A Blogger in Spite of Myself

[Pamela Troy]

I'd like to thank everybody for the many, many kind responses I got to my first post in General Discussion here as a DU member. I should say that I've posted other articles here, though I've never talked much on the discussion boards.

Just to tell everyone a little about myself -- or at least my online persona:

I've been online since the early '80s, due mainly to a software engineer boyfriend who became one of the first fairly well-known online personalities. (No, I won't say who it was except that I miss him and that he is now deceased and had a flare for wit and invective that made his name almost synonymous with the term "flamewar.") My pieces have appeared here, and on Buzzflash, and have been picked up by Smirking Chimp and The Crisis Papers, but I've most consistently posted to the Compuserve discussion board where I currently debate and sometimes do housecleaning in the Political Debate Forum as an SL. That means I've been described on Compuserve as a fascistic stooge of the Bush administration and a pinko commie Bin Laden lover by different posters on the same day for interfering with their Godgiven right to post copyrighted material and publicly call each other doodyheads.

I love debate, which is perhaps why I've not posted in the DU discussions forums much. Too many people here agree with me. I've made a couple of previous abortive attempts at blogging, but have been stymied by the fact that A) I doubt my ability to say something new and original every other day or even every other week and B) I've kept a diary, the kind you write in with a pen, off and on since I was nine and that is such a different breed of journal that moving into blogging is kind of like trying to speak Parisian French after you've grown up hearing the New Orleans version. I might post some of the less personal excerpts from my diary to my blog here occasionally, maybe even some old ones since I've been using my computer to run out diary pages since 2000. If I do, it will be not only to share them, but in the hopes of backing up some of my better entries someplace relatively safe. (I lost about a decade from the '80s and '90s when the computer they were stored in died and the disk backups deteriorated, which is why I sometimes startle my husband at night by groaning miserably and pulling my pillow over my head.)

If I add an avatar, it won't be a picture of myself. I prefer to be mysterious and rather like the assumption now endemic on Compuserve that I either have green skin and a black pointy hat or work offline as an overweight disgruntled postal employee.

As for my offline life -- I was born in New Orleans and currently live in San Francisco with my husband. I have a large yellow cat named Rajah, and I work at a library and do freelance writing on the side.

Trivia:

As recently as 2003, there was a statue of me on display in Arkansas. I kid you not.

I love horror films, expecially zombie pics. I hate dead teenager movies.

In addition to cat wrangling, I collect Tarot cards

My favorite song is currently "I Want You Wearing Purple" by Gogol Bordello.

When I was in boarding school, almost every girl on my floor signed an interior page of what I had thought was my carefully hidden diary. I discovered this while rereading that diary at the age of 32.

I am not, in fact, the "Pamela Troy" who apparently bedeviled the heroine on the TV show ROSWELL and whose name keeps bolluxing up my attempts at online egotrawls.