I don’t believe in censorship, even when it is self-censoring. Recently I have done some posts about certain aspects and goings-on in my life that are more sensitive than usual. And I woke up at 3:00 a.m. this morning and some voice in my head was telling me that was a mistake.

But what to do about it? In over 15 years of blogging I’ve only deleted published posts once before. That was when I got called out at work for some content that was job-related and deemed inappropriate. I didn’t like doing it then but I wasn’t willing to give up my sweet salary over some little-read post. This time the issue that was troubling my mind was the possibility of my inadvertently causing trouble in the life of someone I care about. I still didn’t want to delete those posts so I did a quick Google search to learn how to password protect posts in WordPress. It was easier than I imagined to change the privacy setting. And that’s what I did for those five or six posts I thought might prove problematic.

Did I overreact? Perhaps. But I recalled some random guy recently commenting on something I wrote in 2005. And I got an email from someone this week saying he had found my blog while doing a search on Google about the quarantine requirements in Olongapo. A few months back a guy approached me in a bar saying he had found my blog doing some random search. Then he proceeded to lambast me for continuing to hike during the lockdown because “it made all foreigners look bad”. Anyway, the point is I tend to blog as if no one is going to read what I write. I do have some friends that I know read the blog and everyone else who does are random strangers anyway. But if one of those random strangers happened to know the person I was talking about or knew that person’s friends or decided to share some of what I wrote with them it might make a mess of things in ways that I would not want to be responsible for. Hence, the password protection for those posts.

I do not intend to make this a regular practice. I will perhaps be a bit more discrete about what I write and better consider the implications of words that may cause collateral damage to innocent bystanders. And any of you who are a regular reader/commenter here can send me a message and I’ll provide you the passwords for those posts. Fair enough? Sorry for the inconvenience.

In other news, I found this photo on Facebook rather titillating:

I’m not sure what kind of fruit or plant this might be, but damn, I want a taste:

And I will close with this:

Things will be back to normal around here tomorrow, including some photos from today’s very pleasant mountaintop hike. Stick around!