changes

Essentially, I now live in Beijing. Well, I "live" in Beijing. I am here temporarily, for 5 months, as an intern with an international agency. I go back to Boston in 5 months.

I also rejuvenated my public blog. However, the me posting 3 years ago was a very different person and tended to overshare on the internet. So, before relaunching that site, I had to ensure that the more sensitive posts were no longer readable. That however turned into a bit of a fiasco because I was previously unaware of this internet project called Internet Archive, which aims to archive every single site on the internet.

The fiasco involved an older male friend who was already starting to get creepy. Rather haphazardly, I discovered that he was reading my public blog, but not through the normal blog address, but rather through the archives at Internet Archive. All of the more sensitive posts, despite being no longer visible on my blog, were still in the internet archives because they were at one time, all public. Blame it on stupid youthful ignorance and naivete.

I know it's my own fault for being immature and attention-needy a few years back and posting more private thoughts with my real name, and in all honestly there wasn't anything particularly juicy in there anyway, but I still felt stalked, betrayed, and violated by this let-me-emphasize-again-already-getting-creepy older male friend. Yet I was completely and utterly helpless. I came home that night and collapsed on the couch next to Broadway in tears.

Broadway wiped away the tears and helped me set up a robots.txt file for the public blog so that the archive robots won't crawl my site anymore, and he also helped me request that Internet Archive restrict access to the material that was already archived from the site. But it was done maybe a day too late, as I could tell from my site trackers that the friend had already crawled through 90% of the back posts. He read them one by one, clicking the "Previous Post" button, all the way back to the very first post. I just can't get over the fact that he purposefully read the blog through the Internet Archives server knowing that he would find hidden posts no longer visible on the actual site. That's manipulatively creepy, and even now, more than a month later, I get so angry thinking about it. Obviously, that "friendship" will never be the same.

Given the existence of the public blog, and my restarting to post there especially while I am in China, I debated whether or not to still keep this one. I write here so infrequently already, even when I didn't have a second blog. I felt that it would be a lost cause for sure to try to keep two blogs going. But then the last couple of days, I thought of some interesting things that would only be appropriate for a private blog. So why not, I'll keep both and see how things go.

Along those lines, I'm also considering forgoing anonymity and sharing the public blog with readers of this blog. I want to share about Beijing. I definitely won't post any links here--that just seems like a bad idea, but I am still thinking of turning this into a private blog with restricted readership. I'm particularly paranoid now after the creepy stalker friend incident. The worst would be for someone somewhere to stalk and establish a connection back to here from my public profile.

Anyway, so potentially some changes here in the near future.

really mature

The Doctor who I avoid at all costs de-friended me on Facebook. WTF? I want to say it's no big deal, and it isn't a big deal, but I'm kinda offended. I wouldn't defriend him, and I'm more upset than anything that I can't facebook stalk him anymore (that's how mature I am, I know).

I was supposed to go to this Halloween party on Saturday (and Broadway was planning to come with me), but by the time I got home from lab around 11:30pm, I just wanted to veg out on the couch. I felt kinda bad because I told my friend (party host) that I would go, but I knew he would understand.

Many other friends went to the party, and one in particular posted some facebook pictures from her camera, and one is of her and the Doctor. Then I was glad that I didn't go to the party, especially with Broadway in tow. I can't imagine that being a good situation for anyone given all the history.

Then I was curious as to what the Doctor has been up to recently and went to his facebook page. Imagine my surprise when it showed that we were no longer friends. I had actually just looked at some recent pictures of his maybe a couple of months ago, so I know his defriending me is relatively recent. In that time period, I also changed my relationship status to being engaged. I wonder if that had anything to do with his defriending me.

That relationship was indeed rather fucked up, and I'm sure he feels as strongly as I do about not wanting to talk to or see the other person. But the defriending feels to me like a bit of a "fuck you," and I'm offended.

It is what it is. Whatever.