The other day, I caught my dad quoting from one of my writeups. He made some joke that I made in some daylog a long time ago. By the time you read this, an e2 nuke request has been filled for it. But anyway, it was a node I would rather him not see. I don't really know why I don't want him to see it. It didn't have any bad language in it, it wasn't a description of drug-provoked shenanigans, but it was private.

I told him this.

After the words left my mouth, the strange part of what I had just said occurred to me. Other people read this stuff. Complete strangers. People I wouldn't recognize if I ran into them on the street. (Except for moJoe, he's creepy looking, I think I'd recognize him.) I mean, I knew this all along. I've read some of the most private details of people's lives. But, it didn't ever bother me. It still doesn't. I would share with the noding public just about anything. Why, then, did it bother me that my own father read my writeups?

I found out later that he has been, for months, doing user searches on me and reading anything new that I've posted. This really bothers me. Again, I don't know why. I have no problem sharing with total strangers who I wouldn't know from Adam random details of my life. But it's completely different if my close friends and family know them. Why? I honestly can't think of any good reason, except that perhaps I'm afraid of the retribution. Nobody here will criticize me for falling asleep in the library at school and missing the next period. Apparently some people even liked that daylog, it was ranked pretty high. (Higher, even, than the normal levels of vote dumping.) And of course, then there are daily evils. But, again, nothing questionable was revealed in any of these logs, and he never asked me about them until I found out.

Maybe I'm afraid of getting actual feedback. I get plenty of feedback from the system: writeups get voted down, I get a /msg from someone saying "You forgot to capitalize 'Ecto Cooler' in your last writeup." But none of it is actually real. It's all just lit pixels on a monitor. What do people who live near- or even in some cases with- other noders feel like? Do noders who know noders ever comment on each other's writeups? How does this relate to the topic at hand?

It probably doesn't, I just wanted to leave a little message for my dad the next time he user searches me.

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