So my cranberry fruit cup bread totally rocks with strawberry jam.

The Departure Lounge song "Christmas Downer" has been playing in my head for days now, and I think it's my new Christmas theme song. It appears that I've had one of my seasonal changes of heart. Who knows why?

I guess I'm usually in a good mood after Creative Nonfiction, unless I'm completely ashamed of my essay. This week's was rushed, but not bad.

Sad to think that I'll probably never see most of the creative nonfiction people again, and strange — the reality of a short stay on a large campus. I've been in a lot of workshops, and this was a good group.

Since Prof. McNulty basically introduced me to the class as "the blogger" (a situation I put myself in, I realize) and asked for my web address, I'm much too paranoid to give more detailed impressions here. One of the essays this term was about how creepy it is to find out someone has been blogging about you behind your back, for god's sake. I'll stick to meatspace gossip for the time being. Not that I have anything negative to say about anyone, no of course not.

Meatspace. I saw that term in Cryptonomicon and thought it was ridiculous, then Prof. Weiner uses it once and suddenly I think it's really useful. I can't think of the last time I picked up a word or phrase from a teacher.

I do have my own thoughts on the whole "blogging behind their back" thing, since obviously I do that quite often right here.

Many of the people I've written about have eventually discovered the blog somehow. Not by design, assuredly. It's not like I'm putting up Ourboldhero.com posters anywhere. Graham. At Lawrence I think it was Ann of Stillwater who outed me as a blogger, in Germany it was the Suburbanite. Here I got lazy and a Google search was enough, but I hadn't written much about my classmates yet. In none of these cases did people seem creeped out.

Though I suppose they wouldn't tell me if they were. I remember hearing that a few of them searched the archive for references to themselves. Some pestered me for enough info to turn this into a bad gossip column.

I guess I don't see the problem. The creepy part couldn't simply be having opinions about another peron — it has to be the public aspect associated with blogging.

But unlike the blogger from that girl's story, I'm not using real names for the most part, and the only way to figure out who most of these people are would be recognizing their faces in some picture. And with the exception of Graham, this site's readers are split into several groups of people who've never met each other.

Employers can't really find anything here: I blogged about the Politician for four years but while you can start with the Politician and figure out who he is, it's much more difficult to start with his real name and get to the Politician.

Maybe this is the blogger in me talking, but it is really public if you're just a silly name, if no one has any idea or even interest in who you are?