I rarely blog about work or my home town. I don't talk about work because everything I work on is covered by Non-Disclosure Agreements and usually involves a Fortune 500 company. And the rest of this post is why I rarely blog about my home town.

I grew up in a rural Oklahoma farm town. Let me illustrate how small. First, the town's official population is just under 300. Second, I went to a consolidated school and still only graduated with about 26 other people. For those of you not familiar with a consolidated school, it is when two or more towns combine school systems. It is the school system equivalent of hooking up a bunch of robots to form Voltron. Until we consolidated in my 5th grade year, there were only two boys - counting me - in the class.

A vast majority of the people who blog on sites like Xanga are spoiled because they come from large cities, and that grants them a certain type of anonymity. What they write is not easily associated with them, and so it is easier to maintain anonymity or at least a low profile. Odds are if you're from a large city and you blog you could post anything you wanted and it will never be associated with you in real life. And it is easier to hide your actions, because you most likely belong to many different communities that either partially overlap or do not overlap. (By community I mean any group you're part of).

But if you come from a small town your different communities overlap and often they completely overlap and consist of the same people but in a different setting. For example, the people I went to Church with are the people I went to school with, the people I went to school with are the people I worked with, and so on.

Let's suppose I posted a story about someone from my home town - not necessarily a bad story or a good story, but just a story. I guarantee that person would know within 24 hours *. In my town we all know each other, and word spreads fast. Potentially for the rest of my life any time I returned home people might associate me with that story or even or information. And when you're from a small town, you don't want to alienate yourself, because unlike a large city, there isn't always a new place to fit in.

Not only that, I want to respect the people who still live there. If I said something that offended a perosn or family, it might affect how people interact with my family. Imagine how terrible it would be if my parents were treated differently because of something I said on my blog. And this isn't an impossible scenario in a small town.

(By the way, don't discount word spreading fast as a bad thing. Good news spreads as fast as gossip. And being part of such tightly overlapping communities, information spreading can't be helped. It isn't out of malice. It is simply how small town life works.)

I am not saying I have bad things to say about my town or the people. Quite the contrary. Rather, it means no matter the story I have to be careful even if I find the story harmless. A story I tell about Oklahoma will not affect me in San Francisco. But it might affect someone who still lives in Oklahoma.

* = And if you don't believe me, a few months ago I posted a story about grade school. The other person the story was about found out (not that I had attempted to hide the story) and took time to send me a fairly hard-toned e-mail. I meant nothing by the story, other than it is funny how much we change as we grow up. In the end we both realized neither of us meant any harm, and it all ended cordially. That incident was a silly story about grade school. It happened when I was maybe ten. What if I'd told a story that mattered?

As a surprise, yesterday I took Laura to Terra Mia where we spent the afternoon decorating pottery. She decorated a butter dish, and I decorated a rimmed dinner plate. I felt a bit uninspired and defaulted to my UFO and robots motif. I decorated the bottom of the plate like the bottom of a UFO and the top as a robot.



The colors will be much more rich after firing. I'll be sure to post another picture. And that is obviously an old-school ray gun, not a hair dryer, that he is wielding. There is nothing scary about a hair dryer toting robot. I've encountered a few, and they didn't even cause a chill to run down my spine. If you want street cred equip your robots ray guns.

I've learned a new trick.


Yes, I do need a haircut.

After finishing our pottery, we headed to the Purple Onion for the CD recording of Hasan Minhaj's comedy album. The Purple Onion is the same venue Zach Galifnakis recorded his incredibly hysterical DVD. I liked Hasan's material, but there are styles I prefer more, and I never quite warmed up to his stage presence. The album comes out in January. And I recommend you purchase it for two tracks:

• The one where I sneezed
• The one where I yelled out "Oklahoma!"

On a final note, I hate how slow oil paintings dry. I painted 5 master pieces a week ago, and none of them have finished drying yet. And damn it, I'm ready to post about them. I'm off to either slay some badass creatures in Warcraft or to pick up my government check in Call of Duty: Modern Welfare in which I'm a level 15 dead-beat dad, with 4 children by 3 mothers, a beat up Geo Metro, a part-time job at Wal-Mart, and have a Bangles football tattoo. I'm hoping that today I can unlock diabetes and a rascal scooter.