hyperlink overdrive

In the fall, I get to do this. I'll be taking on this concentration.


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It's all decided now. But here's what happened before: I learned how difficult it is to keep information quiet, even for unimportant people like me. Honestly? it creeped me out a bit.

I decided that I wasn't going to lie about it unless I had to. I'd try not to volunteer information. And that I'd tell my employer, officially, when I felt I needed to so that he wouldn't hear it from anyone but me. In all likelihood, I'd tell him early. But I didn't want it to be public knowledge until AFTER it was a certainty that I'd be going.

I didn't talk about my decision to go to grad school on social media. I asked questions, anonymously, on a message board. I talked to certain people over chats and email, and even phone. I told a few people face-to-face, some of whom I probably shouldn't have told. Alcohol may or may not have been involved. Hint: it was. Obviously, I told a good handful of people. I wasn't trying to keep a true secret. It was an attempt to balance an overwhelming need to blab it all out with the need to handle the decision professionally and rationally. And, at all costs, resist the urge to crowdsource my decision, once I had the two offers on the table.

In the end, I learned how quickly news travels through my mother. She told a friend, who told a friend, who happens to be the mother of my intern's boyfriend. Five days after getting my first acceptance, I walked into the office, and my intern said, "Congratulations!" I reacted with the kind of shock and surprise that actually made me take a step backwards, as if to get ready to escape.

Lesson learned: don't tell ANYONE something you need to keep even moderately under the radar. Not even your mother. But you'll probably tell her. And a few other people. So: be prepared for the inevitable, and get ready to deal with the consequences of a confessional culture.

Foucault was right! See here:

We have singularly become a confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday lives, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one's sins, one's thoughts and desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctors to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else. The things people write books about. (History of Sexuality)

So maybe the internet is more an enabler, not a catalyst, for this inability to keep secrets.