On Living Your Life

There are a lot of articles online that suggest you delete any evidence of having a good time or living your life from all of your social network pages. “If an employer sees a picture of you drunk at a bar, they will fire you!” these articles seem to suggest. “If you mention a hedonistic allowance, if you blog that your favorite movie is Blazing Saddles, if you use a swear on Twitter, kiss your job goodbye.” I reject this sphere of thought.

The Internet blends our personal lives, our professional lives, and our idealistic lives. This is definitely a good thing, but it means that everyone is your audience. On the internet, unlike talking face to face, you can’t have a distinct work persona, bar persona, and family persona. But it doesn’t mean you should pretend to be a flawless, one dimensional person online.

Please, do not read this as a rant against professional responsibility. I understand there is a time to be interesting and a time to be professional. The best of us can exist in the happy grey area between the two most of the time. I try to.

Instead, read this as a suggestion that we all have personal lives, and to sanitize the Internet of our personalities for the sake of seeming flawless to potential clients or employers is ridiculous. If an employer does not want to hire me because I have interesting, honest content on my social network pages, I can conclude one of two things:

1) The hiring manager is holding me to a very harsh double standard

2) The hiring manager is a very boring person

In both cases, I say: who needs ‘em? I want to work with fun people who appreciate personality and a sense of humor.

So I humbly bare to you my presence across the Internet: my website, my Twitter, my Facebook… hell, even my rarely-used MySpace. I have nothing to hide. I embrace my love for Blazing Saddles and Scotch. I (reluctantly) share with you the (mostly unflattering) pictures of me on Facebook. I want you to know that I--like you--am a complex, interesting human being.

My Taste in DVDs Part 2

A few days ago, I noted that my DVD collection tends to favor a specific genre. In that post I included a photo of my movies that were not either comedy or science fiction. It's a stack of about 20 DVDs. So, in that context, here are my science fiction DVDs:


That's over three feet of DVDs. And yes, you notice correctly: the complete Twilight Zone (five seasons) and the complete Star Trek: The Next Generation (seven seasons) are making the stack pretty tall. They are also making the stack quite awesome.

But that's not even the best part. I went ahead and stacked all my comedy DVDs. The stack is so tall that I could not stack them without help from Lovely Assistant Emily:


I took these photos a few days ago when I was pretty drunk. That means most of these stacks were toppled in a depressing/hilarious drunken way.

File this one under "stacks provide unique insights."

Here's a tip

I'm very happy to share some advice with you:

Don't drink and blog. If you drink three glasses (not sips, glasses) of scotch and then get an idea for a blog, you'll end up writing 1000 words asking the internet for a date. You will not come off as cool.

That is all.