Dr. B has a couple of good posts about blogging, anonymity, employee-employer relationships, and more. Whenever I mention to people that someone got fired for blogging, they almost always say, well, they deserved it for being so stupid. And, like Dr. B and many of her commenters, I think more needs to be done to examine the responsibility of the employer in such situations. There are endless accounts of bloggers being fired for what seem like small offenses. There’s even a Technorati tag for it. And there are advice articles. Most of these articles advise you to suck all the life out of blogging. “Be safe,” they say.

I have to say that I think most employers fear bloggers and blogging. Otherwise they wouldn’t be firing and/or suing employees for doing so. There is a power in blogging that most people don’t have at work. In your blog, you can say that comeback that you wish you could say. You can speculate about why co-workers said certain things. Or you can simply report the goings on at work because they’re interesting or funny or pathetic. How often have you been in a meeting and wished you could just say, “This is the dumbest meeting I’ve ever been in. There’s no agenda and we’ll never make a decision because so-and-so won’t let go of X project because he’s a power-monger.” Social convention makes you sit there and keep your mouth shut. But you can write about it on your blog and it makes you feel better.

What are employers afraid of? Are they afraid they’ll be embarrassed? Have their secrets revealed? Afraid they’ll look stupid and some client will dump them because they read something bad about them on a blog? Afraid an employee will reveal their unethical behavior? Afraid they’ll lose their position of power, which is really held only because of social convention?

Frankly, I’m a proponenet of more openness, more honesty, which is what bugs me about the Bush administration. Blogging begins to shed some light on what was once hidden. Bosses are afraid of this. It’s like the secretive family not wanting people to know they do strange things in private. I’m all for privacy except when it comes to the employer/employee relationship and business policies and practices. I think employees should know their rights. I think employees should know what’s going on in a company. If employees feel that their superiors are being honest with them, then there’s no need for them to speculate on their blogs.

I see a lot of fear of blogging and other kinds of open content like wikis among journalists, employers and educators*. They’re losing control of the message. I would like to see those in power think, not of controlling, but of partnering with their employees of letting their employees expose problems and propose solutions–perhaps via their personal blogs.

Like the nanny story Dr. B related, I think too many employers not only want to control the message, but want to control the very identity of their employees. They want to prevent them from having any individuality. They project their hopes onto them or a packaged image.

I think we can’t be squelched by all these stories. We have to keep scrutinizing these situations and start to turn the spotlight, not on the bloggers who were fired, but the employers who fired them.

A tangent, of sorts. Want to read some interesting employee blogs? Read some by people who work at Walmart.

*I have more to say on educators’ fear of blogging later.

To whomever made coffee at work this morning: you are a saint. Unfortunately, had to settle for fat-free non-dairy creamer.

Last night, the electricity went out. I had drifted off to sleep when all of a sudden, I heard screaming and loud beeping. The kids had not yet drifted off to sleep and started screaming bloody murder when the lights went out. Mr. Geeky’s back-up electricity for his computer started beeping to let us know that the electricity went out. As if we didn’t know. The kids piled in bed with me and I spent the night fighting for the covers and avoiding elbows, knees and feet. As I said, the person who made the coffee is a saint.

Writing is hard. (You must say this with the same intonation as “Math is hard.”) While tossing and turning last night, I was revising what I’d written yesterday, thinking of new ways to frame things, more details to put in. The hardest thing about writing memoir is creating a good story arc. Some events in my life lend themselves well to this; others, not so much. I’m looking forward to sitting down at the computer tonight.

I am counting down the days to vacation. I leave on Friday. This is the latest I’ve ever gone on vacation. Usually I go the last week of June/first week of July, about the halfway point of the summer (by our academic calendar). When I return, things will be beginning to gear up for the school year. I’m going to try not to think about that for now. I have a light schedule this week and I’m not planning to tackle any big projects. I might go over to the library and do some reading.

I have printed out 25 pages. I will revise it. When I’m done, it should be longer.

Simple strategy.

Very good article by Frank Rich this morning. Go read it.

In (hopefully) sequential order:

blog
write
go to grocery store
eat
revise
laundry (which can happen concurrently with other activities)
more writing–need to get away from it! tomorrow.

