Blog Me

I said to my teachers over dinner the other night (at a sugar shack in the middle of a maple grove in the middle of Quebecois countryside) that my job is a lot like being The Cool Aunt. The Cool Aunt gets to play with her nieces and nephews, have all the fun, eat junk food with them, take them out to neat places, and at the end of the day, the kids ultimately go back to their parents. The Cool Aunt does none of the disciplining, none of the teaching of life lessons, none of the real, hard work. With my job, I get the kids for a few days and take them around cool cities. I get to talk to them and do activities with them, dance on the cruises, laugh and make jokes, and sort of be the older friend who's not really a friend but at least isn't a teacher friend. I'm so totally The Cool Aunt. I get to be a different Cool Aunt every week too. Sometimes I'm more serious and sometimes I'm extra fun and fancy.

There's a lot of neat things about being a tour leader (that's why I can't shut up about it on here), but the one thing about it that I've always thought about is the element of anonymity it affords me. Every week I meet people who know nothing about me and I have a handful of days to make something up. Of course, I share all the neat information about myself and leave out the sordid details. After one tour a couple of years ago, a student on the trip found my blog and my goodness, that opened up a whole giant can of worms and that's why I try my darndest not to say a thing about the groups I take on tour anymore. I probably should have learned that lesson the first time when people at work found out about my blog the year before that, but alas, I'm just not the sharpest crayon in the box.

So when ex-boy Mr. D-Bag found the blog a couple months ago and told all his buddies to check out how crazy I was, I probably shouldn't have been as pissed off as I was. I thought my blog afforded me some wiggle room when it came to concealing who I am, but when Google gives you the link to this place as the first result when you search my name, I really shouldn't be deluded into thinking that I can say whatever I want here without anyone from Real Life reading it.

It's hard, you know? I can't tell the strangers I meet every week all the secrets and juicy details of my life. My closest friends are spread out over a handful of cities and with me moving around so much I can hardly find the time to write an email nevermind sit down and chat on the phone for a few hours. I wear my emotions on my sleeve (er- blog, I guess), what can I say? I have to tell my stories to someone and there's nothing like the nebulous blog-someone. I'd like to think that maybe I should keep the details on the delicate things in life a little more ...not so publicly available over the internets, but it's pretty apparent that I have little to no shame about sharing my personal life. I'm very much an open book kind of person. Ask me a question and I'll answer it, or sometimes I'll just share information that no one asked to know, like in the last post.

Sigh - you'll have to excuse me. Every now and then I go through a bout of uncertainty wherein I question how much of me is on here and how much is deeper, far away from this e-space. Then I wonder about what other people think when they read all this stuff because sometimes the Real Life Me feels very removed from Blog Me. Right away, the first thing I can tell you about Blog Me is that she's all dramatic and not quite as chill as Real Life Me. But the chill stuff doesn't make for good stories, so drama's all rage around here. Bear with (blog) me for a while, will ya?
8:38 pm