A brief word on the direction of my blog
I initially started out with a small idea, about writing a personal dating blog in the hopes an audience would incentivise me to date. A few days later I thought it would be a great idea to fold in some of my ambitions, like writing and comedy, and pretty much everything ever that is great and that I should do.
As anyone reading my blog would probably know, I’ve remained focused on blogging about personal dating aspects rather than anything else. That’s the direction I’m going to continue toward. So yes, primarily this is another dating blog. Dating? It’s always struck me as a strange word. Like I should be taking pips out of dried fruit. Or preparing an itinerary on my calendar. Anyway. Dating first, and I haven’t, and don’t plan on going into any of the hard details about the other aspects.
Anonymity on the dating aspect is fairly important to me. Quite a few of the times I’m blowing off steam, and trying to put my thoughts into an order. Paradoxically I’m putting private thoughts into a very public forum. That buffer of anonymity really allows me to free up. Well, I think I’d be cool with going under my own name for about 80% of what I’ve written, which is just a vague percentage I plucked out of nowhere.
Some of what I write I wouldn’t want to be linked to my own name for professional reasons. As I am blowing off steam under a different name, I’m not hindered by how Mr Blah Blah (totally my actual real name) will be hurt in the future. What if I’m interviewing for jobs and HR Googles my name and this comes up? There’s also the issue of publication in academic journals. If people look for other works by me, and they come across this… you know, it’s not exactly academic. Maybe great fodder for psychology, who knows. But I’m not in psychology.
Being one stepped removed also allows me to experiment around with writing a little bit. Like linking song lyrics to girls of my past. And allows for a non-committal free form of streaming conscious that doesn’t really matter if I’m paying closer attention to how everything fits together. Although I do, but I don’t have to.
Further, blogging under a pseudonym doesn’t make sense for author-comedy things. If I talk frankly about what I’m doing, I’d be about one or two Google searches away from an easy ID, rendering the whole exercise pointless. And if I’m blogging about those things, I don’t really have much to hide anyway. I will continue to talk about the more personal aspects of creative stuff. But the blog’s primarily about girls, with brief flavours of other stuff that I’m doing without getting into it too much.
It’s very wise to consider future jobs when posting content online. Never put something on the internet you wouldn’t want your future boss to see…or anyone, really. It is a public service, after all.
–JW
This is exactly why I go by the codename NSG and occcasionally write nontruths in my blog (about 5-10% of the time, probably). Gotta throw people off.