Anonymous honesty may destroy me.

I don't know how the bloggers do it. How can they write about their lives with such gleeful or willful abandon, in pure public?

My life (and i imagine everyone else's, as i can't assume myself to be unique) is a knit of relations. To understand how, why i live is to grasp however fleetingly my understandings of the people (places, things) around me and my relations to them. In an anonymous forum, it's possible for me to explicate them (the people, the relations, the events) with candor, to take a snapshot. For the snapshot to stand, to have meaning to its anonymous audience, i have to build the supporting frame of context. For me to build context is to make generalizations, to make verbal things that are assumed or hidden, unspoken ground rules and judgments, which can be tailored to the vignette for the sake of consistency.

Anything static describing a relationship cannot be true.

This is all fine if i am creating art for an anonymous audience. I use the raw materials of myself (and so, without their permission, of others) and build something that the audience can infuse with their own meaning.

Quel coincidence! Je m'appelle Monsieur Smith aussi!

Words conjure blank faces, assign to them attributes, the reader/voyeur assigns meaning and turns it into his own play.

Except when the voyeur finds himself cast. My friends know i write. So they read it. And, but, so, then i can't write about them, because of the hardness of even this fluid medium. Because this becomes a power relationship i don't want to have.

I have the power of interpretation.

They have the power of surveillance.

They know what i'm thinking.

I control their portrayal.

Could you be comfortable with this, could you remain true?

I choose the thing that will define me to everyone with whom I come in contact on the internet.

Or the only thing that defines who I want people to think I am. That's the beautiful -- and terrible -- thing about the internet.

I'm not saying anyone should lie about who they are.

But the internet gives me a great and terrible power. I can be shrewdly honest with people I have never met, more so than I can with my ex-boyfriend, or my parents, or my sister, or my real-life friends. I don't have to hold anything back.

Or I can hold everything back. Or only certain parts.

On one website, I can play up the fact that I have three Coach bags plus two scarves, a wristlet, a keychain, and a cell phone cover; a Juicy clutch, a tracksuit, a necklace, a watch, and a bag; a Chanel bag and earrings; and that I buy most of my makeup at Sephora, and I wear exclusively high heels and skirts to work.

On another, I can let everyone know that I have almost 3,000 gamerpoints, I used to be in a female gaming clan, I was a semi-finalist for the 2009 Frag Dolls casting call, about half my t-shirts are video game related, I juggled being a full-time student and playing WoW, and at conventions I'm usually asked to be a model for the OGO Girls of Gaming calendar.

Or I could discuss headphones and Chucks and skinny jeans; and lament how I missed Warped Tour '09, but I made up for it by buying a pair of Vans and supporting local music; and boast that I just bought a secondhand keyboard in great condition so that I could start learning to play Mae songs.

I could "casually" mention that since I'm part Asian, my skin is very slightly golden-tinted but pale; my eyes tend to get squinty when I smile; my cheekbones are high and prominent; I'm naturally slender; people ask me why my face is flat.

Or I could give you the full disclosure.

I didn't fabricate any of the above statements. I just picked and chose the parts that make me seem interesting. I tailored my personality, my interests, myself, to what I thought the internet would want to hear.

It's because I desperately want to find myself interesting.

My consolation? I'm not the only one that does it.