(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

RECENTLY I completed an interview for an online forum that I participate in. I decided to post my responses to four out of the five interview questions on my site as well. This is the first of four journal entries based on these questions.

QUESTION 1. Your personal journal, weblog, and photography live on the same domain with your business site, and you use your real name (at least, I assume it’s your real name) in both places. Many people choose to fragment their online lives and use pseudonyms. Did you consider and reject this approach? Have there been any particularly positive or negative reactions from people who know you offline finding you online?

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You read my weblog. Prepare to die.”

Okay! Okay! My name is really Sam Snyder. Yes, I do use my real name on my site.

I considered using a pseudonym but I thought it would get too complicated. I thought I would eventually give my identity away somehow anyway. So I gave up on the idea fairly quickly.

By using my real name I put myself in a position that requires honesty and sincerity. Writing with sincerity in an open manner is the main thing that I set out to do when I started my online journal. I have been through a lot in my life. (Just a glance at questions 3 and 4, even without the answers, will show that.) I survived most of it and still have a good portion of my sanity and all of my sense of humor. As I began to heal over time, I maintained the view that there was a purpose behind what I experienced. As I interacted with others and began to open up and relate my experiences to them, I often found that I could be an encouragement and a support to others going through difficult times. It is this type of openness and sincerity that I attempt to convey in my online journal writing. Judging by some of the emails I’ve received, I have been fairly successful in the attempt.

I suppose that using my real name on my site and writing openly have exposed me to some risks. They have been minimal so far though. The worst of the negative experiences has come from an ex-girlfriend. She posed under a different name a little while back and contacted me through my site. I always try to reply to emails that people send when it concerns my writing or something on the site. So I answered this person’s questions and there were several emails exchanged over the course of a few weeks. However, this particular girl has a tendency to be spiteful and I soon became suspicious of the emails. In the end it amounted to nothing more than an annoyance.

On the positive side, I have had a few people who used to know me find my site. One of them had moved away several years ago. She came across the site and somehow tracked my phone number down. Her call came on a particularly dismal day and really brightened things up.

A drawback in using my real name is that I cannot always be as direct, severe, revealing, etc., because people know who I am. There are people who know me personally, like my mom, who read my site. There are co-workers who read. There are some friends with various religious beliefs and moral sensitivities who read. While I completely believe that a writer has the right to freedom of speech, I often choose to limit my freedom so as not to offend or embarrass some of these readers. Personally, I have no problem with a writer who uses vulgarity to express themselves, or writes about issues that some may consider taboo. F***! I do that once in a while myself! Now, even though I just censored myself, I know that I made a few of my readers squirm a little and wish I hadn’t used the word “FISH” before that last sentence. I cannot please everyone all of the time. (God knows I’ve gotten plenty of flack over my “pony roasting” spoof!) I will not write to please everyone. But I do try to tone myself done a bit since I interact offline with some of my readers.

PART 2 TO FOLLOW SOON!

(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

New Years Day 2003 closed with a beautiful sunset. We stopped on our way to Cousin A P’s house to take this photo. H, M, J and I were invited to her house for dinner. Cousin J was there as well. We haven’t seen each other very much over the years. So I was happy that he was there for dinner.

(After using all those initials in that paragraph, I realize how out of date the “Cast” page is! I’ll have to take care of that soon.)

Having H and M visit us at Christmas is always the highlight of the holiday for the family here. There are a lot of miles between New Jersey and Georgia where the girls live. As H said several times while she was here, “We don’t see each other enough.” There is great excitement when they arrive, much sadness when they leave.

Emotionally I crash when they leave. The miles and months of separation are not what I envisioned our family would be like. Watching my little girls board a plane and entrusting them to airline attendants was not something I thought I would have to do when they were born. I attempt to steel my heart, grit my teeth, grin and bear it, throw myself into some flurry of activity, or dive into a strong rum and Coke to take the edge off. None of that works very well. Usually the day after H and M leave I spend the day in my room, hiding from the world. This time was no different. January 3rd was pretty much a blank. January 4th was almost the same until I finally got up enough ambition to get in the car and stop by Pete’s place. Even though everyone there was sick to some degree, it was better to hang out there and watch movies with them than to mope around in my room.

I’m not complaining or looking for pity here. This is just the way it is. I’m learning to live with it. I’m learning to cope. Better than that… I’m determined to win in spite of it all. Slowly but surely. Three steps forward and two steps back sometimes. Come in running. Right? At least keep moving forward, crawling when necessary.

H and M arrived the day after Christmas. S went with me to pick them up at Newark Airport. It’s the best feeling to see them come through the gate! H is usually fairly calm. M is always bouncing all over the place. We stopped for candy on the way through the airport. We each bought giant jawbreakers. Of course I got one too!

By the time we got home we were starving. So the three girls and I went to the diner. We ate like pigs and there are pictures to prove it! (See the link below.) There are a few photos of the girls stuffing their faces. It’s all fair though because I look pretty rough in a few of those photos. Remember, this was the day after Christmas. At 5:30 that morning I was still at Pete’s house. I only slept about three hours before driving to Newark to pick up the girls. Rather unflattering pictures. What the heck!

Later that same day, H and M opened their gifts from the rest of us. There are some cute pictures of this. (See the link below again.) “Santa” went overboard this year! That’s the way it works when an older sister has a job and is very generous. The separation does not diminish the love. Thank you, “Santa.”

