It's strange doing a job interview when you have a blog, and your blog is on your resume.

Actually, it's weird having a blog in general when people outside the magic computer internet world know about it. A few years ago when I bought my car, I didn't know at the time but my dad (who was with me) told the sales agent about my website and when we came back the next day to finalize the paperwork she mentioned that she'd read most of it.

It does weird things to a relationship with a stranger. Suddenly you know that they know things about you that other people who know you don't know.

At an interview, though, it gets a little hairy. Someone says they took a look at some of my blog entries and my active consciousness of the world clicks off and I mentally scramble backwards in time to try to remember what sort of unseemly things I've posted here. How long ago was it that I eluded to my embarrassing female troubles? It was long ago enough that they probably didn't click back that far, right? What about my overly-long, self-involved pieces? Hopefully they would have skipped those due to length, right? TLDR? Real world people do that, right?

By the time I've come to realize that you'd have to read for a few hours to come to the conclusion that I'm a depressed asocial overbearing whacko, the conversation has gone somewhere else and I'm left alone in my little island of worry while everybody else is asking about where I see myself in 10 years or what my biggest weakness is.

My biggest weakness is that I have a blog I wish people didn't read but get upset over when people don't.

Then I go home and post about this worry and realize that those people will probably read it and have some kind of self-aware fit of panic and the entire nature of the universe will get all wobbly for everybody involved.

It also changes how and what I post here. If I'm sending out resumes I get afraid to post anything in fear of offending someone or misaligning myself. Sometimes I feel like I need to post something so I crank out some vague essay having nothing to do with anything.

I have to consider what the first entry will be. I could have recently written the world's best entry, but it'd be moot if it was directly beneath a description of this really great pie I just ate. It keeps me from writing about things I normally would, like how my grandpa died on Saturday, because I worry about how people will react to it.

I start to feel like a politician, who has to be able to account for everything he's said or done and make sure anything new he says to one group doesn't offend anyone in another, because someone's always listening.

For a fleeting moment I consider that if someone's going to hire me, they'll be getting the real me and not the phony job interview version of myself, and that maybe I shouldn't worry so much about it. Then I realize that's stupid, and go back to worrying.