name.
when I die and go to hell the name of my room will be I’M NOT PARANOID I ACTUALLY ONLY KNOW PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO UNDERSTANDING OF PRIVACY.
The official government institution for preserving the French language is the Académie française and one of my hobbies is actually reading the updates on their website, it’s always so funny. Just lambasting new English loanwords and trying to shame people into using French terms instead. Some examples of their grumpily anglophobic entries:
“There is absolutely no reason to borrow the word backstage when we already have the perfectly suitable coulisses, although we understand your natural affection for the word stage which the British stole from us in the first place.”
“Why use rooftop instead of toit en terrasse? And if we absolutely must use a foreign word for this concept, let us at least borrow a term from a sunny Mediterranean country. Borrowing ‘rooftop bar’ from a nation famous for its abominable weather is absurd.”
their absolute outrage at any wine vocabulary being borrowed and distorted by wine barbarians (“please only use vintage to refer to porto”)
an entry explains that turning “to feel” into the ridiculous anglo-French verb “feeler” is tragic, “especially since ‘feeler’ is already an English noun that could refer to a snail’s ocular tentacles” and if we French don’t show respect for snail vocabulary who will??
My favourite entry:
“ASAP: This abbreviation, which is far from transparent, seems to accrue most of the vices of a language that conceals its contemptuous and comminatory character under the rags of a spurious modernity”
I did not ever imagine I would be on the same side of a situation as a grumpliy anglophobic government institution in France, but listen: English is an insidious shambling monster, and if it were trying to infiltrate my perfectly acceptable if bizarrely pronounced language, I would also be pissed and suspicious.
If you could have any zoo animal as a puppy-sized pet …
If you could have any zoo animal become the size of a puppy and have it as a pet, what animal would you choose and why? Elephant? Giraffe? What it would be like to have that animal as a pet? Describe daily life with your pet or tell a story about your life with it.
Capybaras are kind of like giant guinea pigs, so as the delighted owner of two guinea pigs, this story would just be a regular journal entry for me and my puppy-sized capybaras.
the other day I reblogged a pissed off post about how the midwest deserves more coverage in national media, but today I heard a motherfucking country cover of an elton john song and I just
I really like playing people who don’t have it together because that’s real. I like playing people who are struggling and they’re trying to figure it out and it’s kind of day by day. That’s how I feel most of the time.
Scientist David Nutt memorably said alcohol is more dangerous than crack. Now, he is trying to invent a healthy synthetic alternative, and the race is on to get it to market
ya'know, maybe the reason rural, small-town people don’t trust national media is because national news outlets pretty much ignore 85% of the country.
nebraska is literally flooded, at least one person has died and three are missing, 60 thousand have evacuated… and the first cnn article about this went up like ten minutes ago and only mentioned flooding around omaha.
like. i’m from omaha and i’m frustrated by the lack of attention the rest of our state is getting. someone died, and you’re not going to mention that? how was this not a story worth reporting this morning? are nebraskan farmers and small-town citizens not just as important as the californians displaced by wildfires, or southern/east coast people affected by hurricanes?
when we complain about nebraska being ignored, we’re not really talking about not having shows set in nebraska, as much as we might want that. we’re talking about this — thousands of people losing their homes, their livelihood, and yet no one seems to think it’s worth mentioning.
when hurricanes devastated the south last year, nebraskans donated what we could to help those affected. we sent trucks filled with donated items and coordinated with shelters and organizations to make sure we actually sent things that were needed. i’m just saying, it would be nice to see some of that support in turn. even if it’s just bringing attention to this.
At the very least you would think that the farmlands that feed most of the US being flooded would be important to someone other then us Nebraskans. But we are ignored. At best Omaha is briefly mentioned. At worst we’re ridiculed and looked down upon because we’re just some dumb hicks with a boring state and a laughing stalk of a football team.
I’m terrified for my fellow Nebraskans because even us in the city don’t have enough money to be the only ones who donate. This needs more recognition because more people will die because of exposure after the fact.
I live in Fremont Nebraska. We are literally a fucking island right now. There is no way in or out of town. Half our town is flooded and the water is still expecting to rise. Two of my friends have lost their homes and one lost pets.
The thing about the flooding is that the other half of Nebraska is experiencing blizzards. Our whole state is in anarchy right now. There’s no water left in fremont. Two of our leveys have broke and our dam is being held together through sheer fucking will. This is fucking terrifying okay? Even if me and my family wanted to leave we CAN’T. If fremont get’s flooded anymore where are we going to evac to? We can’t. We can’t get out of town. Why has this not been a fucking emergency yet?
Currently my family is okay, but were close to losing our home too.
If you can spare anything please. PLEASE Donate. Nebraska is in need of a lot of help right now…
I live smack-dab in the middle of the state, four hours away from Omaha, and these are some pictures my friends and family have taken.
There are so many bridges out, so many roads impassable. Hundreds of people are stranded.
See this little island? Zoom in. Those are cows. Stranded, freezing, with no food, in the middle of calving season.
People have been losing 3 out of every 5 baby cows, because they are freezing in the mud before farmers and ranchers can even get to them.
This is my Uncle’s house, on the left
It’s a two story, and that water is six feet below the roof. They have my grandparent’s camper parked next the the barn (on the right) and you can’t even see it. My uncle has three young kids, the oldest of which has severe cerebral palsy, and now they’re living out of a hotel. My aunt only had time to pack two suitcases for the five of them. They had to leave everything else.
Really you guys, Nebraska has been flooded before, we have tornadoes every year, our temperatures are just as extreme as Chicago or Phoenix - but this is so much worse than any of that. I know there are worse things going on in the world, but this is happening too, and it’s going to impact so much more than most people think it will. Nebraska is a huge supplier of beef, pork, corn, and soybeans. Just in my hometown we have a huge Tyson processing plant that is weeks behind in production because the trucks can’t get through, and it’s costing a lot of people their jobs. This is serious.
Nebraska has an Emergency Management Agency with a website for direct information at https://nema.nebraska.gov/ . The county map of disaster declarations is staggering. There are press releases, which include lists of shelters, hotlines, and assistance.
Also, if the sheer quantity of human, animal, and economic misery isn’t enough to awaken everybody’s give-a-damn, maybe having the shit scared out of you will:
there’s a goddamned. NUCLEAR FUCKING POWER PLANT ON THE MISSOURI RIVER BETWEEN OMAHA AND KANSAS CITY.
I wonder how many people actually fall all the way down the rabbit hole from “I’m gonna take up crochet or knitting” to “a drop-spindle is inexpensive; what if I tried spinning some yarn” to “oh look you can get a rigid heddle loom for less than a new gaming console let’s learn to weave” to “fuck it let’s move to the mountains and raise alpacas”
