Perpetual Smile

I am not doing too well.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in a fog, kind of just moving through the days. I’ve been a little better today but I can’t shake the feeling that this is only the eye of the storm.

In high school, the best parts of my days in shop (I went to a technical high school and spent my four years in Culinary Arts) were the mornings and afternoons. First thing in the morning, I would come in and fill a little bowl with chocolate chip cookie dough as it was being made by Chef I. He got so used to me snitching cookie dough that at one point he started having a bowl ready for me. (And then Chef Z and later Chef M tried to shut me down, but that’s another post for another day.)

After a day of cooking, we would eat together. If you worked on Faculty Range, in Bake Shop, or in the Dining Room, you got to eat the good stuff (as opposed to being on Cafeteria side, where you made lunch for the whole student body). My favorite thing to eat for lunch was a few slices of bread with butter and a big bowl of sauce. (And to think I stayed a size 3-5 throughout my high school career!)

I haven’t had homemade bread since.

This afternoon, while wandering around on Lifehacker at work, I found a post on making fresh-baked bread quickly and easily. I scribbled down the recipe — 6 cups of water, 3 tablespoons of salt, 3 tablespoons of yeast, and 13 cups of flour — on a Post-It and stuck it in my purse.

As soon as I got home, I set to it.

I split the recipe in half, since the Lifehacker post is for a one- to two-week supply of bread that you ideally bake a loaf every day. I dissolved 1 1/2 tbsp of yeast and 1 1/2 tbsp of salt in 3 cups of hot water (I remembered from Culinary that the hot water makes the difference).

Then I stirred in 6 1/2 cups of flour.

After the dough started to come together, I stripped off my rings and kneaded the dough with my hands. The scent of it was intoxicating.

When it reached the right consistency, I patted it into a neat little ball, scraped dough off of my fingers, and went to the sink to wash my hands. I didn’t get far before the urge to try some of the dough came over me. I pulled a little glob off of my left hand and popped it into my mouth. I knew instantly that I hadn’t fucked up the recipe; it had the perfect bread dough taste, with just the right amount of salt. I scraped as much dough off of my hands as I could and ate it before washing them, it was that good.

Then I put a towel over the bowl the way Noni always did when I watched her make dough and set it to rise.

If all goes well, I’ll have a nice hot slice of homemade bread with butter tomorrow morning before work with Noni, Popi, and Biz Noni. I might even put some grape jelly on it. My mouth just waters thinking about it, and my heart warms just a little bit.

That gaping hole is still there, but with little things like hot fresh bread and cards from my good friends online and off, it is a little less raw.

I’m still trying to figure out this whole keeping work and play separate on the internet thing. In real life, I don’t have to tell my coworkers anything. But online? They can Google me and every. little. thing. ever. pops up. Suddenly I’m self-conscious about every swear used on my blog and wondering if they think I’m crazy since I run a pen pal project for people with depression. I put myself on display, but when am I going to get bit in the ass about it?

Because it’s gonna happen. And I don’t know what I’ll do when it does.

So I’ve been ignoring the possibility that I could lose a client because of Twitter sarcasm about having a bad day, or that someone could stumble upon my blogs about depression and suicide and cutting and fire me dead because that’s shit that people just aren’t comfortable with. I know who I am. I’m a person who’s got a lot to say and doesn’t want to censor anything. I want to tell the truth about the things I experience, see, think, and feel because if I don’t, who the hell else is going to? I want to talk straight up about my past and muse about my future. I know I have a hell of a lot of potential, and I know what I want to do with my life. But the what ifs of being this OUT THERE and HONEST are terrifying.

The people who know me love me because they know me. The people who don’t already know me and may want to hire me aren’t going to love me. They’re going to be looking for any reason not to hire me, because that’s what people do. Especially now that I’m getting my teaching certificate. What if my hypothetical principal finds out I used to cut myself or that I used to starve myself, and decides I’m just not mentally stable enough to teach a bunch of kids? What if I lose a big website client with the company I’m partnered with because of something I’ve written about? I can’t blog and not be real. I’m not funny, so I can’t write up a riot about how to make corn. I’m not a mother, so I can’t write about little girls shoving handfuls of sugar into their mouths. There are a lot of things I’m not.

But I know that I can’t not blog. I know that I can’t blog only about work. I know that I can’t blog only about mundane, blah things that no one cares about. (Unless my blog is already mundane and blah. Then you should just let me know, so I can quit while I’m ahead.) I have a compulsive urge to write about everything that I know I shouldn’t write about. And I can’t figure out how to keep my professional life from colliding with my writing. I mean, let’s face it: I don’t hold much back, especially over at Scars Can Speak.

So tell me, all of you bloggers who do it anyway without worrying: what’s the secret? What’s the trick? What do I do and how do I do it?

So, I’m trying to figure out this whole social media thing. I understand how to use it for business. I understand how to use it for personal stuff. It’s the two together that I have a problem with.

Everything was going well, until co-workers started friend requesting me on Facebook and I started maintaining our company’s page on Facebook. Instantly, the game changed. Obviously I couldn’t just deny their friend requests. That would be rude and difficult to explain to them face to face on Monday. Where I was once careless and didn’t give a shit about what got posted where or what I said, I was suddenly frantically deleting status updates, notes, comments — anything that might get me in trouble or frowned upon. People at work like me. They have no idea that I’ve got a potty mouth, so I didn’t want to dirty up my professional image.

Not too long ago, I noticed a comment on my blog from a co-worker. Obviously I don’t restrain my inner trucker around here; I figure, I pay for the site, so I should be able to say whatever I want, and fuck what people think. This is the way it should work, right? Wrong, probably. I can’t really write about work here, because who knows if something I say might upset someone. I should probably not swear, in case one of my clients finds this. I mean, you can Google my name and this blog is one of the first things you’ll find. Hell, my (now-private) Twitter account @elizawhat is on the first page when you Google “Elizabeth Barone.”

This is all very good for my internet rockstardom, but what happens if a client reads a blog post about my chronic pain, my depression, my miscarriage? What happens when a co-worker who might have it out for me reads a post with a whole slew of yet-to-be-invented profanities and turns me in to the big wigs? No one really wants to read about how shitty my entire April has been, or how so-and-so is being an even shittier friend.

Despite this blog’s title, things aren’t always so sunny around here.

I haven’t exactly been careful with the above mentioned Twitter account, either. I have been using it as if I were talking to friends, as opposed to potential clients and colleagues. I created a second account, @elizabethbarone, for my professional/business contacts, but do I really want to maintain two accounts just for me? Do I have to keep two separate personalities on the internet, just like I have in real life (work me, regular me)?

I envy those of us bloggers who can live off of their ads and other stuff, rather than having to worry about their bosses reading their blogs. I mean yes, I get that you should just keep certain things to yourself if you don’t want anyone reading it, but we all have our moments where we want to rant and get that ego-stroking feedback. We all want to share things with other people, which is what makes the blogosphere so fucking awesome.

But I ask you, is a disclaimer in my about page enough? Should I just yank all of this down and erase the regular me from the internet and strictly maintain the digital work me? How can I balance the two, when they so often bleed into each other?