On Being Outed as a Blogger
Reactuate: “Most of my real world friends and acquaintances don't know about Reactuate.” There are certain real-life situations—one of which would be getting a girfriend—that, although they said situations haven't occured (yet?), they would probably mean the demise of Just a Gwai Lo. The unlikeliest of unlikelies, getting a girlfriend, would have 100% completely seriously meant the demise of the old incarnation of Just a Gwai Lo. I even went so far as to say rather grumpily that a girl and I knew wouldn't be "compatible", and she called me on it, much to my consternation and embarrassment. So yeah, no more of that.
A lot of the old Just a Gwai Lo was about what I now—after seeing the movie American Splendor (why was the comic series not brought to my attention beforehand?!)—refer to as "Harvey Pekar Moments". The standout vignette of that movie is his thought bubble “I’m desperately lonely and horny as hell”. [Insert description of a recent Harvey Pekar Moment of my own, deleted to save from embarrassing myself, here.] The movie, for me, was interesting because Harvey Pekar had included in his comics the stories that involved people he knew intimately, and to a far, far lesser extent, the old Just a Gwai Lo weblog was about how I felt about people who both knew me and read the weblog.
Reactuate points to Plain Layne, and how her weblog was discovered by her roommate and her girlfriend, and what that has meant for her. Adam helpfully pointed out to me that searching for my full name, with a little bit of patience, one could eventually find this weblog. That's fine. It's inevitable. Potential girlfriends (ha!) will probably search for me on a search engine and come to the conclusion that I'm some neurotic nerd. That's also fine. This weblog is a fairly accurate representation of the things I think about, but not necessarily of the actions that I take.
