Why yes, I do have a blog.

After posting a few Facebook wall posts and putting up a Youtube video in my earlier, frivolously careless days, I've come to realize that things posted to the Internet are really, forever lost and exposed. The comments you make on a OMG! picture. The websites you delete off your history feed. The gchats, the uploaded pictures, etc. All roam free in this very public domain.

I've not had anything bite me in the butt yet. But I'm paranoid.

After restricting my Facebook privacy stats to Alcatraz standards, I proceeded to try to delete my Gaia account (which, to the chagrin of my awful, lazier side, will take longer than the click of a button).

And that's where I stopped to think. Registration is often mandatory to access the better portions of websites, and I've done it so many times now that I'm sure that anyone with access to these registrations could compile a tidy summary of my "private" exploits. It doesn't matter that I've not always entered the correct zip code or last name: my email ties me to all of them.

So unless I have a sudden change of heart and go "Into the Wild", I'm linked forever to my very public Internet life. The ubiquity of this scares me, but empowers me as well. Because where better to promote whatever image you want to promote than the Internet? On this massive web of liens and links, a con artist can become a deviantARTISTE, a graying senator can become an Argentinian hunk of love, a bird enthusiast can become an Anglophilic-rapper...and a girl can become a blogger. How riche.