tonight I made a call to my dad, for the simple purpose of saying hi. He started acting strange, and mentioning things that he couldn’t have known. Eventually he spilled the beans to me…that my brother had shown him my livejournal. I had to spend the next 3 hours or so explaining all of the things I have done in the last year that I have told my friends but not my parents. I think I have a new candidate for most awkward moment of my life.
After the event, I decided to NEVER post there again without making every single post friends-only. I never used this feature before because I always felt that I was too insignifigant in this world for anybody to bother reading all 100 or so posts I have made. Is this a viable option…or should I do something else?
I had almost the same thing happen to me. I used to keep all the notes my friends wrote me in a bag under my bed. My dad found it one day when he was “looking for something”, and proceeded to read all of them. IMHO I would definitely start using that feature.
Yeah probably a good idea. My roomie found my Melo which has made me more careful about when I’m logged in. My parents probably won’t find it simply because they have no clue about my internet habits/names/sn’s
I just don’t write anything that I don’t consider completely public. I know my boss and quite a few of my coworkers, including the district manager of our store, sometimes read mine – and though my parents don’t read it, my grandparents know about my site as do many of the neighbours. So I don’t ever mention names or write anything overly personal to begin with.
Go friendsonly, if not entirely, at least for anything that could get you into any trouble or cause issues with parental units. One of my teachers found my LJ, and it freaked me out for a while. The worst part is, although I friendsonlyed a lot of entries, Google still has one of my older pages cached and I can’t get them to take it out of the cache. So many of my teachers could conceivably find out what I really think, and I can’t do anything about it at all. I’m sure many of them have, because I am in a small school and word gets around. Luckily, I only have a semester left there.
When I moved away to college, I didn’t take a lot of my stuff with me b/c I didn’t have space for it…including a stack of childhood/adolescent journals I’d kept for years. (They were in my bedroom closet underneath a whole bunch of old notes/stuffed animals, etc…)
My dad and I have a pretty troubled relationship, and it got worse after I moved away…and once, in the midst of an argument, he quoted something I said in those journals and basically wanted me to defend it.
I’ve never been so outraged in my life; I told him that since he read something totally private, never meant for any eyes but mine, I was under no obligation to explain or defend anything I said…and he spluttered that “I didn’t know they were journals,” which is a complete lie…all of them were in folders labelled “Audrey’s Journal.” HELLO.
He has yet to mention them again; I have no idea how much he read, or even what’s in those journals, since I haven’t even seen them in years…but I refuse to defend or explain any ill-gotten information.
How old are you, fusoya? If you’re over 18 and/or out of the house, I wouldn’t see the need to defend your actions, or whatever you wrote in your journal. (I’d be taking it up with your Benedict Arnold brother, personally. :D)
By the way, I have asked for my journals back–my parents live in another city–but I have yet to get them. grrrrrr
Well, I’m over 18…I’m currently living in my mom’s basement (yeah, I know that sounds so cliche, but it’s true) since I just finished college and am looking for a job…and I’ll probably stay here until I have a secure position and a steady income. But many of the things I wrote about (and had to defend) were related to things I did when I WAS living at school, and should be moot anyway.
My brother decided to spill the beans right before running off on a trip to Miami. If he thinks I’ll forget about this by the time he gets back…well…someone remind me to kick his ass.