Avoiding writing!

Back when I was thinking about living with Chelsea for the fall we went to look at a couple of rooms being sublet by some NYU drama acquaintances of ours. The place was beautiful and is where Chels will be but I chose to pass in favor of smelly boys and greenpoint. ANYWHOO, we are sitting around chatting and the girl who is subletting turns to me and asks about how the play is going.
For a moment I froze and had that “how do you know about this? Are you stalking me?” moment before I realized that I posted my directors notice on the Playwrights Horizons list serve which EVERY acting student reads (or so it seems). So of course she saw it and recognized my name. And of course she would ask about it and not feign ignorance because that would be weirder.
And so I was thinking about this at my NYU desk job when this professor who has been on a leave of absence shows up. Now I know a whole lot of shit about this particular professor because he has a blog and sometime last spring he was mugged taking out the trash from his Park Slope apartment. He blogged about the incident and somehow gawker picked up on it and mocked him mercilessly. This is how I found out about it. This professor responded and then gawker responded and it was one of those things that gawker gets obsessed with for about a week then forgets about.
Well, three or four months after this happens I’m at work and this professor starts talking to my boss about how he bought this beautiful house in Westchester that he is remodeling and so on. And while my boss and professor are discussing building contractors I’m sitting there thinking “I know the reasons why you are moving. And you have no idea that I know.”
Which is sort of bizarre. Especially since he knows nothing about me. (unless he reads this blog WHO KNOWS?)
Now I’m not one of those people who is automatically freaked out by things like that. I really like facebook. I really like knowing that my best friend from elementary school is working in India now and that another is headed to Mozambique. I think, if anything, facebook will make my ten year reunion more interesting, not less.
But it is still a very strange dynamic. There are people who I hardly speak to, who I have not seen in years but I read their live journals. And so I know about their break ups, their medical ailments, look at their photos.
I don’t actually know the implications of this or have any sort of opinion about it. Most of my in-person communication is gossip anyway.
Granted I wouldn’t spend so much time on the internet if I didn’t have an NYU desk job.
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Tangentially related: it seems to say a lot about someone whether or not they HAVE a blog and then what they put on it. Is it gossip, or complaints, or your favorite poems, or pictures or poker round ups or links to other blogs. Not that I have any idea what my blog says about me. That I like to ramble? That I think people are interested in what I have to say aka self centered? That I spend 99% of my time avoiding writing?
Well, that last one is certainly true.