introspection

A while back my friend Holly (the ever witty and insightful Spleeness) posed the question: How much do you reveal about yourself on your blog?

I couldn't sit down and write a good answer then, but I've carved out a little time to explore the issue a bit.

If you this is your first time here, or if you really don't know me from any other person who cranks out dozens upon dozens of words and pushes them into the great wide open Web, I'll direct your attention to two places.

The first is the archive on this site--just page back through things or do searches. You'll find a ton of stuff on my politics, pass times, photography, and family.

The second is the sidebar. Most of what's there is from other blogs I write. Each deals with a specific set of interests I have. How to Crush Without Being Crushed is probably the most often deeply personal. It deals with relationships. Mostly mine. Mostly from the past. And mostly horribly tragic. OK, maybe not "tragic", but definitely not the most successful things in the world. In retrospect, kind of funny. At the time they were playing out, not so much.

Bottom line is, I'm pretty darn open about things here on the Web. Mostly because I don't have much at all to hide. Also because I'm pretty open in the "real" world, too. I like parity. No sense to me in being more closed off in one space while being open in another.

On Thursday, I came home to an empty couch and a lot more floor space than I've had in a while. My buddy Josh, who's been staying with me for more than a year now, finally had enough going in his favor to continue his long-paused trip.

When he first rolled into town, the weather was awful and it took him a week or so to dry out. Such is the challenge of a cross-country motorcycle trip. Aiming to not leave under similar circumstances, his exit was postponed about a week from what he had planned. In that time, another mechanical issue or two came up with the bike and he found some good deals on a few other things he had been look for.

He left me with a new wireless router and a set of movies I'd been putting off buying for years.

Josh has done this stint of couch-surfing infinitely better than I did back in 2003.

At today's gaming session, where we normally romp about as characters hunting down clues to stop an evil cult from raising up demons to destroy the world (in 1925, of course), we were thrown a curve ball.

After the initial set-up and recap of the previous sessions adventures and after setting down what our usual characters would be up to, the game master had us all roll our dice. Then, after numbers were counted, he told us to pick from the new characters that were placed on the table. All that was visible was the character's name, age, occupation and the briefest of brief descriptions.