The earliest is not a memory in and of itself, but a memory of a photograph. We are at Ma-maw and Pa-paw’s house, standing outside in front of what used to be the garage and is now the family room. I am wearing a dark pink leotard with white stripes, a little white tutu, and tights; red spots are painted on my cheeks. Andrew stands beside me, still very small, a toddler in confusion. And wearing honest-to-goodness lederhosen. We are trick-or-treating our grandparents.

Fast forward to fifth grade. Our school system benefits from the presence of Indiana University in the community; each fifth-grade class spends (spent?) a week at IU’s Bradford Woods retreat center outside Martinsville. It’s sort of like a week-long summer camp, except you get to miss school for it. It’s wonderful, but our week happens to be Halloween week. I am put out. We have a party at camp, but I never cared about the parties. I want trick-or-treating! I want candy! When I get back home, days later, I find a bag of loot waiting for me; Andrew was coerced into doing double duty so that I could have my treats too. And he didn’t even raid my share for the good treats.

Another jump, to the Halloween of eighth grade. We’ve just moved, and the new house isn’t really in a neighborhood. I might be getting a little old for trick-or-treating, but Mom bundles me up along with Andrew to go back to our old neighborhood for a round anyway. I am dressed, nominally, as Laura Ingalls, though how this differs from any other prarie girl of her era is questionable. We trick-or-treat at our old house, vacated only a very few months ago during summer break. I find it strange to see Other People living there, and yet it doesn’t even look like our house anymore, so it seems all right despite the strangeness.

A short hop to sometime in high school. I’m definitely too old for trick-or-treating now, but has that ever stopped me? I take more care with my costume, now. It started simply, an ankle-length black skirt with matching top and cloth belt under a Navy blue cloak, with heavy dragon earrings and a primitive-looking necklace. Sandals are the footwear of choice, no matter what the weather, my hair is loose and sparkling golden against the blue of the cloak, and the fire-engine-red lipstick is an absolute necessity. I was so pale and spooky I actually scared my fellow haunted hayride volunteers the first year. Since then I’ve added each year — more jewelry, more accessories, usually. I’m not completely certain what the costume is; I’ve heard it called “ghost”, “witch”, and “Druid priestess”. I lean toward “witch” myself, and have accumulated a belt pouch full of suitable accouterments to support that. This year, my big addition is a sword. It’s a real sword, though not one that I’d trust my life to; it’s a slender dress blade in a dark red scabbard that Dad picked up at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. You could run someone through with it if you really, really tried, but mostly it looks flashy. At one house, I spot one of those “I’ll pretend I’m a statue and then creep up behind you while you’re getting your candy, thereby scaring the crap out of you” people creeping up on us out of the corner of my eye. My response is to turn and draw the sword, which seems to sort of scare the crap out of him. He backs off.

A longer jump, this time, up to just five years ago. Tim and I have moved into our new house. We’ve converted the garage to a rec room, complete with pool table. In honor of our first Halloween with real live trick-or-treaters, we throw a party in the garage, opening the overhead door and setting up an elaborate candy table (featuring a giant plastic cauldron filled with candy) at the front. I am wearing my not-period-accurate Ren Faire dress, black crushed velvet and a silver veil and long sleeves and a bodice laced indecently tight and low. All our friends are there. The garage winds up only half-decorated, since I wanted a harvest theme and Tim wanted black lights and neon colors. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is on infinite loop on the DVD player; one intrepid young trick-or-treater tries to bypass the treats in favor of watching the movie. A good time is had by all. The Candy Cauldron takes weeks to go dry, even though by the end of the night we’re dropping huge handfuls into outstretched bags. We try to recapture the magic of it the following year, but only Jen attends and none of us has the same enthusiasm for it.

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CNN.com: Privacy is dead, and social media hold smoking gun

Hey, look. Tech is destroying society again. Good to know some things never change.

Today we have more information and a higher potential for connecting to other human beings at our fingertips every moment than we have had in the past. There are many things that this can mean to us. It can mean that it’s easier to research your business proposal or your kid’s paper on dinosaurs, to find out how to cook satay or treat a stomachache at home or what that line in that one movie is that you find so funny, to keep up with the latest on the health care debate or the war in Iraq or a TV show you don’t have time to watch. It can mean that we have to do more critical thinking to understand what information is good and can be trusted, because Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crud) is even more applicable on the Internet where anyone can post any information they feel like, true or not. It can mean that we can easily find support for our endeavours in weight loss, academics, religion, a new lifestyle, underwater basketweaving, or any number of other things. (This is sort of a variation on Rule 34: If you can imagine it, there is online support for it.) It can also mean that we have to watch ourselves and make sure that in supporting others we don’t overshare our own information.

