The Reluctant Pollyanna

The hard thing about being anonymous is that I can't leave critical comments on other people's blogs. If it's just an observation or if it's something positive then yes, anonymity is just fine and that's what I do. But when it's a critical opinion to offer, then I feel that you have to at least give yourself a handle or better yet, just log in as yourself. In the past, I used to post criticism anonymously or under my initials but have come around to the belief that criticism needs an identity otherwise there is no dialogue, it's just seeking shelter in anonymity.

On the other hand, I am reluctant to shed my anonymity, although any of my friends or acquaintances reading this blog can quite easily figure out who I am. I don't know why I want to retain this anonymity. It's restrictive, given my parameters - no potshots at family, friends or random acquaintances. Leaving out work means that I can only comment on very narrowly personal interests. So going public is attractive, but I still hesitate.

K. also has a blog, a very erudite blog on our attempts to get off oil in our personal lives and our successes and failures in this experiment. His entries read like a mini-science journal full of stats and charts and pictures and links to various very serious scientific websites. My observations on the other hand are not about my interests, but about random things that happen to catch my attention or that put me in a pensive mood. In other words, this is a hopelessly self-indulgent bourgeois blog that has no educational value at all, except as a way of keeping a historical record of my thoughts so that perhaps my grandchildren can read it. In many ways, this blog has shown me just how mundane my life outside work really is. Work keeps my brain alive, post-work is all humdrum routine.

So is my anonymity a sign of shame, that I am so appalled that I cannot own up to the possession of this bland as vanilla life? That's not quite true either. Who could not be charmed by Fairfield County, Connecticut, close enough to the hustle of New York City but far away enough? Stuffy and yet liberal enough for me right now even though I long for better Mexican restaurants. In many ways, my life outside work is so full of sudden delights - the swirling fall of golden maple leaves in gusty October winds, the vision of my nonagenarian neighbor taking her careful walk and reminding me of the stability inherent in our neighborhood (so different from the transient population of our Chicago street), the pushing of strollers by playground-bound mothers, the chuckling of my children as they push their toys around the backyard - that I can only dimly wish for another kind of lifestyle.

Whatever my motives - unexamined too closely by myself - I have decided that for now, I would rather preserve my place in the shadows of blogdom and not in the limelight - I repeat, for now. The practical implications for this blog is that for better or for worse, I can only provide links to blogs that I like, not excoriate directly the ones that I despise - and although there are many among the latter, they shall remain only alluded to, not engaged with in public.