Censorship

Like most of my more open-minded peers, I despise censorship in all its forms; from government-sponsored suppression of a free press to a public school’s removal of ideas that threaten its daily routine. However, there remains a gray area regarding opinions posted on the internet, where—though no one is officially regulating the flow of ideas—what you post might come back to hurt you. I learned this during my Livejournal days (*shudder*) on multiple occasions that I will not go into here. These incidents lead to my aversion to blogging, which I overcame only by shunning the daily recounts and true confessions that hounded my last blog. People, I’ve found, despise being written about as if they were characters in a narrative; a statement that evokes, even as I write this, the image of a menacing figure with tinted hair and a fur-lined coat wandering the Bennington campus late at night with her scowling sidekick, blowing cigarette smoke in my face and stretching out her o’s and i’s as she whispered her condemnations in the bushes outside Commons. That girl had dark, hideous eyes made all the more sinister by an abundance of mascara and eyeshadow. I’ll never forget those eyes. (Okay, so I lied about not delving into the past, but that’s the most you’re going to get).

However, once again it is clear to me that if I’m not careful, and if Certain Parties (I’m not talking about ex-girlfriends, either) were ever to find this blog, a similar fate could be in store for yours truly. As much as I hate to, I have to be careful about what I post here. This is at times frustrating, and at other times made easier by obfuscating or manipulating key facts or opinions. I consider it censorship if someone wants to express something and cannot; and by this definition I do feel censored with this blog. I’ve given the matter a lot of thought and vowed to tread as close to the line as I can and encourage all to read between the lines until this threat is no longer a problem. As a further precaution, I’ll post this official-sounding Disclaimer written with lots of Latinate language and passive voice:

DISCLAIMER:
All entries in this blog are, for all legal intents and purposes, works of fiction, and any opinions expressed therein are not necessarily those held by its author. The tone has been highly distorted for entertainment and humorous purposes, and should be considered facetious. Where incidents are recounted which supposedly involve real people, the names of those people have been changed. Any resemblance between the identities of people recounted here and those of the real world are purely coincidental. Much of the dialogue and anecdotes recorded herein are works of the author’s imagination and, even when they appear to refer to real-life incidents, should be taken as fictitious.