Reasons You Will Hate Me

35 comments

This time it's personal.

I am having somewhat of a blogging crisis.

On the weekend I received a forwarded email from my mother. She had been contacted by a friend of hers who had self-googled* and discovered himself on RYWHM. He was most displeased by the post, and requested - in a gentle but firm fashion - that I either remove the piece in question or change the names.

I re-read the post, and while it was essentially a dry and occasionally sarcastic observational recollection (do you love how I make myself sound pithy and Coward-esque here?), I didn't find it in any way malicious or degrading. I didn't use any full names nor posted any links to identify him.

I suppose my question is - and to an extent, always has been - at what point should you stop mining your personal experiences for blogging purposes? Do you write the sordid ins and outs of your relationship for your partner to read? Do you make scathing appraisals of lost friends knowing there's the off-chance they will stumble across your website?

Is it not essentially a writer's responsibility to share their view - however contentious - with the world?

I have always envied Greg The Boyfriend's ability to bare his twisted soul to internet lurkers (though you'll have to trawl through his archives to get the really dirty stuff). Though the idea of being out with friends and having the entire table at an Indian restaurant knowing you've had anal sex and with whom is, for me, another matter altogether.

My mother isn't too mad, but I know she'd prefer it if I didn't turn random meetings with her friends into half-arsed jokey fodder for my blog.

Lines in the sand, anyone?

oh, and p.s. COMMUNITY SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:

'On Tuesday 15 November, hundreds of thousands of Australians will gather in capital cities and towns all over the country for the National Day of Community Protest against the government's draconian IR laws. A Sky Channel broadcast of the event will be beamed into hundreds of workplaces and community venues around Australia. Community Protest rallies will be held in all major capital cities and regional centres.

The new workplace legislation introduced into Federal Parliament on Wednesday, 2 November will strip more than a hundred years of workers' rights, remove many hard won conditions and set a new low for the future workplace conditions of Australians.

Under these laws:

Individual Contracts (AWAs) - it will be easier to push more and more people on to individual contracts. Under these laws there is no requirement for these contacts to protect people's take-home pay and include important workplace conditions like overtime pay, penalty rates, public holiday pay, meal breaks, redundancy pay, etc.

Awards - Award conditions will not be guaranteed or protected, in fact under these laws the award safety net is effectively gone.

Unions - The right of unions to visit workplaces will be restricted and unions can be hit with fines of $33,000, if they even ask for workers to be protected from unfair dismissal or individual contracts.

Unfair dismissal - unfair dismissal laws will no longer apply even to large companies/institutions with more than 100 employees if their "operational needs" (eg restructure) require redundancies, sackings, etc.

---

SYDNEY
Venue 1: Martin Place
Venue 2: Belmore Park, Cnr Eddy Ave & Pitt Street (near Central Station)

Time: 9.00am sharp

MELBOURNE
Federation Square
Corner Flinders and Swanston Street, Melbourne

Time: 9.00am sharp

BRISBANE
Southbank
South Bank Cultural Forecourt

Time: 9am

PERTH
The Esplanade
Perth CBD

Time: 12 noon

ADELAIDE
Elder Park King William St
Adelaide

Time: 8am

695 days til the next election.

*BE IT ON THINE OWN HEAD, SELF-GOOGLERS!

35 comments.

Comments

15Nov11:57

tantrik said...

ego-googling is for wankers. I've tried but a search of my name - in quotation marks - reveals 652,000 matches. I'm one fucking popular dude!

Anyway Fits, my opinion on the line in the sand is where someone you write about becomes easily identifiable to people you (and maybe they) know. It won't matter to the subject that they are anonymous to the majority of your readers - it's the 2 degrees of separation between their milieu and yours that counts.

Just go easy on those you know, even distantly, because you're funny as fuck without the need to take aquaintances down.

Oh, re the IR protests - they'll do as much good in stopping the weasel's intentions as the protests against the invasion of Iraq. And fucking stupid Australians voted him back in after that debacle!
The only difference in the next election is that the taxpayers may have actually felt some financial pain fron this legislation - that's all that seems to count these days.

15Nov12:01

Ukulele said...

Guilty as charged for writing things under the guise of anonymity, knowing full well the anonymous will read said piece, only to be scolded in the end for airing turgid information.

Have learned my lesson.

For the most part.

But sometimes cant help it because they started it.

15Nov12:10

kranki said...

Question: How did this person find themselves mentioned on your blog if you did not use their full name?

15Nov12:12

kranki said...

Oh and at least you didn't make the mistake of ripping on somebody and then including them in the mass email that says come and read my blog.

