Moleskine entry: January 5th, 2011
I have a new Moleskine.
This makes me happy.
It was a gift from those lovely folk @ Mint Digital (more than likely, orchestrated by my dear friend Utku), to mark the start of 2011*
Thanks Utterz. I like it.
So. Plans for the year then? I have two. Travel and dance. Doing more of both. The former I’m working on, the latter also.
I guess if I’m completely honest with myself, one underlying goal for the year ahead would be not to share as much. For the last two years (more so than before at least) I’ve lived my life openly, on the internet – and decorated it accordingly. In the same way that one would in his own house, I shared my happiness, my joy and my deepest loves on the walls around me.
If it made me smile, or if I thought it would do the same for someone, else then I shared it. But now…?
Now the largest piece of that puzzle has disappeared and, whenever I visit this place I once called home, it is not long before I wander into a memory of times gone past. It’s not like I can even show people around; an image here, a link there, an oblique reference off to the right – it happens.
This year, whatever comes my way, I’ll be keeping a fair amount of it back (more than I did before at least anyway).
For now, that’s how things have to be.
James Whatley
5/1/11
It’s no secret that deciding what to share (and more importantly, what NOT to share) is a tough thing, and something that I think you’ll find yourself constantly re-defining. Christina shares almost nothing – she’s never on her Twitter anymore, rarely gets on Facebook, and doesn’t like me uploading photos of her to Flickr.
I’m coming into this pretty hard soon, too, with a baby on the way. At what point are you sharing your ultimate joy of fatherhood with people, and at what point are you actually putting your child in danger by sharing too much? What about your family’s privacy? The first thing is that I avoid sharing my location when I’m anywhere near our home. I have an app on my Android phone that automatically disables GPS when I get within a certain radius of our home. It’s slightly inconvenient at times (and of course, you could find our street address easily if you looked hard enough), but still.
As we begin to use our online presence as a sort of living resume, you also have to consider what you do and don’t want to be ‘out there’, you know?