dianaschnuth

Speak when you are angry — and you will make the best speech you’ll ever regret.
—Lawrence Peter

I snapped at my brother-in-law yesterday at Easter. I really should have held my tongue; he had been in a car accident the day before, and was physically and mentally out of sorts. But he made an angry comment to Aaron about how he didn’t want people taking his picture without telling him — which is my M.O. at family gatherings. I’d actually already snapped one of him earlier, thinking his drugged-up state looked kind of cute.

So, I “thanked” him for telling me to my face not to take his picture, instead of telling my husband. He muttered something as I turned away, apparently not for my ears.

The private conversation that Aaron had with him later covered many topics, one of which was my penchant for taking candid photos and posting them online, either on my blog or on Flickr. I honestly hadn’t considered the fact that I don’t have explicit permission from the subjects to post their photos publicly; they’re snapshots of my friends and family. If I’d wanted to publish them in a magazine or use them in my online portfolio, I would certainly ask (and have in the past). But for my blog? For my Flickr?

After I cooled down and considered the implications, it occurred to me that I’ve posted people’s personal information on my blog multiple times. I’ve posted people’s full names along with their photos. While I don’t personally have a problem with posting info about myself online, other people might. (Actually, some people definitely do, even apart from my brother-in-law; one former co-worker from college has specifically asked me not to post her last name, to make her less searchable online for professional reasons.)

So, now I’m on a mission to rectify the situation. I’m going to remove references to people by their full names in all my blog entries; luckily, there aren’t many of those. (I reserve the right to keep full names of people I’m trying to find, in the hopes that they’ll Google themselves and find me.) I’m also going to set any photos of people on Flickr (ones not taken in public or at conventions, anyway) to be viewable by friends and family only, unless they’ve told me they’re OK with having their picture online. So, if you’re a regular reader and you know I have photos of you posted on my Flickr, feel free to speak up in advance one way or the other. Also, if you don’t have a Flickr account, and still want to be able to see pictures of my friends and family, you might want to sign up and friend me (it’s free, after all).

In this era of widespread indexing of information, I suppose we should all be more conscious of how we could potentially be violating others’ rights to privacy. Sorry if I stepped on any toes.

In looking through my e-mail for things I’d meant to blog, but never did, I came across this bit from April of last year:

I’m not much for literal dream interpretation. After some inspection of my own dreams over time, though, I can start to see patterns and themes. Symbolism. Things like that. I can tell what was just thrown into my dreams as a replay of the day’s events, and I can draw parallels between situations in my dreams and situations in real life. I know that certain people that appear in my dreams represent certain aspects of myself.

Lately, I’ve been dreaming about skipping school. Either I really want to skip class and end up just not going to school at all, or I skip class and I didn’t mean to. Sometimes, school is college, and sometimes it’s a weird conglomeration of college and high school.

Yesterday, I posted this dream on Twitter:

Before that, last week, I had a dream that included one of my co-workers. I didn’t write it down, and I didn’t talk about the contents of the dream, so I don’t remember exactly what he was doing in my dream.

As we were standing in line the next day to grab some coffee at Biggby’s, though, I went ahead and told him that he’d been in one of my dreams the previous night. That can be awkward — how do you respond to that? After he blushed and laughed (“I’ve never been in a co-worker’s dream before!”), we ended up having a brief and intriguing conversation about dream interpretation as we waited for our coffee.

He started with, “Do you believe…?”

That kind of opening always evinces the skeptical “hairy eyeball” from me, and this was no exception. Turns out that he wasn’t being quite that open-ended about it, and simply asked what I thought about how the brain reinterprets things in dreams. I made it clear that I don’t believe in clairvoyance or precognition, but that I find it completely possible that the subconscious picks up on clues and signals in our surroundings that we don’t consciously perceive.

Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty sure that the recurring characters in my dreams represent certain aspects of my life. Maybe my co-worker now represents my work life and/or my career in IT.

As for the Japan dream, that one’s easy to interpret.

(BTW, 140 characters was way too short to include all the nuances of the dream. It also included a cashier / counter girl who spoke excellent English and a cash register that doubled as a bun-warmer for sample sandwiches.)

I’ve been in an exceptionally good humour today, and have been trying to pin down why. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but it kind of does.

Physically, I feel well-rested, despite getting no more than my usual seven-ish hours of sleep. Maybe it had something to do with last night’s workout? This morning’s Skinny Double Mocha helped, too, in more ways than one. I got sufficiently caffeinated, for sure, but I also enjoyed feeling like a part of the group. (Six of us walked over to Biggby’s together and shared buy-one-get-one coupons.)

I’ve also been particularly productive at work lately, and the work I’ve been doing has been helpful to other members of my team. That makes me feel useful and needed, and like I belong. The last time I felt like that was a good two years ago, when I was developing the Loan Corrections database at Sky.

Hopefully, this good mood is sustainable over a few days, and isn’t just a one-shot thing for today. I’ll do what I can to keep it rolling.

Time to head back in to work, though I’d love to stay outside with my favorite tunes and my portable internets and the warm sun and the fresh breeze. Ah, Spring.

Yes, it’s the middle of the day, and I’m blogging. I’m on my lunchbreak, sitting in the abandoned foodcourt of Portside, tapping away on my iPhone. I point this out so I won’t get busted later for blogging during work hours.

See, my direct supervisor is also one of my friends on Facebook. There have been times when I wondered if that was a smart move, since my Facebook is basically a Tumblr account, aggregating all my blog entries, shared items from Google Reader, favorites from YouTube, Flickr photos, etc. I think, though, that having her in the loop keeps me from blogging anything I might regret later, like publicly admitting when my sick day is actually a “mental health day,” or Tweeting something unsavory about work, or talking smack about just about anybody (at work or otherwise). My Mom reads my blog and Facebook, too, but I’d be more concerned about losing future favorable references or getting myself into professional trouble than pissing off my Mom.

Besides my boss, many of my friends read my blog, so I try to keep some things under wraps. I don’t use this as my “diary” like I did back in 2002, just because it’s more widely read. I can’t just say, “Something So-and-so said today made me really uncomfortable,” or “I really wish So-and-so would stop calling,” although I’m not afraid to say that I wish our friends (read: Aaron’s friends) would call and want to get together more often.

Something else to consider is the fact that I use the same username on every forum and site I’m on, so I always have to be on guard. Well, not so much “on guard” as just aware of the image I’m putting out there. This is the Internet, after all, and even locked posts have a way of becoming more public via email or IM, if someone sees the need.

Am I worried? No, not really. If I were, I’d use something more elusive as my alias, and I certainly wouldn’t use my full name as my domain. I mean, I already got my debit card number stolen once, and I survived that. I don’t publish my SSN online or anything, and I’m not popular enough on the internet that people will look up my address and stalk me, or try to break in while I’m gone, or follow me to work.

I’m comfortable with my level of transparency. In fact, I kind of like it. It’s refreshingly honest. This is me; take it or leave it.