If You Drink At Every Parenthetical in this Post, You Probably Should Not Drive

How awesome is my sister? You haven't heard the last of her...I have a few other e-mails (including one with the subject line "Why I Am Not Allowed to Have a Blog") saved up. I can't believe I didn't think of this before...I could have meted them out throughout November and saved my own thoughts--all six of them--for later, once the NaBloPoMoPre (National Blog Posting Month Pressure) is over.

I haven't told my sister about this blog. What do y'all do about the whole anonymity issue? Do you have a chosen circle? Are you totally incognito? Reasons for/against?

Personally, I have told only three people about this blog, for a number of reasons:

1) Truthfully? I wasn't sure I could stick with it, and thought it would look quite lame to make this announcement of My New Project, only to have my enthusiasm wane once it became hard, time consuming, etc. (see also: guitar, knitting, learning Spanish, shaving my legs on a regular basis).

2) I wanted the freedom that writing anonymously would provide. I like that I can write for my loyal cadre of readers (you don't mind if I call you loyal, do you? I mean, I know you haven't had to prove your loyalty in a fight or anything, but I choose to believe you'd totally have my back) and just come at this in a very tabula rasa (oh, that's right--I went to the Latin. Booyah.) way. I'm not thinking about "well, I can tell Person A this, but if I tell Person B this she's gonna get all..." Not that I want to offend anyone, but I tend to be a very people-please-y person, so just having a little interweb distance is incentive to be a little more honest. Should I offend you and you decide you don't want to read anymore, you can just stop and I can just assume you were struck by lightning or something. No pressure.

(On the other hand, when I read up on how to start a blog, I kept coming up against the warning that you should always write as if people you know will find your blog because [ominously] they will. Which is kind of a buzzkill, really, albeit probably good advice. Not that I planned on slandering my nearest and dearest, of course, but you know when you have that interaction with a friend and you still love them and it's all fine but you really, kinda just want to vent about it for a while? And be right, even though of course we're all unique snowflakes with our own fresh perspectives...anyway, I do try and keep in mind that anything I write could someday be found by someone who knows me. I dunno...is this something y'all worry about?)

3) It's nice to have something private and my own, you know? Something I'm doing just for myself and only I need to know about its success or failure.

That being said, of course, I did tell three people (MOTH and my two oldest, closest friends) and the reason for that is simple: I cannot SHUT UP. Not that I can't keep your secrets, of course, but I sure as hell struggle with keeping my own. I totally would've caved eventually, either to be all, "Yay! I-have-a-blog-and-all-these-readers!!" or "Waah! I-have-a-blog-and-no-one-reads-it!" and then I'd have to explain why I didn't tell them earlier.

So I don't know. I'm thinking about telling my sister, if for no other reason than I should probably get her permission before disseminating her writing all over the web. On the other hand, she might start her own and then you'd all leave me for hers. Hm. Maybe I haven't thought this through enough.

(P.S. Just look at that last line: thought, through, enough. Can you believe any of us learned to read/write/speak this completely disorderly language of ours? I mean, I consider myself a grammar and spelling nerd, but even I have to admit that English is all effed up.)