Embargo

In the librarian world, there is a concept that academic journals use when they publish their content in an online library database. They will often have a one-year or six-month "embargo," which means you can't get the full-text of their articles online for six months to a year after they publish it in their print edition.

So for example, if you subscribe to the New Zealand Journal of Squid Eyeball Research, you can read the articles as soon as you get a paper copy of it delivered to your office (supposedly a disgusting office that smells of squid), but if you tried to look up the articles in a library database, you would only get the abstract and would have to wait six months to read the whole article. They do this to encourage people (ie. squid eyeball researchers) to subscribe to the print journal.

I have decided use this concept to introduce K to Snarkbutt Divorced. I'm sending her posts that are more than six months old. This seems to be a good compromise. I still get to show off the blog to her, she still gets to read my stuff, and I can continue to write without feeling like she's looking in. After all, what I write today won't be seen by her for six months, and by then, I will have moved on to completely new issues. It doesn't bother me for her to know what I was dealing with six months ago. That's old news.

The first post I sent her was the very first one in which I mentioned her. It was about night lights and feeling lonely, and during my meandering thoughts I made a passing reference to this obscure acquaintance:

I recently "friended" someone I knew from grad school on Facebook. (She's actually someone I went out with a few times, but she wasn't interested in me "in that way.") She's single, and according to her Facebook updates, she leads a fabulous single life. She's always going out of town to some music festival or camping trip, or doing activities like contra dancing and cooking class, and inviting friends over for dinner. Maybe she's not as happy and fulfilled as she presents herself on Facebook, but I envy her life. I envy how she seems to make being single work for her.

I ended the post with my fear that winter was coming and I was expecting it to be rough on my mental state:

I think I'm going to need more than just a night light.

When I sent that post to K, she responded with an email with the subject line, "More Than a Night Light." It's amazing to look back at that moment and see how the solution to the "night light" problem was buried earlier in the blog, in passing, about my FB friend with the fabulous single life. I never ever imagined when I wrote that how those two things would fit together!

So K is excited to be getting daily installments of my blog from last year. She said she likes reading my life as as story. And it will be fun to show her how I was feeling about her as we first became friends, and then more. Some of it may be embarrassing, but she already knows me pretty well. I don't think any of this will shock her.