15Nov12:13

Born Dancin' said...

Let 'em sue. Write up a contract and offer it to each and every new person you meet. Then waive their writes in their (prima) faces!

15Nov12:17

ka said...

I say anything goes!

yet i feel a tinge of regret at a thread i once wrote on a message board titled "When i prematurely ejaculated into my pants". Although it was a well constructed piece of prose punctuated with humourous witticisms the subject matter does not lend oneself to suitors of the opposite sex.

Bugger him but one must placate ones mother. especially when she does one's washing and ironing. Not that i know what that's like.

15Nov12:40

Buck Fudd said...

kranki said...
"Question: How did this person find themselves mentioned on your blog if you did not use their full name?"

I had the same thought. Maybe he googled his own name together with Ms Fits name, which would beg the question, why?

15Nov12:50

sublime-ation said...

Fuck now youv'e spoiled my post for today.
I was going to write something really bitchy about my friend's boyfriend and now I have a conscience

*sigh*

"Again."

And he started it too!

15Nov13:14

Mark K said...

Yeah, I've recently been forced to institute a no full names policy because of this very problem. If someone had a name distinctive enough to be googlable, then I'd probably truncate it or something. I'd kowtow to this guy's demands too - what's the harm?

15Nov14:17

Jellyfish said...

Um, yeah - how did he find the piece?

When I first started blogging, my blog was completely anonymous and none of my friends knew aboout it. Now, pretty much everyone I know reads it, including my parents, who for a long time were my prime source of material. I don't think they've yet worked out how to go back throught the archives thank Christ, I am not looking forward to them finding the posts where I complain about their drinking habits or the time they gave me a filing cabinet for my birthday.

Anyway - I started off being able to write pretty much anything about anyone, and now have to be much more careful. I could say 'Screw it, I'm writing about you all anyway because it's my blog and I can do what I want'... but I've basically decided that this is part of the nature of blogs, they are always going to change a little if the readership does and you just have to accept it.

I've decided that, as Ole Golly say in Harriet the Spy, 'Rememebr that writing is to put love in the world, not to use against your friends.'

Having said that I was planning to blog this week about how my 99 year old Nana got accidently drunk on mojitos at a wedding on Saturday. So, whatever.

15Nov14:19

Jellyfish said...

Only I don't think Louise Fitzhugh would spell 'Remember' wrong. And that's why she's a famous author, and I'm just an idiot with baby vomit on my trousers.

15Nov14:37

Peter said...

A filing cabinet?
Great present!

15Nov14:44

Jellyfish said...

Yeah. Not so much when you're 19.

15Nov14:45

Peter said...

Oh, and Fits and other protesters. I think (though now I am doubting it) that the Melbourne rally is at 8.30 - to cause maximum disruption to peak hour.

I would check the ACTU site but I can't get on. Maybe my work has blocked it... Dare they?

15Nov15:06

Anonymous said...

Peter - conspiracy theory of the day - All union sites are down! Go on - check them out! ACTU, Victorian Trades Hall Council, Unions NSW, Labornet, CFMEU, LHMU, AWU all down. However, Your Rights at Work Website is up - www.rightsatwork.com.au. The National Hookup starts at 9.00am sharp BUT they're asking people to get there at 8.30am.

15Nov15:31

Ova Girl said...

This is a hard one and I'm also interested in people's views on this.
A friend bailed me up soon after I first started blogging because I had talked about her new baby and used the word ugly in the same sentence.
Part of me absolutely hates being told what to write and what not to write, but I don't want to hurt people either.

15Nov15:43

ms fits said...

But was the baby ugly, Ova? If so, you had legitimate journalism on your side.

I don't know. I always admire bloggers who just go in hard; to hell with anyone else's feelings. You read cartoonists like Robert and Aline Crumb, who lay their grubby fantasies and affairs out for all to see. It always seems riskier, somehow.

But yes, there's always a mother's feelings to consider...

15Nov16:02

BEVIS said...

So I guess you have the option of coming up with an alias for the purposes of your blog for every person you make reference to (and then using that same alias again next time you refer to them, if you can remember what it was) ... or telling them to jam it. I do the former, with an option on the latter if they work out who I mean and still complain about it.

You can risk offending people (but hey - the have the same options you do! Tell him he can start his own blog and rip through you if he wants!), or you can be less-than-truthful online (which I'm sure no one ever does ... although this would cramp one's journalistic integrity - such that doesn't make me laugh when I type it).

Or you can be a powerhouse unto yourself and brake for no one.

:)

15Nov16:02

Peter said...

