A Question

If you start dating someone, should you tell him that you have a blog?

This is totally premature, of course.

Three weeks ago I was in a chatroom, and a guy opened up a window with me. We wound up chatting for quite a while, and we had one of the most substantive chats I’d had in a long time. He thought the same thing; although he was relatively new to chatting, he’d never had an online conversation this deep before. Eventually he had to go to dinner, so I gave him my e-mail address and the chat ended.

The next day he wrote back, but getting back to him wasn’t at the top of my priorities, so a week went by. Then I figured, hey, I’ll write him back. I did, and he replied. We decided we’d try to meet up again online.

On a Saturday night, I came home from Wonderbar at about 4 in the morning and decided to go online. There he was. We wound up chatting for an hour.

For the next week, we chatted every night, probably at least 3 hours each night. We told each other much of our life stories. We really seemed to click, to understand each other in many ways, or at least to want to understand each other. He lives in New York, but lately he’s been spending lots of time in D.C. for work. He was hesitant to move on to further forms of communication, such as the telephone, but eventually he decided he wanted to give me a call.

On Monday night he called, and we talked on the phone for about three hours. We seemed to hit it off pretty well. Last night we talked again. We plan to move on to an in-person meeting at some point, probably soon.

The biggest thing is that I haven’t yet seen what he looks like, although he’s seen my picture. Perhaps the red flags should be going up for me, who knows. I know his height, his weight, and his age, and these all meet with my approval; and I know that he’s had a few boyfriends, so he must be at least objectively attractive.

Anyway, I don’t know if I should tell him about the blog. And actually, this has a lot to do with why I’ve been hesitant to blog lately. If you go back and read the entries of the last couple of days with this in mind, maybe they’ll make more sense.

A Little Better

For some reason I’m feeling better than I was. There are a few reasons.

One, I have been told by the person in question that just because I’m “serious,” doesn’t mean I’m “humorless.” That makes me feel somewhat better, because if it were the case that I were no fun to be around, that would kind of suck for me.

Two, he’s also told me (I’m paraphrasing) that I shouldn’t take it too much to heart that I don’t click with him. And I’ve realized that it’s much healthier not to focus on what other people think of you. You have to be who you are. If you just be yourself long enough, someone will come along who likes that self. Part of me already knew all of this, but it’s easy to forget those things. We’ve got to learn to be happy.

Three, I just read through the last several days of East/West. Flip, I’m sorry that things with Beau didn’t quite go according to plan. And, not to piggyback on someone’s misfortune, but reading your recent entries reminds me that there’s nothing wrong with honest, raw blogging. It also makes me realize that I’m not the only person with doubts in the world. And the e-mail my friend sent me the other day still applies.

Four, I talked on the phone with my landlord — I’m also going to send him a letter documenting my recent noise troubles, because it’s always best for these things to be in writing. My landlord told me he’ll talk to the neighbors and he’ll send them something in writing about their excessive noise. He told me that if the problem continues, the neighbors will have to leave, because he can’t have tenants disturbing other tenants. (Residential real estate leases have an implied warranty of quiet enjoyment.) Anyway, I’ve always been polite and friendly to my landlord, and he seems to like me. Plus I’ve lived in the building two months longer than these other people. So things could work out okay. The apartment noise sucks; when you can’t even get a good night’s sleep in your own home, that’s a problem.

Anyway, things could be looking up.

Now, there’s a separate issue, which I’ll leave to a separate entry.

I always get Jonno and Jockohomo confused. Am I the only one?

You astute readers may notice that this is indeed a new blog entry, one day after I wrote that I was thinking of giving this thing up. But I’m wondering if maybe I could keep blogging and yet enjoy it. It’s no fun blogging when your life seems like it’s in a ditch, because then all the posts come off sounding negative, and there’s a price to pay: a guy who otherwise might have thought you were lots of fun reads your blog and tells you that he thinks your personality is too serious for him to want to date you. Even if you didn’t want to date him in the first place, comments like that do hurt. Anyway, whatever. That’s not worth dwelling on.

The fact is, there’s something I’d lose if I stopped blogging: a connection to the blogging community. Even though I’ve only met one fellow blogger in person, and that was before I started my blog, it’s nice to be part of this community. It’s great to read others’ blogs and to hear from fellow bloggers.

Blogging is cathartic. And yet…

…it would be nice if my blog were read only by beings who lived on another planet, because then I’d know that I had no chance of ever interacting with my readers in real life. But the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle kicks in: things change once they are observed. At first you’re blogging about things that have no connection to your readers. But as more people read your blog, you find that sometimes the things you blog about involve other bloggers, or another blogger might do or say something that affects what you write. The barrier between your blog and your life is pierced. You realize that you’re not sending your thoughts out into a void, but out to other people who could play roles, big or infinitesimally small, in your life.

What I’m really trying to say is this: I don’t want my blog to turn people off from the person who’s writing it. I don’t want people to enjoy my blog but not me. I don’t want to be some observed being; I want to be a part of someone’s life eventually. It would be nice if I could keep the people who read my blog separate from the people involved in my life, but that’s not really possible. And it’s not like this is new to blogging; anyone who’s written a memoir, or even a work of fiction, has had to deal with this problem. What you write is affected by your life, and your life is affected by what you write.

Anyway.

I’m not sure what any of this means. Maybe I’ll try to be a more cheerful blogger in the future. Maybe I’m just going through some rough times in my life right now, which I am — the noise in my apartment building has been intolerable lately. I haven’t been able to sleep. The walls are so thin that you can hear people’s voices when they talk, and you can hear people walking around, and my upstairs neighbor comes in at 3 in the morning with a couple of friends and they laugh and yell and listen to music. I’ve asked him to stop, and I’ve gotten rude responses. There’s something important, though; I have a law degree. I know how to use the law. You can make the law work for you. I’ve already talked to my landlord, and perhaps things will get better. But if not, I think I have a good case for breaking my lease. In fact, I found a New Jersey court case, on this very subject, that comes to this exact conclusion. So if I have to move, I have to move.

On the upside, one of co-workers just left for a five-night vacation yesterday, and she’s offered me the use of her house. I slept there last night, and it was heavenly: a whole house to myself. A cute, kinda rustic house, and no noisy neighbors, and I can play music as loud as I want. I don’t want this to lull me into a sense of complacency, but it’s so nice to get away.