Bits of This and That

Last week, we stayed home, ate healthy home-cooked meals in, worked, and just sort of had an uneventful life.  (So uneventful that I have no photos to post.)

I'm doing strength, stabilization, and PT exercises and my shoulder seems to be holding up okay.  There are some new clicks and its obviously more loose, but it's not an emergency.  I can do pushups and dips and have full range of motion with very little pain.  I eased back in to running and got in 12 miles for the week.  I'm comfortable that I can build back up to my previous mileage without too much trouble.

I looked at a local highly regarded sports medicine orthopedic surgical practice to find someone who specializes in dislocated shoulders and was shocked to recognize the name of my original surgeon from 20 years ago.

I had assumed he must have retired by now because I remember him being firmly in middle age.  Turns out, 20 years ago, I thought someone in their mid 30s was older than they were.  20 years later, the surgeon is only in his mid fifties and still practicing.

Unfortunately, their clinic doesn't accept my current insurance.  But, as the intake nurse made clear, I'm nowhere near as bad as I could be.  She asked how often I was dislocating my shoulder, was it *every* *day*?  YIKES. [Clarifying comment -- Eegads, no.  Just the one time this year.]  So, I'm still in pretty decent shape as these things go.

The current plan is to strengthen the arm back up, keep running, aim to get back into yoga and reach back out when I get an opportunity to change insurance.  If I have to use a different surgeon, I will.  But, ideally (fingers crossed and a quick prayer) nothing will force me to have surgery in the short term and the original artist will get another crack at his work.

Other than that, I finally deactivated my Facebook account.  I downloaded all my data and confirmed that my browser isolation policy had kept me fairly clean on the unintended data collection side, but when I reviewed everything they had (52.7 MB, small by FB standards, but still a ton of data), I had a very strong sense that there is absolutely no reason a third party should have that much detailed data about my life. 

A while back I'd considered terminating, but after evaluating it, I'd been staying on for 2 running groups, a tortoise club, and a book club, but with my shoulder issue turning me purely into an easy flat surface runner for the forseeable future, I figured the running groups were less likely to be useful, I confirmed with my book club that they'd keep me in the loop via email, and I decided I could just use YouTube for my tortoise fix.

My original thought was that I'd give it a month of deactivation and assuming nothing serious on the regrets side came up I'd formally delete my account.  But, after a few days, I feel such a sense of relief.  When I'd done the inventory of my own personal cost/benefit of using Facebook, I hadn't realized that it also made me feel an odd sense of obligation -- now that I'm free, I'm realizing that I felt like I *had* to look at and process a bunch of posts whenever I logged on.  Subconsciously, I'm sure this is part of why I'd slowly been decreasing my FB logins over the last year or so (and I was never a super-frequent poster).   I'm not sure where that feeling came from or what it was all about, but not having it feels great.

Who Owns Your Stories?

There is a difference, for people my age and older, at least, between the pseudo-private and the public.

The pseudo-private are the things you say behind closed doors, the stories you haven’t agreed to publish fully.  You know you are making yourself vulnerable when you tell your close friends, and they may (if they are indiscreet) share with their close friends (but even they should understand that they receive the information under an NDA). Everyone knows it’s not something that should be shared publicly, without your consent.

Historically, I suffered from the idea that people understood this. 

I am, of course, probably naïve.  On the other hand, I am the chosen trusted recipient of many stories I've never shared of sexual and physical abuse, exploration, cheating, abortion, parental horrors, and other secrets that, frankly, I believe are part of what make us human, so perhaps I am the opposite of naive vis-a-vis content, but very naive and willingly in disbelief on the disclosure front. 

For the generations younger than mine (and also my cohort, if I'm honest), I've observed that this distinction between the treatment that should be accorded private shared secrets and the treatment accorded those that are made public is much less real, if it even exists at all.  And technically, they are correct.  Of *COURSE* everything you share can end up on the front page of the New York Times.  This has always been true.  But most of us were not entertaining enough, historically, to have this be an actual risk.  It's a point of pride for my down-to-earth extended family that the New York Times has never actually cared about what a particular member of my family has ever done.  Period.

Essentially, I (wrongly) thought I owned, or at least could control, my own stories.  

Tonight, at a social event, I found myself the butt of a series of jokes, grounded in reality.  Fine.  Terrible, but fine.  We’ve all been there.  Unfortunately, the jokes started with things I'd said and done in a limited set of close friends and veered into sexual comments about my own life I've shared in a few small intimate settings.   Mind you, this was at a nice restaurant for a public birthday dinner including several folks who would never have been part of the initial audience I selected.  When I realized the joke direction, I tried to slightly move the conversation away from the topic.  This did not work.  The speaker kept returning, intent on making the joke at my expense on fairly personal sexually-related themes, in front of people I did not know well, at all.  

