Don't Tell Her I Said So

Willa the calico is having an attack of the high spirits known in our apartment as the Skirballs. (This is the name of a performing arts center in Los Angeles, but for some reason suggests not so much culture as frantic cat hijinks.)

She has already ripped around the apartment a half dozen times, always going at such a clip that she's almost horizontal when she corners, the centrifugal force pulling her over as she goes. She's also jumped six inches at the sound of a New Yorker page being turned and leapt sidewise from a crouch into a full on run for the food bowl.

Speaking of the New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote a piece this week about diaries, which presents, as always, the temptation of spilling my guts via blog. So far, I've only gotten as far as being brutally honest about my cat's borderline psychosis.

You stumble upon blogs that allude to circumstances -- and you might even be able to guess those circumstances if you know the writer a little. But that's not the same thing as spelling out the gory details.

(I happened upon the blog of an ex-boyfriend once and discovered that he'd had an especially brutal break up in recent years. But he was so opaque about it, I have no way of knowing if I'm the heartless bint who effed him up or not. If so, I doubt my apology would do any good. If not, how egotistical of me to write him out of the blue with the assumption that I'd crushed him like a grape beneath my Dansko. Being me, I decided I probably was the heartless bint, and privately repented of my carelessness.)

There is a horrific scene in "Harriet the Spy," in which all her careful observations are laid bare when her classmates discover her notebook. I wonder what lesson other people took from that moment? Perhaps to keep one's notebooks carefully concealed from prying eyes? For me, I took it as an object lesson in never writing down things you don't want read by other people. And I've taken that lesson pretty seriously, although I did drink 'n diary in college, with predictably nightmarish results. (God, what would we do without shitty college roommates?)

In years past, I've searched the internet with a fine tooth comb for any and all accounts of aspiring television writers and their efforts to break in. The best of these -- a blog by a guy who landed an ABC/Disney Fellowship -- ended with the fellowship, then went behind a password-protected wall, and has now vanished from the face of the Web. There are enough aspiring writers out there that you would think at least one of them would have a tell-all blog.

But then I find myself not-quite-spelling-out where I intern, or who I interviewed with and for what job, and I see the real problem. It's not that I don't want other people to see what I'm up to, it's that I'm afraid to say it out loud, for fear it will all turn out to have been a lovely dream.