kerouac says

i'd been ruminating about anonymity--or rather, pseudonymity, i guess. there's been an explosion of blogs among my friends and sort-of-acquaintences, and most everybody i know who's started in the last year uses his or her real name--or at least doesn't hide it.

when i started, i had this idea that i'd know who some of you were, but none of you would know who i was! because i would be crafty and not let any identifying details slip! that lasted for about four days!

so now i'm sort of pseudo-anonymous, since it's next to impossible to write about anything half-way interesting without imparting clues to your identity, even with a tortured system of code names for everyone who you don't want to find the blog when they google themselves.

this is an appropriate tangent: i google myself regularly. i'm sure everyone does. i also google some of the very people i was once concerned would find this blog: the monkey, certain and possible employers, ex-boyfriends, ex-wives. i would like to add that those are some completely fine people, except for one; it's just that without the protection of the fake name i was (am) convinced i would run into one of them at cafe ladro and s/he would look at me with this certain glint that says, i know something about you and i would immediately begin to stammer or submissively urinate. awkward.

there are a couple people i am constantly waiting to run into. i am practicing my reaction, so i will have it down pat when the time comes and all i can see is white light and i can't remember any verbs. three guesses who the first one is. the other one is this guy i thought was The Guy, before i met the monkey.

i was pretty sure. he was not sure. whatever it was we were doing eventually sort of stumbled away to die, but not before an important exchange left me feeling i'd been treated shabbily. no one can blame you for changing your mind, but if you're handing someone's heart back to her, and you fumble and drop it, maybe complete radio silence isn't the best response. especially when you asked the heart-giver repeatedly if you could still contact her, and she was hesitant but eventually told you you could write her a letter if you wanted, and you immediately said you would, and made a point of saying so more than once, and used the word "promise," and even asked her to email the correct mailing address, which made her feel really dumb when it turned out you never wrote to her at all. and then you just sort of left it that way, forever, as if it hadn't happened or you never loved her even back then (maybe you didn't; you said possibly the lamest thing ever after saying i love you, which is: " . . . and i don't know what that means.").

and then she moved to the city you live in, and was convinced for the first six months that it was only a matter of time until the two of you met by accident. she practiced her face a lot and two separate times got all hyperventilatey thinking she saw you on the subway.

she doesn't think about it so much now, but she still googles you once in a while, enough to find out today that you do not live in her city anymore. you and your nice-looking girlfriend, the one you were meeting during the heart-drop episode, have moved to another continent and have a blog. maybe she tried to read the whole blog, skimming to see if she could find any phrases like "at the wedding," or "since we got married." none of those come up, although there is a profile on the blog for a third person, with a boy's name, and she was momentarily petrified that you maybe made a kid before she did. (you didn't. the profile belongs to your cat.)

here is the thing: we both turned out better. that is not in dispute. whatever is going on with you in deepest africa is clearly better than the stunted thing we could never quite get off the ground, and i have to admit that nothing we did or had holds a candle to my current situation. but i'm still theoretically pissed. and still hurt, in a sort of oblique way, like i have a bad break-up shoulder that acts up when it rains. maybe what happened was just a natural imperfect thing, and that's how it goes, but when people say i matter and then act like i don't, i turn into a tornado.

if you are reading this, you, you should say something. i don't think you are, but if you are, you should really pipe up. i like to know my audience.