"IS THIS GONNA END UP ON YOUR BLOG?"

A blog is a lot like a family photo album. If all you knew about a family was based on the contents of their photo albums you might come to the wrong conclusion that their life was full of vacations and get-togethers, smiles and happy moments. After all, who takes pictures of the mundane, the routine, or the quiet moments in life. Both blogs and photo albums tend to be carefully manufactured by their creators to present a certain side of who they are. It’s not dishonest so much as it is incomplete. This is true to some extent in all human interaction, but I think the problem is exaggerated on-line.

The trouble comes when people who only know the carefully-manicured me meet the Josh Tate who lives without a delete button. There is a large and growing number of people who know me this way, which can be problematic for a number of reasons. I suppose it is not entirely negative though (unless you dislike my on-line persona). In many respects it is simply inevitable, and at the end of the day I’m simply glad to be known, but it can become a bit awkward when the two worlds collide. This is so because we are both more and less than our on-line personas.

The most troubling thing about this dichotomy for me personally is that those who know me primarily through my blog seem to think that I approach every relationship and experience as fodder for my next post. "Is this gonna end up on your blog?" they ask. It's almost as if they think my life orbits my blog rather than the other way around.  Maybe I take myself too seriously, but I want those within my sphere to understand that I don’t view them, or our shared experiences, as blog fodder.