As for the rest of the time H and M were here, we spent most of it relaxing together, watching movies, visiting friends. They had a great time with a few of the neighborhood girls that they are friends with. They even spent New Years Eve with all the girls and Dad took the opportunity to be with some friends that night. The girls and I also stopped by my office to have coffee with Friend D and to see a few other people one afternoon.

At first M was very bashful when we got to the office. She is usually the big ham, the crazy one making funny faces and being silly. She decided to open up while I was talking to several ladies. She was hiding close behind me and peeking around to look at everyone once in a while. Suddenly she said, “Daddy, these pants (Levi’s Dockers) make your butt look big!” What a riot! She was then out of her little shyness bubble and was the “office clown” the rest of the time.

Now the holidays are past. The girls have gone home to Georgia. It’s a new year. There are some new things happening, which I will write about another time. There are several things that I am looking forward to this year.

One of those things is a trip to Georgia to see the girls in March. One has a birthday in February and the other in the beginning of March. J, S, T, and I plan on driving to Georgia in early March to spend a weekend with H and M. It will be a combined birthday celebration. H and M are excited to introduce us to all of their neighborhood friends. It will be a great adventure.

Even though the holidays are over and the girls are gone, I have some things that I’m excited about and looking forward to. There is some lingering sadness because they are gone. But March and Georgia are just around the corner. I can make it.

CORRESPONDING PICTURE GALLERIES:

• At the Diner
• Christmas 2003

(Originally posted on the website Continuum…)

IT WAS THREE YEARS AGO today that I posted my first entry, “Snow and Chinese Food,” on this website. Since then there have been 77 additional entries added, including this one, consisting of nearly 83,000 words. So many words and I haven’t told you nearly as much as I intended to when I first set out on this little adventure. What have you read here regarding my first marriage, or my work as a milk pasteurizer for 13 years, or my son’s learning disabilities, or my experiences in the federal witness protection program? Not much. Possibly in the future I will write about those things.

In addition to the journal entries, there have been 60 photo galleries posted on this site, several of them in multiple parts. There are over 1400 photos. Not too shabby.

It is amazing how much changes over the course of three years. People come and go. Circumstances change. Fortune fluctuates. Hopefully, this has been reflected in the writings on this website. I chose the accompanying photo because it represents “progression.” Life is going somewhere. It is not stagnant. Even if you determine to sit still and keep everything just the way it is, it still changes. It continues on and brings you with it whether you like it or not. When you resist life’s changes, life sort of grabs you by the hair and drags you along in a primal way. It’s better to cooperate a little, learn some things, gain some wisdom.

My writings are often my reflections upon what life has handed me. They are partly memoir, partly introspection, often intimately revealing, always sincere. All with a dash of humor to help it go down easier. They are about me. Yet, I try to write in a way that touches others in fundamental ways. Sometimes I write about past experiences and feel the emotions of those times while I am writing. I try to capture this and blend it into my writings. When I receive emails saying, “That made me cry,” or “I laughed so hard my drink came out of my nose,” or “Are you okay?” I know that the emotion was in the writing.

Online journaling has been an interesting experience. I have connected with people in various parts of the world. With a few of them I now have very good long distance friendships. Some people stumble upon the site while they are surfing around. Some find it through links on other journals. Some find it while they are searching for the strangest things on Google or Yahoo. Some people read a little and never come back. Some stick around and even sign up for the notify list. Some tell me they feel that they have known me for a long time once they read some of the articles. A few have even said that they came across the site and read something that was just what they needed to hear at that time.

There have been a few strange incidents in relation to the website. After I posted some crazy stuff about roasting ponies, someone sent me an email and ripped me apart. I was told that it was people like me who keep the world as messed up as it is. I was called heartless and cruel. It turned out that the person who wrote to me was a 14 year-old girl in Denmark. Another oddity was when an ex-girlfriend contacted me through the website using a fake name. I always make it a point to respond to people who write to me. Usually those interactions go well. But this particular girl has a tendency to be spiteful and rather sharp in her comments. Eventually this gave her away and I figured out who it was. Rather weird and very annoying.

I suppose that a person puts themselves in a vulnerable position, susceptible to being approached by the weird and annoying, when they write an online journal. The essence of journaling is expressing personal experiences and personal reflections on those experiences. An online journaler may also write about subjects other than themselves (politics, places, events, etc.). But even this will be personal observations and points of view. Overall, a journal is personal in nature. This type of writing always exposes a writer to those who will criticize, those who will assume, those who will misunderstand, even those who will attack.

So be it.

I believe that the online journaling phenomena has added something of great value to the internet. It has brought an element of humanity to this technological wonder. There are plenty of websites offering commercialism, pornography, facts, figures, etc. Through their websites, the writers of online journals offer themselves. They open the door a little and allow others into their lives. Sometimes I think that as technology advances, we become more isolated. The technology is convenient. But it has also replaced real human interaction to some degree. Online journals help to counteract that. They are expressions of colors in the grayness of cyberspace. They are beds of flowers planted among the bits and bytes of web servers all over the world. They are inns of hospitality along the information highway.

Okay… so my online journal is not so much like an inn of hospitality and more like a nut house. But come on in anyway! Kick off your shoes! Let down your hair! Join the insanity!

Seriously… thank you all for reading my site. I appreciate it.