This speaker clearly felt entitled to my stories.  It was as if by telling them, I'd given up my ownership.

Now, to be fair, I can understand the speaker’s confusion.  On a few occasions, I’d spoken openly, drunkenly, without care, in front of close friends in our home on this topic.  Regularly, I speak and write openly about gender and sexual themes (generally).  I can see how the speaker may have assumed that I have no concern for my own dignity or privacy when it comes to these issues, because I've highlighted, linked to, attended and celebrated women who were much more open than I am on similar themes.

But, I AM A PRIVATE BEING.

And the kids today, they aren't.  Really.  I’m pretty sure they don’t think dignity and privacy are actually things (even if you try to trick them into an answer regarding sexuality).  Certainly the famous do not have the privilege of believing that private disclosures between friends is actually a thing to be respected.

 

The difference is, up until tonight I thought privacy and owning my own stories was still a thing for me. 

So, I am sad. 

My take home tonight is that to live my life the way I want to, I need to develop a very different set of filters.  Either that, or I need to get comfortable living my life with much more of myself on full-on public display than I’ve traditionally been comfortable with.  And, honestly, the latter is probably on the winning side of history…

Facebook Vacation

I've confirmed that today's Facebook's privacy changes allow strangers to see everything in your timeline if they search for you by name.

I was annoyed but putting up with the reality that people could tag me in photos or posts without my consent and it was up to me to delete the tags.  Essentially, this meant I had extra work -- I had to regularly login and confirm that everything where I was tagged was something I wanted everyone to know about me.  If I didn't regularly login, someone could tag me and it could stay up, visible on my timeline for my entire network until I finally got around to taking it down.

But, before today, I was one of the (apparently very few) users who hid their entire Timeline from search. As of today, that feature is now gone.  So, I had to go through my entire timeline and "hide" the things I did not want viewable by strangers in connection with my name.  Mind you, I'd already done this by "hiding" my entire timeline.  Again, like publication of tags of my facebook profile without my consent, the publication of the timeline to anyone who searched for me by name caused me extra work.

I'm guessing the day is soon coming when facebook will cater solely to people who do not share my privacy concerns.  At that point, even if I'm willing to do all the work, the features I want just may not be available.

So, I'm taking the rest of the year as a facebook holiday to evaluate my options for (a) how much I actually miss facebook; and (b) if I miss it enough, how to address this issue in 2013.

Christina Catzoela Is an Awesome Attorney

I had the privilege of meeting her in law school and becoming close friends with her when we worked together.

When she was a junior associate, she tried to help the customer of one of her law firm's clients.

She was rewarded with praise in a letter written by the customer.

Unfortunately, because the remainder of the letter was full of complaints, and it was posted to a complaints board, her name is now associated with a search result link whose title gives the opposite impression. If you read the letter, you will see that despite the author's negative opinions of the remainder of the treatment they received, they had nothing but good things to say about Ms. Catzoela.

This post serves two purposes: (1) to attempt to inject some additional explanation and positive mojo into Ms. Catzoela's Google juice. (2) to observe the effect, if any, a single blog post by me can have on a fairly low-volume search term in Google's results.

Update: Cool! Google apparently just slurps blogger posts straight into the index. Instant gratification!

Need to Evolve

Tonight, while catching up on facebook with some very long lost friends, I encountered this response:


add\n*Jenn*



Seriously. I have no idea.

And I parse language for a living.

Google had no good first-page answers.

Am I supposed to dig deeper than that?

*very confused.....*

Right to Forget?

It appears that France is considering legislation that would require online data to be deleted/removed after a certain amount of time.

Ignoring the pragmatic implementation issues, assuming a government could actually make this law work -- the debate raises several very interesting policy and culture issues.

-How long and how far should information about our former actions follow us?

-If it's true, should anyone be allowed to say it? What if it's their opinion, but it's quite terrible as it concerns you? What if it was true at some point in the past but may not be so anymore?

-Are we, as an Internet culture, moving to being more forgiving of each other's transgressions, because, hey, who doesn't have some unfortunate party pictures available somewhere on the Internet?

-Or, are we, as an Internet culture, moving to a policed information state, where we have a right to control where our reputations are made and modified. Where we get to protect ourselves from the information related to our former transgressions, because, hey, at some point we all should be able to move on, overcome, and forget our past misdeeds.

-And how does this debate take into consideration the reality that most people find horrifically negative facts about a person to be much more interesting (and therefor higher on the search results) than any (and possibly all) counterbalancing healthy, normal, well adjusted facts?

It's questions like these, and more, that have kept me for so long from being completely open with my identity on this blog.

Lately, though, I can't help but feel that the ship has sailed. I feel as if the Internet has evolved to a place where I have 2 binary options -- I can stay fully engaged in the culture and join the transparency, or I can continue to seclude myself and slowly remove myself from and miss out on many of its newer benefits.

