I think the the internet has made the world a little too small for me not to feel a bit self-conscious about any of the nonsense I might choose to write here, and that's been a major reason I haven't kept up. Knowing exactly where, and therefore who, was reading has been a major deterrent. Paradoxical, I know, since that was what used to motivate me to write, and now it's the reason I don't want to. In fact, when I updated the Blogger template a few months ago, I decided not to put back the stats counter, because I didn't want to know who was reading.
I know, I know - what did I expect, right? It's a blog, for crying out loud, with my name on it, and for awhile I even had it on my Facebook profile. But around election time I started to realize that I didn't want half of Bryan America reading about my occasionally entertaining stories (also known as...misadventures!), my failed attempts at dating, or my irreverent comments about any number of potentially upsetting issues - nor did I want to wonder what they were thinking of me.
The final straw was a couple of months ago, when I got a Facebook message from a guy I dated briefly the summer after my freshman year of college. We had a brief, and to my thinking, casual dating relationship, although the end was a bit tough on him, and we hadn't spoken since, UNTIL I got a few FB messages from him (with the last asking why we stopped dating after five weeks - SIXTEEN YEARS AGO) and it just totally freaked me out. After that, I deleted a bunch of Facebook "friends" who I hadn't actually talked to in 15 years or more, and put all my settings on private.
Of course, the flip side of this teeny tiny internet world we're living in is that I got to apologize tonight (via Facebook chat) to a sweet boy from high school who I was a terrible snob to - oh, about 20 years ago. Sadly, neither of us had forgotten this particularly wrenching adolescent moment, and when he said hello on chat tonight and brought that teen movie moment up, I knew exactly where he was going with it. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing that we can be in touch with people we were terrible to 20 years ago, but that's the nature of Facebook, I guess. And I guess without this blog, I couldn't have just told you that story! See, the internet IS no joke.
I guess I'm not quite ready to abandon the blog yet, if only to entertain the friends who I know are reading and getting a kick out of it. And besides, I'm pretty sure the world needs more pictures of my adorable niece!


And four generations of the exact same chin!

