Identity = ? (part 3)

Or heck, I could just post it all on that cooking blog I started a while back.

You tired of this topic yet, dear reader? I appear to have bored even myself.

Identity = ? (part 2)

... no, what I originally intended to write about was the tricky, slippery nature of online identity. In my quest for a blog I can share on various profiles that have my name on them, I went looking for a URL I could love.

So far, the ones I’ve tried are all taken: http://thisfar.blogspot.com/, http://highway1.blogspot.com/, and http://101books.blogspot.com/.

I wish the 101books person had kept writing; it seemed like a neat idea, and her comments made me laugh. Highway1: whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t German. Thisfar: I wonder what this was about...it looks like a list of books, but which books? Why? Blogs should have introductions, I think, a “this is why I’m writing” section for the curious reader.

On top of all that, naming things is not my forte. As a child, I named my stuffed animals things like “Kitty” and “Lion.” As an adult, I name my work projects things like “[Feature description] v2” and “Make [desired behavior] work.” I ask my engineers to name things, and their names are consistently better, funnier, and more on-point than mine.

So what’s a would-be blogger to do? I have no idea. I claimed [myfirstname][mylastname].blogspot.com, and even posted a first post, but it doesn’t feel quite right and I’m half-tempted to delete it. The thing about writing on The Internets is that, unlike in the real world, you have to name yourself. And if you’re not good at naming ... well, you write blog posts like this in an attempt to stall, hoping that a brilliant idea sneaks up on you while you distracted yourself.

Nope, nothing yet. I’ve got my eyes closed, I’m not looking....

Identity = ?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about social networks: not the online kind, the which-of-my-friends-have-ever-met kind. A blog is a way of putting communication out in public for others to see, and this blog in particular is pretty anonymous. If you read it, you’re either a very close friend and know who I am or you’re the opposite: a total stranger with no way to track me down.

So what do I do if I write something I want to share with someone who’s an acquaintance? Worse yet, a work acquaintance? What if I want to link it from FaceBook & Twitter & LinkedIn?

I’m certainly not going to link here; that would mean I’ve got no outlet for the things I want to be truly anonymous. So currently, I just don’t write whatever it is. Or I write it but don’t post it, or I write it but send it only to my Mom (thanks for being my outlet, Mom!). This is ... to borrow a high school term I sometimes can’t resist ... lame.

I want to go public. Sort of. I want a single place to post everything I think is worth writing, and then I want to control who sees it.

Believe it or not, though, that is not what this post started off being about....

Finding peace

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about peace. I don’t mean peace like the opposite of war; I mean peace like inner calm (if there is such a thing), peace as contentment, like the opposite of a noisy brain.

My conclusion is that it’s weird that there’s no peace-oriented Western tradition to follow. There’s yoga; there’s meditation; but where’s the European tradition I can pick up on? I don’t want to chant things in a foreign language or focus on my third eye or imagine chakras. I want my head to feel a bit clearer, but adding poorly translated Sanskrit phrases to the list of things I think about doesn’t seem like a particularly reasonable way to go about this.

Maybe this is why Catholics say the rosary? Of course, I’m not Catholic either....

And so I sit here, my computer’s screen blank except for this text. Laptop on my lap, I stare into the white-ish glow, legs crossed under me, and I type. I take a sip of water. I backspace a word or two, sculpting paragraphs and sentences into shapes that please me.

And I wonder:

Maybe a Western contemplative tradition is something I could just invent?

The size of money

This is one of those "because I think this is cool" posts. Somebody has digitally modelled exactly how big $10 trillion dollars is, physically: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

Interestingly, $10 thousand was a lot smaller than I thought, but $10 trillion was a lot bigger. I thought that familiarity would build accuracy (ok, no, I'm not familiar with a stack of $10 thousand in cash, but it is at least a number I can understand in terms of what it would get me; $10 trillion, not so much), but it doesn't. 

In which I am a little too good at research

At Christmas, my husband received a book called The Green Guide. As you might imagine, it’s intended to be a resource for how to live one’s life and buy one’s stuff in a more environmentally friendly way. It’s published by National Geographic, so it ought to be reasonably reputable.

I made the mistake of reading it.

Specifically, I ran across this section: The Dirty Dozen, which calls out various chemicals which one should attempt to avoid in personal care products. I read my shampoo bottle labels.

I read my makeup-container labels.

I threw out most of my lipstick, a couple of mascaras, and some concealer. I threw out the partially-used bar of soap in the shower. I bought new stuff from Burt’s Bees and Origins, and spent an evening happily playing with it (I know, I know, a whole evening? But I’ve been the only woman in the office for a good few days now; I needed some girlie time).

Then I started wondering a little more. I started doing searches for unlovely phrases such as [ cosmetics safety ], and I ran across the Cosmetics Database, and ran searches on some of the ingredients on the back of my packages, and realized I’d effectively gone from threat level 8 to threat level 2 or 3 or 4, which is nice and all, but fundamentally, there are no safe cosmetics which I was able to locate.

I haven’t even started on deoderant. I’m too scared.

I mean, I see hints that okay stuff might be out there, but they sure aren’t available in stores. And no one really agrees on what’s safe (is it disturbing that there are studies done about how well some of this stuff works for embalming purposes?) And who buys lipstick online? Please. I work for a tech company; I know enough not to trust the color I see on my screen.

To make myself feel better, I did a few more searches. I confirmed that yes, most household products are also unsafe. As is the off-gassing from the fabric-covered walls of my cubicle at work, the particle-board furniture in this apartment I’m staying in while I’m in NY, and certainly the bus fumes I walked past on my way home. If it’s all dangerous, I figure, why not look nice?!

Sigh. At least threat level 2 or 3 or 4 is an improvement on threat level 8.