With great power comes great responsibility, yes? With great access comes a great need for caution. Saying that social networking is responsible for the erosion of privacy is like saying that cars are responsible for drunk driving accidents. Social networking is a tool. It’s up to us how we use it. If you want privacy, don’t post about the details of the personal crisis you’re going through right now. If you don’t want people to know your weight, keep your weight-loss-tracking stats private. Consider before you tweet about your vacation whether you want everyone to know that you’re not at home. Take responsibility for your personal information; if you don’t want it out there, either don’t put it out there or protect it. Recognize that you are not required to show us every photo you take of your kid/pet/spouse/art project/refrigerator mold. Recognize that it’s OK to block everyone who isn’t on your approved list from seeing the updates on how you’re dealing with whatever personal tragedy you’re going through. Realize that we don’t all have a right to know everything about you, and you’re allowed to keep things to yourself and/or amongst friends.

Sometimes information gets out of your control. You can’t really do much except quit telling secrets to the person who blabbed, obviously; once it’s out, it’s out. What you can do to help this problem, though, is exercise the same caution about other people’s private information. If you’re privy to some juicy bit of gossip, don’t post it in a public Facebook update. Don’t even share it with someone you trust, unless you’ve cleared it with the person whose secret it is first. If you don’t want other people to spill your information to the world, do them the favor of not spilling theirs either. Really, this is just basic good manners, isn’t it?

These are the considerations we’ve always had, really. We must select our audience for our information and do what we can to ensure that our selection is honored. The big difference is that our potential audience is so much bigger now.

Cashmore closes by saying:

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Fitbit and the SenseCam give us a simple choice: participate or fade into a lonely obscurity.

Here’s the thing: That’s always been the case. If you’re not in the public eye, you’re “obscure”. Social networking is only the latest means of being in the public eye. Ask yourself, too, whether obscurity is actually a bad thing. In the pre-Internet days, would it have bothered you to not be known across the nation and even the world? Would you have sought out the spotlight? Some would, and I suspect they will be the same ones who will decide it’s worth it to lay their lives bare before the world on social networking sites. Most of us, I venture to suggest, would have operated (or did operate) much as we do today: sharing anecdotes, photos, personal milestones and the products of our creative minds with such friends and family as we choose to.

(All of this, of course, ignores other more insidious privacy problems such as personal data collection that have been going on longer than social networking has been popular and are not specific to social networking. Which has done at least as much to kill privacy, if it is indeed dead, as anything else.)

Social networking is not, as usual, the enemy. We just have to be smart about how we use it.

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Having finished said book, I’ve posted about it again over at the reading journal:
The Time Traveler’s Wife

The short of it is: Meh. I think I’ve gotta get back to my regularly-scheduled high fantasy now, where time travel keeps itself sensibly confined to places where it will be most effective instead of running amok. (“Amok! Amok! Amok! OOF.”)

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My own personal rulebook for NaNoWriMo this year:

1. 2500 words per day, excepting two date nights, Thanksgiving, and the day after Thanksgiving (when I’ll be off work and Natalie will be at daycare, but I intend to do things like decorate and relax). This is actually more than I need (it comes out to 65,000 words, not 50,000), but that gives me a buffer for days when I’m not as motivated.
2. Nearly nothing is what it seems.
3. The Internet and popular opinion are notoriously unreliable sources.
4. Everything can be subjective if you try hard enough.
5. No one involved is completely innocent. No, I mean no one.
6. Historical accuracy and fact-checking are not concerns at this stage in the game. Save it for the editing process.
7. Keep It Simple, Stupid. We’re trying to finish a draft this year, not just hit 50K. You can edit and add later.

NaNo itself provides my reward for me; last year they partnered with CreateSpace to provide free proof copies of “winning” manuscripts to the authors of same. They’re doing the same this year. As I understand it, there’s no catch. No shipping, no fees, just here, have a printed proof copy of your own work. I didn’t do it because I didn’t have a complete draft and it seemed silly to get a proof copy of a partial draft. This is my motivation to not just meet the wordcount goal, but also finish the draft.

If you’re interested enough to remind yourself of my premise before I start flooding the blog with updates on Sunday, here’s my work-in-progress page about it:
Nia With a Reverse Ring

I’ll get the wordcount widget, with its link to my NaNo profile, up soon.

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Mid-book impressions about The Time Traveler’s Wife over on the reading journal:
Authors: Stop It With The Chess Already (Etc.)

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Over at my reading journal, that book on the Delphic Maxims unfortunately is not turning out to be quite what I’d hoped for after all:
Longing for Wisdom

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Today I’m blogging at SparkPeople, updating on how the new schedule is going (mostly as it relates to my exercise plan):
The Schedule, One Week Later

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A mixed review for the randomly-stumbled-upon anthology over at my reading journal:
This is Not Chick Lit

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More Natalieness, compiled on my phone over the past few weeks.

Public photos: Reading With Daddy, Napping With Grandpa
Private Gallery: All Kinds of Fun

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I’m going to start trying to remember to link from here when I blog elsewhere again. Today, I’m blogging our changing family schedule and my potentially-changing exercise schedule specifically over at SparkPeople:
Changing Schedules

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