Thoughts on friending and personal stuff

I do like to friend new people, I really do, and I wish I could friend everyone, but there are time limitations involved. I'm a serial commenter, you see, and I'm gone about four months of the year, and both of these things make it a little difficult to maintain a really large flist.

I like to think of a flist as a "work in progress" (as pen_and_umbra so perfectly said). Every so often I defriend a few here or there and friend a new person or two. It isn't really a personal attack; it's just that I read every single entry of every single friend/community on my flist (okay, I skip over memes, but still), and it takes a couple hours a day to keep up. If I find myself skipping over the entries of someone, then I defriend. I don't use filters. I like to have my flist reflect exactly who I'm reading. I'm not exactly happy with the fact that it's called "friending"; sometimes I really wish it was called "gathering people for a reading list", but then again, many of the people on my friends list are friends now, and I wouldn't want to call them "gathered people".

The content of my journal varies. There is a lot of fannish content, but there is some RL stuff too, and sometimes I feel guilty that the fans on my flist have to wade through RL stuff, and vice versa. I've tried to do something new, which is using an icon for certain topics (like the HBP icon for HBP stuff, tLS icon for tLS stuff, chickenfoot/kangaroo sign for funny stuff) so that people who aren't into that can skip it.

Personal information. I know that it must bother some of you that I'm so cagey about what I do exactly, but it isn't only my own privacy I'm protecting. It's also the privacy of other friends and family. Just because I want to share the private details of my life over the internet doesn't mean they want me to share theirs. Funny stories and experiences are fine, I think. But there is this line that I really don't want to cross---I don't want everyone to know exactly what their business is, because then I'd have to go back and delete entries referring to how I did at certain shows, etc., because then you could simply backtrack and know details about their business that they usually don't share. And my business is directly related to theirs, so if I tell you what I do, you can figure out what they do. So I really try to keep it all vague and anonymous. I know it's irritating and confusing, but if you knew what I did exactly, then you would know what they did, and you'd be able to figure out where I am half the time, and I don't friendslock anything.

Believe me, I really would like to just go on and on about all of the minutiae of my businesses.

So that's the deal.

It looked like fun...

So I stole it from pen_and_umbra.

( Bookstack pic )