I was watching "In Treatment" and I had a breakthrough. Not to be flip. No, really, I did. I was thinking about why I enjoy writing these e-mails. I was surprised to realize that part of it is that I don't want everyone to see these. I like this feeling that I'm writing to friends.
A blog does not feel intimate. It feels exposed.
This feels intimate.
A blog feels like a billboard, like standing on a street corner with a sign.
Why is that? the therapist might ask.
Open Salon is part of Salon. So I can't escape my persona. I am still being that Cary person who is an employee and an advice columnist by trade.
"By trade," I said to Joshua Cohen last week at the SFJCC bookfest when I approached him to praise him for his book Witz, and for his spirited reading from it that afternoon, I said, "I am a writer by trade." I wonder why I do that. "By trade?" Is it to say that I consider myself to be a working person rather than an elite? Was it to say at once that I am not coming to him as a novelist or a wannabe novelist, nor as a wannabe writer, but as a worker among workers?
If I post on Open Salon it is a little like still being at the office. Like I still have my tie on.
I don't wear a tie to work anymore and I never wore a tie to work at Salon so it's been 10 years since I wore a tie to work but I used to like wearing a tie to work because when you had your tie on you knew you were at work and when you took your tie off that meant you were done.
I miss "being at work." I miss putting on a tie and leaving the house and going in to work.
But I do not go into work because it is a 45-minute Muni ride and I like the windows open and the windows do not open at Salon. I have friends there. I like the people at Salon. We have history. We understand each other. We've been through a lot together.
That's how it is with this e-mail: I feel, because you have consented to receive these, I feel like I know who is reading this. I feel like I am writing to friends.
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 also i'm thinking about advertising
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yes, I realized that I not only knew nothing about advertising but what I did think I knew was not only wrong but counterproductive, and I would have been better off not doing any "advertising" rather than doing the kind of "advertising" that I apparently was doing. So now I have this idea for an ad campaign based around the statement "All our ads are terrible."
especially this one.
And talk about how terrible our ads are. which opens the possibility of talking about the whole notion of advertising.
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