Boundaries in Blogging

I was chatting with Big Apple the other night. She is a friend of a friend who, I suppose after a bit more chatting and whatever, will be a friend in her own right. She kicked off the conversation by complimenting my blogs and asking if she had a "codename" and, if so, what it was.

The funny thing is that I could not say, with 100% certainty, whether she had been in a blog or not. There are a couple of reasons for that.

First of all, this is blog post number 296. I have a reasonably good memory, and it might seem that since I am almost entirely responsible for all of those blogs, that I should remember each and every one of them. I do not, alas, possess that level of recall.

Secondly, I haven't hung out with her that much. There has been one specific incident that might have spurred me to blog about her and the situation (and, indeed, that blog very well might exist; I haven't done anything approaching homework for this entry) and there are some other things that I am not personally involved with that I could spin a yarn from...

There are two other aspects that influence both of those reasons. The first is that I don't JUST write in my blog here on MySpace. I write (often longwinded) emails to people with my trials and tribulations, and I may or may not have a shadow blog entry or two out on the Interwebs somewhere. I might have mentioned Big Apple in an email at some point after the little situation happened.

The second aspect is that I try to keep a reasonable limit to my blogs, even though the boundaries aren't always clear to readers. Ms. Hat and I spent a night eating pizza and watching TV several weeks back. We hadn't hung out before and a few times through the night she apologized for being quiet... but that she was worried about ending up in my blog.

(I assured her she would not... but I suppose I'm either a liar or that meta-references don't count, because here she is.)

So... boundaries. I have some general rules I try to follow, including:

• Do not mock my friends
• Do not mock people who might read my blog (I learned that the hard way, as it turns out, over a year ago when I miffed a couple of people that I didn't even know read my blog... and I didn't even recal disrespecting them)
• Few, if any, references to dates or the girls I'm hanging out with in a romantic or semi-romantic way
• Limit the amount of "me at my worst"

That last one is the trickiest, I think. I've done some things and had some things happen that I will tell people about in conversation (even rather casual, with people I don't know that well) but that doesn't really sit well with me being immortalized in my blog. I might have my moments of desperation, or extreme failure, or even extreme success, but I try not to write about those.
It's difficult not to do, because it's often pretty darn interesting. But I have to make do with obscure references to stocking caps and Aussie chicks and vomit-spoiled bedding.

I'm sorry. Perhaps I should try to ratchet up the adventure level so the currently off-limits stuff becomes everyday and get put into MySpace blog-ready form...