Yeah, Fits, it's riskier... But it also can tend towards, well, just being mean. Edgy is all well and good, but who wants to be a prick to their friends?

If no-one ever did anything nasty then we'd all be friends and dance around together hugging and singing and jesus christ peter how lame can you be?

In conclusion: as an ethos, "to hell with anyone else's feelings" is undoubtedly edgy, and may even provide a journalistic coup now and again, but I suspect it's unlikely to make one, or at least me, happy.

15Nov16:04

BEVIS said...

"the have the same options you do" should have read "they have the same options you do", sorry.

15Nov17:14

thr said...

...referring to home life and friends is the MO of all breakfast radio "crews"

*Dave Hughes, stand still laddie*

Blogs are light weight in comparison.

15Nov17:48

Jeremy said...

I think you have to make a choice - if you're going to be completely without limits you need to be completely anonymous, such that no-one knows it's you.

If you're going to be identifiable, you've got to write in a way which would be defensible if the person read it.

I used to work on the assumption no-one knew who I was, and then was careless enough that people figured it out.

Now I'll still write things about people I know, but if I'm going to poke fun at them I'll try to do it affectionately. As I would to their face, really.

ps See you there tomorrow. (In amongst 40,000 other people.)

15Nov17:53

Anonymous said...

thomas arrrgh, the difference with a blog is that the stain can be permanent (for as long as the blog exists anyway) and normally the target isn't in on the joke.
I wrote a disparaging comment about someone in a newsgroup in 1996 and my real name ended up in the header.
The indelible comment remains nearly 10 years later and it doesn't reflect well on me. People have found it and it has caused conflicts as recently as 6 months ago.
Fuck usenet holding onto shit back to the early eighties!

15Nov19:10

Russell Allen said...

Don't be a chicken shit (as Burt Reynolds would say in the Cannonball Run) and carry on as you are.

You're not scared of your momma are you? Say it ain't so...

15Nov19:40

daniel said...

Whenever i google my name and find your site i wonder what strangers (and my mother) would think. Here's some choice phrases you'll find:

"I ate Daniel Boud under the fucking table like he was my bitch"

"MattyB pashed Daniel Boud"

"Daniel Boud totally said he'd fuck Alexander Downer"

Why didn't i think of a clever pseudonym!

16Nov00:22

Joseph said...

Well it just depends on what you think is important. I know what I think is important.

16Nov10:36

TJ said...

I've been nailed pretty hard with it a couple of times. Dooced and Dumped because of the damn thing.

In hindsight, I have a big gobby mouth and write shit that I shouldn't, but I've tried the censorored thing and it sucked rat's balls.

There's something inherently satisfying about going that step further. You might wind up unemployed and unsexed, but your *writing* will be fab, goddammit.

That said, if my family ever found it, I would have to commit seppuku right there on the spot.

16Nov11:45

2ript said...

Make no-one else happy if not yourself. I don't see the problem if you're not posting a freakin photo of them with their names and addresses, like I occasionally do

16Nov13:40

Ian said...

It's not as though you haven't copped all sorts of shit on all sorts of blogs. You remain outwardly indifferent. So should he.

16Nov15:45

Zoe said...

If he's happy for you to leave the post and change the names, I'd do that.

And I have a lot of fun making up a suitable new name for him.

16Nov15:52

Zoe said...

And hopefully I'd spell whatever witty name I came up with properly, so as not to look like the illiterate nork I did in that last comment.

17Nov08:05

buzzgirl said...

God, someone just yesterday asked me to take down a post about him. I did take it down, but then I seethed about it and became really angry with myself. I think self-googling is a lot like eavesdropping: you're not always going to be happy to find out what others think of you.

17Nov17:56

LV said...

I love Perth! "We want to fight this unjust legislation...but we also want to sleep in until 10am!"

18Nov10:11

Brownie said...

Re IR protest photo: I don't think that was the first-preferred use hope of the City Council.
Re: vanity searches- my way of thwarting Technorati etc, is to simply add a letter to any name - it doesn't detract from comprehension to post, say, 'Robert Doyyle is a dickhead', or run the names together- 'AlexanderDowner has a chromosome deficiency'. How are they gonna find themselves?
Re 690 days to go: We form the Blogger Party before the next election. All we need is 500 members and a $350 rego fee. We run our entire campaign online at zero cost. When we don't win, we get a grant of $500,000 and we 500 split it. easy peasy. we do not let the DPP gaol us for making the claim like they did to Pauline Hanson though.

19Nov03:52

Anonymous said...

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Reasons you will hate me

This time it's personal.

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