With an Accent from Holland

The Ethics of Blogging

I know I haven’t written on this blog for a very long time, except for the few lines about Yolanda and our cache a couple of days ago. I really didn’t feel like writing anything.

It started when my mobile phone was stolen in the first week of March. I wanted to go home and write how it happened, but then I realized that everything that I write here will be ‘findable’ forever. I mean, this weblog is hosted on Blogspot and that is owned by Google nowadays. And we all know that Google saves everything. They link this info to my Gmail account and to all my search queries, which are quite a large number. So then I thought, okay, I can write about this mistake I made (because it was my own fault) but any new employer or whoever will be able to read that I made this mistake. It just set me thinking about the ethics of this blog. How much do I want to share with you? How much have I already shared? I mean, I love to write here and it’s like a diary for me too. I just had to consider these things for a while.

But I’m here now and I will share with you as much as possible. In the meantime, I have bought a new phone and a new mp4 player. I had to buy a new music player, because my old 20 GB hard disk player crashed and died. I bought a Sandisk Sansa E250, 2 GB with a micro SD slot. I really didn’t want another hard disk player anymore. Too many moveable parts which can break, like my old one did. The great advantage of this player is that it can also play movies. The screen is very small of course, only 1.8 inch, but it’s still cool that it’s available. I just ripped three episodes of Charmed and I can watch them on my player.

Yesterday and today I had some rough times in the ‘dealing with my father’s death business’. I had to call to the crematorium to make an appointment to distribute the ashes and there was one sentence which made me cry (only after the call, but still).

I said: “Hello, my name is Charda and I’m calling you about the distribution of my father’s ashes.” It was so strange to have my name and my fathers name in one sentence together with the words ‘distribution of ashes’. It sounded too impossible. The last couple of weeks the death of my father seemed very unreal to me. I mean, of course I know it happened and I have proof of it everywhere, but it felt unreal and I kind of liked that. Unreal is a better feeling than the pain of knowing it is over. When something is unreal, you can wake up and realize it didn’t happen, that it wasn’t true. That just doesn’t work with the truth.

And then some good news: Martijn and I have been together for 3 years this week. We are living together for almost 2 years now. We went out for dinner last night at a Thai restaurant. That was fun, although I didn’t really like the food I had ordered. I just stole some from Martijn. And the desert was really good.

And our travelbug which we sent into the world last Sunday has started its journey! Someone picked him up yesterday and I hope he will set him into a next cache real soon. I’m really glad he’s moving now.

I’ll try to update more regularly from now on. I can’t promise anything though…

posted by Charda @ 28.3.07