Intimacy (L'intimité)

I've been listening to all sorts of things on the radio. Whereas some people listen to the equivalent TV shows (excellent ones on RDI, every day), I do it on the radio, b/c I need to hear something when I work. Or I need to keep the background of my mind busy, while the foreground does grunt work. I don't know. But what I know is that the French Radio One is having a series of documentaries on the theme of intimacy. Intimacy in couplehood, but also intimacy online, in reality tv and the likes. One of the people on yesterday's show was quoting Freud, who was saying how guilt burdened people at the turn of the century, a hundred years ago - while now, it's probably narcissism. Something like that - the idea of feeling important online.

Some teenagers act in surprise when they learn their parents might read their blogs. My parents won't, unless I'm on a trip at the other end of the world. Similarly for close real-life friends ("It's boring/depressing that you talk about Montreal"). I can, or should, take down certain old sites, but to me, it's lost in cyberspace, and it is as public as those pre-1960s scientific magazines "in storage" at some unknown location, b/c the library can't keep them all on shelf. Yeah, so I'm not taking down my old sites. And with a morbid twist, you don't know when you are going to dissapear, so what if you want to leave something behind; wouldn't a blog (no matter how self-censored it is) be the best everyman's autobiography.

(Sure, unless you become an important figure of History, your descendents will be the only ones to remember you a few generations down the road. I sometimes think about my ancestors, and actively try to know the people up the generational tree who have the ... luck, of still being around. My mom has a cousin in the Taiwan mafia. My great-grand-father (her grandpa) was humiliated by the Communists in Guangdong province, before going to HK. My dad's grandpa was a funny man who taught him to smoke. My father's father had only one sibling, an elder brother (so it wasn't a very fecund generation, but then both my grandpa and great-uncle then each had 5-6 kids). There are all sorts of unheard of relatives who aren't so far genetically, just so very far physically, and probably culturally. Like the second-degree cousins I found out I had in HK. Or that second-degree cousin who was a child actor, lives in Vancouver, is in Montreal for university. It's absolutely funky stuff...)

Blah blah blah, I can't believe my mind travelled from "intimacy" to "family tree".