Yeah, I know these two people don’t seem related, but you never know. Last night, Geeky Boy and I went to the requisite Harry Potter festivities at the bookstore. Last time we did this, we ran into an old schoolmate of his, whom he proceeded to run around with the whole time while I sat with her mother and drank coffee. This time, there was no one he knew. It was actually nice because we got to spend some time together just the two of us. We browsed for other books, looked at games, worked a crossword puzzle, ate snacks. Geeky Boy had a great time watching the magician. He knew how all the tricks were done because Mr. Geeky used to do magic shows and he’s showed him all the tricks. But he thought he was funny anyway. And he got to pet a bird and a rabbit.

I bought a couple of memoirs as a way to get some ideas for putting together my own and I realized I am at a huge disadvantage since I wasn’t abused, didn’t have an affair with my father, or have a drinking or drug problem. Also, I’m not gay (a trait that often accompanies one of the previous situations or causes them), or famous. So you know, I may have to be a little creative.

At midnight (actually 12:30-ish), we queued up for our book. We’d collected a few other purchases while standing around and waiting (being sucked into the corporate marketing). So we bought everything and headed home.

On the way home, Geeky Boy announced that he thought Valerie Plame had revealed herself to some people at the White House in order to discredit Karl Rove and hopefully get him fired. What I said about him not understanding the inner workings of politics? By George, I think he’s got it!

Regular readers might remember that I’m leafing through my old journals. I found this entry from sometime in August, 1988.

Songs that Might Make You Cry
If I Laugh–Cat Stevens
Alison–Elvis Costello
Message in a Bottle–Police
All My Love–Led Zeppelin
She’s Always a Woman–Billy Joel
No one is watching you now–’Til Tuesday
With or Without You–U2
Just You n Me–Chicago
Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Love Me–The Smiths
Ship of Fools–Robert Plant
MLK–U2
Coming up Close–’Til Tuesday

I don’t know if I wrote these down to remind myself not to play them or what. Some of them I didn’t even own–like Chicago. Underneath this list is the following:

Stuff You Wouldn’t Listen to Unless Forced
Stuff I think You’d Like

But there’s not anything listed. Why did I make this list? Odd.

random10, fridayshuffle

This evening after dinner, Geeky Boy suddenly launched into a discussion about the whole Karl Rove/Valerie Plame affair. I’d reproduce it, Bitch, Ph.D.-style, but it was way too complicated. At first, GB didn’t quite get how Karl Rove was in trouble; he didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. Then I explained how leaking a CIA agent’s name to the public was illegal and I explained the basic history of the story. Then he said, “Why isn’t Bob Novak in jail? How is it that a woman who didn’t publish anything is in jail, but Bob Novak isn’t?” A good question. I explained a little of Scrivener’s theory. That kind of confused him and he ended up thinking that they should all be punished.

Do you know how hard it is to explain to a 10-year-old the inner workings of politics?

I love my family, but honestly, I think I could have lived alone. When I was a senior in college, I lived in an apartment by myself, largely thanks to my boyfriend dumping me, but still I think it was the best thing that could have happened to me. It’s sort of ironic because I really, really like people. I love being around people at work, for instance. But I like retreating from them and being isolated for a while.

I may be romanticizing this whole idea since obviously, I haven’t a clue what it’s like to be alone at my age. I mean 22 is one thing, but 37 is quite another. My sister-in-law lives by herself, but she has friends, goes out with men from time to time and seems, for the most part, quite happy. There’s so much pressure on women to find a mate and early. Or at least there was for my generation. It’s so obvious in my journals that I was desperately afraid of being alone, of not having friends, of not having boyfriends. If only I could have accepted that it’s okay to be on my own. I suppose that’s asking a lot of a preteen/teenager.

Yes, I know there are studies that show that people are happier and live longer if they are married and have friends, but have they ever looked at whether there aren’t some people who live alone and are perfectly content? There’s rarely a tv show, book, or movie that shows a character living by themselves quite happily. They’re always depicted as quirky, odd, slightly sad. And I think that’s too bad.

I don’t know if you’ve notice the page count going down over there, but it is. Writing is going. There will be no revising until the weekend. I only look back a sentence or two to pick up the story. There is no editing.

I turn this piece in to my writer’s group on Sept. 11. That’s a big motivation. I’d like to have a big chunk of it done by then. I’ve basically been writing every spare moment, blocking out stuff with the headphones. Knowing my own work habits, which are sporadic–a spurt of activity followed by a period of non-activity–I’m taking advantage of the motivation.

I’ll be interested to see how the revising goes this weekend.