Follow the fake-cut to thoughts on day one of the Olympic Trials.

OMG, FAKE CUT

*needs gymnast icons!*

So, I think I was a bit alarmist yesterday, but I also think part of my gut instinct was correct - I've had this journal for a long time, and there's probably a lot of stuff on here that just doesn't need to be part of my public persona at this point in my life. Nobody needs to know about my high school angst! :)

I'm keeping all prior entries set to private. Anything that I have anxiety about being public knowledge should NOT be on the internet, and clearly it was concerning me on some level. I also think I was correct about the need to differentiate between friends and "Friends List." I think that anything I feel the need to filter selectively is probably something that should only be discussed via more personal channels. The whole idea of "Friends Filters" really blurs the lines between public and private information, especially when those filters are, to a large extent, transparent to the people on them.

I'm not sure how LJ fits into my life at this point. The strength of the LJ platform is its messageboard-like comment threading and the way it aggregates the posts of your friends onto a single page. Unfortunately, these strengths actually run counter to what I need from the platform right now. Honestly, I don't have time for that kind of immersive communication, and by maintaining a LJ at all, I feel like I am implicitly entering into a contract that says I am reading the posts of others on my Friends List. These days I am far better served by formats like Twitter, which allows me the convenience of an SMS interface, as well as the micro-blog format that keeps the time commitment low. I'm also a big fan of Tumblr which allows me to aggregate the various data streams about myself that I've chosen to make public, as well as share things quickly.

So, while I haven't exactly figured out *how* I'm going to use it, I think I'm backpedalling from my initial plan of completely abandoning LJ for all purposes. I will definitely be limiting the amount of personal information that I share, but I may use it as something of a generalized bulletin. If anyone has any examples of how they've commandeered the LJ structure for their own personal use, I'd appreciate ideas. However, the bottom line is that if you really want to know what's going on in my life, you'll have to resort to the horrors of the telephone or email. :) I think that particular choice, despite being made in the heat of the moment, was a good one.

This journal is going private only, and now exists solely for personal archival purposes.

Things seem to be leaking out, and the only way I can think to stop this is to plug the leak entirely.

I haven't used LiveJournal as anything more than a tool for random venting in a long time, and clearly that practice is dangerous, if not to myself, than at least to my friends. I guess I confused real friends with "Friends" as a category.

Most of you have my outside contact information, or know people who do. If you don't have it or have misplaced it, you're welcome to solicit it via comments to this post, but obviously, at this point I'm going to be extremely fucking selective about who will actually get it. I'm ready to extricate myself from the internet cluster-fuck of livejournal, as well as the incestuous little world of Salt Lake City.

(Edited to be slightly less histrionic, now that I have taken some deep breaths)