Thoughts?
It's a doozy.

[UPDATE: And, the same day I wrote this, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg claimed Privacy is no longer a social norm.]

De-Anonymization Warning #2

A while back, I hinted that I may be joining the Freakishly Free Open Kids.

I asked for those who didn't want me to link to them in the event that my meat-space identity might hint at their identity to let me know they'd like to be removed.

But, I think what I'm actually going to do is remove all linked blogs.

I'll re-link you if you request it.

And I'd really like you to request it.

But as of today, in preparation for the potential un-masking, I have no linked blogs. Please help me fix that by asking to be linked.

Cheers,
BT

Writing Under a Pen Name

This Article about why James Chartrand chose his male pen name despite being a female in the meat world is very informative.

Sad.

Frustrating.

But informative.

Interestingly, back when I was less open with details in my life, most of my readers assumed I was male. This despite the fact that according to the Gender Genie, my posts are all over the place.

After taking a look at its results more than a few times, I tend to think the Gender Genie's results are too closely correlated with topics. Travel and food posts like my last one often end up slightly more "female" than "male," while posts like the one three posts ago mentioning research and statistics come back almost twice as "male" as "female."

As cool as that might be, my gender has not swapped in the time period between these two entries in the meat world...

And yet, as they say, On the Internet, No One Knows You're A Dog.

Losing my Anonymity

So, I'm considering joining the kids.

You know, the open, non-private, freakishly free kids.

And, I'm thinking of creating a non-fake account on facebook, where I admit who I am.

And, I'm thinking of linking to this blog. So, I'm scouring the last 7 years, to make sure I'm okay with this.

AND, IF YOU ARE A PRIVATE PERSON WHO I LINK TO WHO WOULD LIKE TO BE ELIMINATED FROM MY ARCHIVES BEFORE I GO PUBLIC -- LET ME KNOW! ASAP!


Anyways -- it turns out, all I'm really doing in cleaning up my old posts is tagging old posts with labels, because I'm actually okay with everything I've posted in the months I've encountered (so far).

But one of the more interesting things I've encountered is how much my current self agrees with my past self (duh!).

And I'm pleased that my 2003 self correctly predicted that the SCO lawsuit would still be going when I graduated (and 3 years later).

On Privacy

Today, I attended a 3/4 day long conference on internet privacy. That wasn't how they billed it, but that's how it ended up playing out.

Many very smart people said many smart things, and most of them have my brain spinning and thinking and evolving. Perhaps if I collect my thoughts I'll post something useful. Probably not, though.

Acknowledging that I probably won't think, write, and post or be anything close to useful in that manner, I feel I should offer something. So, here it is:

Today, as counsel to many small cutting edge companies who struggle with many of the issues that were discussed, the most striking comment, to my ears, came from Lauren Gelman. She said (according to my notes),

Now, anyone can speak to the world about whatever they want -- but our stories aren't just about ourselves, they affect third parties.

I think, from the first person publisher privacy standpoint, that summarizes the whole ball of wax. Sure, you've always been free to tell your story from the street corner, but it used to require so much more effort. Now, it's easy. And you can bring along your acquaintances' reputations for the ride.

This is not to say that there isn't a huge discussion to be had regarding the entities who are collecting data, combining it with other data, mining it, and introspecting into our lives. That is a different and immense issue.

This is just to say that on the harms we can do to one another by exercising this new and ridiculously free, unprecedented power to publish to anyone in the world without a governmentally imposed filter -- I think Lauren's got it.

We've never been so free to permanently speak to millions about our neighbors, acquaintances, exes, and so forth.

It's a brave new world y'all...

It seems fitting that the day SuaSponte is done with her 1L year is the day I should begin my blog.

I've been lurking at her site for quite some time, hungrily gobbling every useful morsel of information that she can offer that will prepare me. In the process, I feel as if I've gotten to know her and I've been inspired to start my own blog. Ostensibly, I'm doing it for the next generation of 1Ls-to-be since I'll be starting my 1L year in August. But really, I'm probably just like all the other blawgers, I love to "hear" myself talk.

I put off starting the blog for several months--mainly because I was busy, but also because I couldn't figure out what level of anonymity I wanted to maintain. I even went so far as to download a few blogging packages to my server. One part of me says, "Just take credit for it. It's not like it's possible to maintain the ruse of anonymity when you start talking about details of your life." Another voice reminds me, "You should try to be slightly anonymous. You aren't certain you want to be outed."

Voice #2 won. There's a choice left if I start annonymous. Besides, as the title of my blog should hint, I'm a known sufferer of foot-in-mouth disease. I pay for it enough in the real world. I think I'll enjoy my freedom here.

The rest of the story will arrive in time.