I'm pretty close to where you are, Phil with all this. I've been feeling a need to retreat and not feel so exposed--a great choice of words.
For me, it started a year ago, when I went back home to my parent's house and spent three days cleaning up my 12 boxes of stuff in the garage (not counting the stuff in the attic!). I found a huge stash of little projects: an attempt in 3rd grade to collect samples of every element, a project in high school to make a music generator out of some new IC chip, a drafting project for My Ultimate Dream House (1981), designs for flexagons and polyhedra, designs for new exciting freeway interchanges, old Commodore C128 code to render 3-D ray tracing, a hand written notebook listing the characteristics of every Star Trek planet, a small breadboarded calculator that didn't even do decimal math. Just random geeky project that no one cared about--but I was just enjoying myself, and not interested in their approval or even if they cared.
These projects were very solitary endeavors, and while I thought I'd throw away a lot during my clean up days last year, I didn't. The exercise was both melancholy and nostalgic, and I came away with a feeling that I'm not all that good in the give-and-take of social obligations, and I'd be happier just doing projects on my own. I was alone in high school, but I wasn't lonely, and really enjoyed the long nights working in my room on some little project or another.
So, yes, since April 2008 I've decided to focus on doing more interesting stuff than putting it out there. I signed up for Facebook, but don't really use it. Twitter is... whatever; I don't use it much and update it two or three times a week. I have been doing quite a bit of pictures ('photography' sounds pretentious), and using Flickr a lot more. But that's about it.
And yeah, I think LiveJournal suits my style just fine. I can ramble on as I see fit (as you do, hah, that's a compliment!) and enjoy the detached yet focused back-and-forth that neither Twitter or Facebook provide. I really don't need the "yay, you go!" encouragement those sites provide to get me motivated to do things, and the sharing of too many details to mere acquaintances makes me uncomfortable: I don't feel like I owe them anything about how I live or work or think minute-to-minute.
So that's where I am, maybe it's where you are too. I do look forward to hearing more of your exploits and projects... and I do hope we get to meet someday as well.
no subject
For me, it started a year ago, when I went back home to my parent's house and spent three days cleaning up my 12 boxes of stuff in the garage (not counting the stuff in the attic!). I found a huge stash of little projects: an attempt in 3rd grade to collect samples of every element, a project in high school to make a music generator out of some new IC chip, a drafting project for My Ultimate Dream House (1981), designs for flexagons and polyhedra, designs for new exciting freeway interchanges, old Commodore C128 code to render 3-D ray tracing, a hand written notebook listing the characteristics of every Star Trek planet, a small breadboarded calculator that didn't even do decimal math. Just random geeky project that no one cared about--but I was just enjoying myself, and not interested in their approval or even if they cared.
These projects were very solitary endeavors, and while I thought I'd throw away a lot during my clean up days last year, I didn't. The exercise was both melancholy and nostalgic, and I came away with a feeling that I'm not all that good in the give-and-take of social obligations, and I'd be happier just doing projects on my own. I was alone in high school, but I wasn't lonely, and really enjoyed the long nights working in my room on some little project or another.
So, yes, since April 2008 I've decided to focus on doing more interesting stuff than putting it out there. I signed up for Facebook, but don't really use it. Twitter is... whatever; I don't use it much and update it two or three times a week. I have been doing quite a bit of pictures ('photography' sounds pretentious), and using Flickr a lot more. But that's about it.
And yeah, I think LiveJournal suits my style just fine. I can ramble on as I see fit (as you do, hah, that's a compliment!) and enjoy the detached yet focused back-and-forth that neither Twitter or Facebook provide. I really don't need the "yay, you go!" encouragement those sites provide to get me motivated to do things, and the sharing of too many details to mere acquaintances makes me uncomfortable: I don't feel like I owe them anything about how I live or work or think minute-to-minute.
So that's where I am, maybe it's where you are too. I do look forward to hearing more of your exploits and projects... and I do hope we get to meet someday as well.