Meta Machinations

There has been a strange confluence of events over the past few days that's had me thinking a lot about this website (good things and bad things alike), and instead of feeling uncomfortable or internalizing the strangeness, I've decided to write a post about it, check my temperature, and put it out there.

Roughly a month ago, I took down my ads.  I stopped getting a check every month for doing the thing I've been doing for my entire adult life - writing here.  Mind you, it wasn't an enormous check but it was a check that was getting ever so slightly bigger every month, and it was in some ways another thing that I would point to that would legitimize my time spent here.  Somebody pays me.  I am a professional. 

But in reality, I wasn't getting paid by that company who cut the check - I was getting paid by you.  You were paying me by visiting, and even though many of you said you never even noticed the ads, they loaded.  And even after another month of thinking about it (and the first month that the paycheck didn't arrive), I'm still happy that I took them down because I feel like the cost of that paycheck, the price that was paid, could have potentially been in your ability to trust what I was telling you when I endorsed a product, made a purchase, or got something free in the mail and reviewed it. 

I'm not saying I'll never have ads again.  If things get to a point where I can live more comfortably through ads, or quit a real job, or send an orphan child to space camp because of my readership, they will go back up.  But they will go up after a conversation like this one and an outline of my policies and what you can expect from me.

So there's that.  I'm feeling good about that.  Though Duke routinely makes comments about how I should have held out longer for the Milwaukee power tools endorsement, I am happy.  I still feel rewarded for what I am doing here.  First and foremost, I still feel a need to write and take pictures and put them in a place for public consumption, and satisfying that need here is pleasing.  I am personally rewarded from the act of self-publishing alone.  Putting it out there is enough for me.  But here's where I'm blessed:  I am doubly rewarded because of my opportunity for interactions with those who read what I self-publish.  When you leave comments, send me personal emails, and talk to me on Facebook and Twitter, that is my paycheck.  Several of the most influential and important relationships in my life began here, from simple google searches that landed people on these pages, links from message boards, and conversations that began with a simple comment and became a Best Friends Forevership.

This is where I fall down the rabbit hole a little bit, because it's very important to me to acknowledge that point and give it the credit it (you) deserve:  I don't just write here, and post to Twitter, and play on Facebook to entertain the friends I already have from long ago.  This isn't just documentation of the life I'm already living, the life that would continue on in the same direction whether I was writing about it or not.  This is a piece of me that changes that direction sometimes.  It brings new people into my life, it brings me closer to people already in my life, and it isn't a static little thing I do when I'm not living my real life.  Owning this website - and owning the online identity of Duchess Jane - is not the entirety of my life but it is also not a separate entity.  The two meet a lot, they cross, they are well acquainted, and they have the power to change each other.

I do not give the internet everything, I hold some cards in my hand.  I do not make choices in my "real" life depending on how they will play for a story here, but it would be an outright lie to say that the website hasn't changed my life a million times.  And this is why I have to stop referring to the life offline as the "real" life.  Because many many things in that reality wouldn't exist if it weren't for duchessjane.com.

Last night I was at an event (the place where the Pepper did lewd things to the Salt and then the Salt frisked him) and I had a couple of conversations that included the phrase "Are you live-blogging this?" because I had my nose in my Blackberry reading an email.  I said no, no, no, several times, but then later, when the alcohol was flowing more freely and the quotes were getting too funny not to document for later, I started tweeting.  That's when you got this and this and this but not the best one for some reason, the moment when Duke thought that the automatic litter box was eating the cat and started screaming.  Anyway.  My point to all of this rambling is that I wasn't live-blogging what I was doing intentionally, but I was taking those notes, sharing those quotes, and it felt like my life was live-blogging itself.  Because you know what?  Some of those quotes were people's reactions to stories I was telling about my friends, friends that I met because they read the website.  So it's a cycle here.  It would be very false of me to keep doing the whole "No, I'm not blogging this, this is real life, this is separate from the internet" when there's just no way I can get through a day anymore without the effect of the website making itself present in the offline world.  Too many friends, too many amazing experiences and wonderful people who have come into my real life here.  It's all real.

So I'm still trying to get to a different, ultimate point here, and that's an acknowledgement that it isn't always happy sunshine rainbow things happening here.  Bad things happen in my offline life and happen in my online life and I have to draw lines to maintain my comfort levels.  Yesterday I drew a very big line, created a very big wall, in a conversation with one of my best friends.  I told him that the easiest way for him to determine the things that he's allowed to reveal about me to others, the things that I don't care if he talks openly about, are the things on this site.  Everything else is mine.  If I make the decision to publish it, it is public knowledge and the world is free to discuss it.  If I don't publish something, but you know it happened because of the depth of your friendship with me, it isn't your right to make it public knowledge just because I have a website where I share everything else.  Exhibitionists can still have secrets, and I have mine. 

And while bad things happen both online and off, what really sucks is when bad things happen offline BECAUSE OF things that happen online, and this is where I feel like I need to draft another statement of intent.  In the same way that I felt icky because I had ads but no transparency in relation to what I accepted, what I reviewed, and what code of conduct I followed in relation to that money, I feel icky when I hear rumblings and find out that people saw themselves in my writing and weren't happy about it.  I feel doubly icky when people see themselves in my writing in a situation that has nothing to do with them, when people read what I've written and think "She's talking about me.  That bitch.  I'm so offended by this thing she said about me right here."  Because those kinds of rumors lead me to immediately pull up the offending post, read it about 659 times, and try to come up with every possible reason that a person thinks I was talking about him or her.  And sometimes it's hard to see it from anybody's viewpoint but my own, because of a basic truth about this website that I know, but maybe you don't.

