On starting a blog ...

I have been online for more than 25 years, and while it has never been a goal of mine to be "published" and highly visible, I have also never seen any reason to hide my identity. It has always been important to me that I am one person, and I do not make any effort to project a different persona to different audiences. As the Internet has grown, things I have written have been readily visible to anyone who might be interested in them, and some things that I put up on my personal website because they were interesting to me, and I wanted to make the fruit of my personal research in that area available to others, have become often-cited references on their topic.
But as the Internet has become "mainstream", I am also finding that if I want to remain open about things that are significant to me, I am beginning to see a need to establish some privacy shields. It is not appropriate to have customers of my business mingling in my personal and family affairs, however "clean" they are, and however proud I am of most aspects of my personal life. So I am separating different circles of social contacts: My professional circle is on LinkedIn.com, while my close friends and my relatives are invited become "friends" on FaceBook.com (in several groups invited to share slightly different items). So when I decidedto try a period of blogging about my new life of dating after the end of a 22-year marriage, I decided that it would be most appropriate to do this in a way where it does not automatically get linked to my professional identity. If my close friends stumble upon it, they will obviously recognize me, but with any luck, it will not show up every time someone googles my name.

I am hoping this blog will allow me to interact with other people in similar circumstances, hopefully allowing us to wring some humor out of our hurts, to share some helpful hints, and reflect on what often seems as an insanity of social conventions.