At various times in my life I have made the statement that I’d like to be either famous or infamous. I didn’t care which. I’ve always known that my cavalier attitude was part of my rebellion against the constant maternal caution not to embarrass her, not to call attention to myself in any negative way.
Of course, there were also times in my life when I’ve stifled myself — you know, the expectations of family, employers. The need to keep being paid a salary is a great motivator to behave.
The great thing about combining retirement and blogging is that I no longer have to worry about keeping a job, and I have a forum wherein I can risk becoming either famous or infamous. (Not that I’m either, or expect to be either. But I’m free to not care — unless I choose to — if someone doesn’t find me acceptable.)
I no longer have to worry about my “permanent record,” unlike the two bloggers who resigned from John Edward’s presidential campaign because of something they posted on their blogs.
Reid Stott over at photodude.com has a realistic post about the situation in which those bloggers found themselves, explaining:

It’s like the phenomenon of someone who was “fired for their blog.” No, they were fired for saying or doing something they shouldn’t have. It just happened to be in their blog. But a blog is not a buffer from the real world. Your words there count just as if you’d said them to someone’s face, with the difference that they are archived for a very very long time

Rafe Colburn, in his post on “your permanent record,” adds another dimension to the issue:

This certainly comes into play when I’m involved with hiring people. I can find out more about anyone from their blog archives than I can by interviewing them. In interviews, people usually tell the interviewer what they think they want to hear. In other contexts, they are usually less circumspect. When I find I may work with someone, I look for blog posts, messages to mailing lists, comments on blogs, Usenet rants from a decade ago, and anything else I can find. There’s more to anyone than their persona on the Internet, but more information is almost always better than less.

All true. All true.
But not for me because I’m retired, and I’m wearing purple.