Onions

IC and I launched our Girly-VIP-Shopping-Email business last week. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.

And the vast majority of the items that we highlighted for purchase/consideration were hand selected by yours truly. The whole email business should be renamed: "Stuff C-Belle Covets."

I commented to CL the other day that if anyone should ever wonder what to get me as a present, they only have to go to our website.

So CL summed it up like this:

People can go to your business website to figure out what to buy for you. And if they want to figure out what you are thinking, they can go to your blog. So really, when you actually start dating someone again some day, you guys never have to actually TALK. Unless he wants to talk about himself, in which case, you wouldn't really be paying attention anyway. So you guys can just have sex all the time.

I blinked a few times at the last part of that. He's quite the joker, that CL.

But it got me thinking about a topic I've thought and written about before. Can someone really figure out another by reading their blog?

The answer is a resounding "no." At least in the case of my blog.

My blog is highly misleading. I write about numerous topics that appear personal. But my treatment of those topics is necessarily superficial and overly simplified - there's just not that much real estate in a typical, bite-sized post.

My thoughts/hopes/fears/dreams that are truly vulnerable and hence, secret, are recorded not on my blog, but in my little black moleskine journal that never strays too far from my side. And for every blog entry, there are multiple entries in my private journal.

But CL is still essentially correct. ONLY my moleskine is privy to the layers of the onion that have not been polished and prettified for public consumption.

I suppose this is one of the reasons my gay boyfriend, Gorgeous Hunk O' Man (JF), and I get along so well. We know that there's all manner of vulnerability hidden away under our respective glossy surfaces. So we treat those glossy surfaces with care, and we don't make the mistake of thinking that the hardness extends all the way down. And we never ask each other for access to the mushy soft bits. Not out of indifference. Rather, out of protectiveness for the other.

It sounds like the opposite of intimacy. I have this particular dynamic only with him - where intimacy is expressed by... well... avoidance. And it's because we actually DO know each other - at least well enough to recognize ourselves in the other.

Because sometimes kindness and affection are demonstrated not by peeling the layers back, but by mutual admiration for and gentle treatment of what has been carefully buffed, and a complicit agreement to ignore the rest.