Dear Diary

I was talking to a good friend the other day, the kind of person who's highly educated and involved with pretty serious literary endeavors -- the kind of person who I figured would hate confessional blogs. Turns out, though, that that's the only kind she likes. "I like blogs that are diaries," she said.

It got me wondering about this here enterprise, which I like to think has developed a voice of its own, but which voice is a bit constructed and certainly not diaristic. Partly this is because I'm not anonymous. Presumably, my bosses check in on this blog from time to time, and my family does, and ... well, I've had many, many visitors since I started monitoring traffic, but I think the largest percentage of those are people who Google a phrase -- say, "New York's dirty little secret," which landed someone here today -- and spend "0 seconds" looking around.

I do think that if I moved somewhere else -- just off the top of my head, Austin or Saratoga -- I would feel more free to write about the minutiae of my inner (and outer) life as I made the transition to a new place. I'm not sure why, but I've resisted truly personal material. This might be fair warning that more such posts are going to start appearing. It might just be me rambling. Hard to say.