If I'm writing about you, you'll know it because you'll be named.

Lots of people have fake names here, but they all know it.  Duke has had two names.  Stinky Ferret Boy knows he's Stinky Ferret Boy.  The Hairy Pretzel and dozens of others named themselves, by leaving a comment under that name first.  Some of the names are usernames from other websites, some of them are variations of a person's real name, and some of them are real names alone.  I will never use a person's real name unless they have started that tradition themselves in the comments.  But if I'm talking about you, even if you've never read this website before, you'll have a name.  It will be a name that you will know to be yours, you will recognize immediately, or it will be a description of who you are in relation to a known entity.

I will protect your identity from the strangers who read this site.  But I will not hide it from you.  If I have something to say about you or directly to you, and I choose this forum to do so, I will not be coy or mince words or go off on a rambling diatribe and then later pretend it had nothing to do with you.  To me, that sort of thing stopped when I graduated from high school, or perhaps middle school.  If you see yourself in something I've written, but you can't tell if I wrote it about you, please give me the benefit of the doubt that it's a coincidence, or a shared experience, and do not jump to the conclusion that the adjectives on my typewriter are meant to be prizefighters.  When in doubt, email me.  I'll tell you more than what I wrote here, and you'll tell me your reasons for thinking it was about you, and we'll laugh about it, and we'll set up a time to sit down and have a drink together and get to know each other better so that we never have this misunderstanding again, so that you realize that behind the computer screen, I'm a good person.  I'm not trying to hurt anybody.

I think the biggest ugliest ickiest ick of the thoughts rolling around my head right now about my online and offline identities are the result of attempted anonymity or false distance on the part of those who criticize.  There are a couple of examples from the past week, so while I'm not naming names, if you see yourself in this next section, you are unfortunately not the sole reason I'm writing it.  It's a conglomeration of a few events.

I don't expect people who met and know me offline to read the blog.  I don't push the URL, I don't hand out business cards when people ask me what's new in my life.  But at the same time, I'm amused when people make a big show of claiming they don't read, when I know it to be false.  I have ways of knowing these things, my friends.  I know that sounds creepy, but when we're having coffee and you wave your hand away when the topic of the website comes up, when you dismiss it like it's nothing and you're above it, I know that you read it twice a day, every day.  I can see you.  Sometimes I only suspect it's you, sometimes due to the internet settings at your place of employment or the google searches that you use to arrive here or the pages where you click the link to get here, it's more than just a suspicion.  I know.  If you want to be more technologically advanced, if you want to hide yourself so I can't see you, go ahead.  Or just use a feed reader - I publish a full feed.  My question is why do you feel the need to do that? Why are you hiding on purpose and acting one way while telling me something else?

This is where I get uncomfortable, because I really truly want to know why you reject me to my face yet read me when you think I don't know it.  I want to know why you scoff at my Facebook page and my Twitter feed and act as though my website doesn't exist at all, but you still read.  Or you still prowl through what I have made publicly available on Facebook after rejecting my friend request.  Or you talk to friends about things you'd only know if you were here.  Why do you want me to feel like I'm not important enough to you, that this thing that I do on the internet is stupid and not worth your time, but you still show up here regularly? 

I'm not saying go away.  I'm asking you why you would read what I write but then try to make me feel stupid for writing it?  Why would you reject my attempts at getting to know you better, but still want to know what's going on in my life?  I'm not a circus clown.  I'm a real person.  Acknowledging that we are running in the same circles doesn't mean we have to be best friends.  And while you can create distance for yourself, keep our online lives separate and not want to be my friend online, I'm okay with that.  But I'm not okay with you consuming my content and using it against me or against other people, assuming it's about you when it's not, creating drama in my life and stressing out my friendships, while simultaneously denying that you visit here at all.  Not okay.  There are a lot of people who read this site that don't comment, don't talk to me, don't interact in any way.  I'm okay with that because they also don't stir up drama in my lives.  There are a lot of people whom I'm very close to who have never visited the site.  I'm okay with that too.  You, and the rest of my readers too, are allowed to have your own comfort levels and your own say in our amount of interaction. 

Where it becomes a problem for me is when you decline positive interaction with me and embrace negative interaction.  I don't understand your motivation for those behaviors and it's very hard for me to not just chalk it up to you being a petty vindictive child.  Particularly if that was my first impression of you, my gut feeling about you, and you have now confirmed it.

This is the problem I don't know how to fix, because I can't fix it, because when it's all broken down to its fundamental components, it isn't my problem at all.  But that doesn't stop me from feeling uncomfortable about it or doing the things I have to do to protect myself from this violation.  This post is both my attempt to explain and my assertion of my intentions going forward. 

I will not intentionally hurt anybody here, but if I change my mind on that and decide to go ahead and do it, I'll identify you enough that you will know I'm talking about you, no doubt in your mind.  In return, if you could go ahead and treat me like a real human that really exists that is really operating under the best of intentions, that would be great.  Because I won't keep pretending that I can't see you, I won't keep biting my tongue when you scoff and roll your eyes about the existence of this site, and I definitely will start doing things to cut off your access to my online identity.  These are actions that I take to protect myself from feeling icky about things that I can't control, by controlling the things I can.  I also don't owe you unlimited chances to make things right.  If I make the first move towards understanding, friendship, and reconciliation, and you slap my hand away, that hand may never be extended again.  I don't owe you anything.

I have good intentions.  I am doing my best to act out of love.  But I have limits too.  What can I say?  I am large.  I contain multitudes.