It’s funny. I created my personal Web page, and then this blog, knowing that people might come to it and read all about me. I haven’t put anything on the site that I don’t want people to be able to get to – nor have I said anything about myself that I want to remain private. (To have put something up that I didn’t want to become public would be self-contradictory.)

Just the other day, however, I mentioned “dante.com” to a colleague of mine at work. (Hi, Rod!) Later that day, he came over to my cubicle and starting chatting with me about the stories I’d written, the DVDs I have in my collection, and so on.

I was slightly taken aback. I wasn’t offended in any way, and I certainly didn’t mind that he’d discovered that information. (As I already said, if I didn’t want people getting to it I wouldn’t have put it on my site in the first place.) Rather, I’d simply never had it happen to me before. I suspect it’s the same sort of reaction that budding celebrities (Not that I put myself in that category!) experience the first time that they’re stopped in public and told by somebody about that person’s opinion of their work. It probably just takes some getting used to. It also probably says something that, after all of these years of designing and editing my site, this was only the first time I’d ever found myself in such a situation.

(In the past, I did have somebody send me an email out of the blue about one of the essays I’d written in University, and published in my Philosophy section, and that they’d read there – but that seemed different somehow. Although, I suppose, no less novel in its own way.)