Mitch Mitchell recently asked me on my 900th post:

Just asking, but what’s stopped you from publishing posts you said you’ve written and held back on? How many posts would you be up to if you hadn’t done that?

I honestly don’t know. I tend to have three general guidelines that keep me in my lane: don’t venture too much into love, don’t discuss my principal or any administrators within my school except to set up a story that has nothing to do with them, and don’t talk about sex except if it’s a general lesson where I don’t have to go into my own sexual relations. I would love to tell you why. Actually, that’s what I’m going to do.

I don’t talk about any of those three on this forum because people read this blog. At first, I thought I would just plow on without a second thought about people’s feelings, but after a while, I got pissed off that I couldn’t just be honest about these topics without getting into a face-to-face discussion about any of these three. The problem with not having a pseudonym or a private blog on which to expound these thoughts is that people catch feelings. They can catch them positively (as so many have), but they can catch them negatively too. For all the great comments and other forms of feedback I got from the poems I wrote and prose I typed, I’d get a nasty reaction from someone that actually mattered in the scope of things.

I don’t mean to hurt people with this venue. If anything, I’m hoping that they too might reflect like I did in this post. Even when criticizing the ed-deformers like President Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, or Mayor Michael Bloomberg, I try to keep it to their professional duties, not as an attack to their actual person. The same thing goes with some of my colleagues who, unbeknownst to them, show their White privilege when they think they’re fighting for the rights of the underprivileged. I try to do that with every post I write, and that keeps me sane even when I find some of the criticisms of my pieces too harsh.

But with topics like love, sex, and my immediate administration, the pieces do mess with people’s psyche, they do go too hard, and they do affect their person no matter how much they deny it does. Thus, I’d rather keep these things to myself. The more honest I become in the other arenas of my life, the less inclined I am to write about these other pieces anyways. Nowadays, with all the publicity I’ve gotten for x-y-z, people have wondered why I don’t write profile pieces on them or concentrate on things they’ve done or said. I tend to reply, “Nah,” with no stated reason.

Now you know.

Jose, who got the monthly “meta” out of his system. Amen …