Teacher + LiveJournal = Confusion

I might as well admit it: I'm in high school. I know you can't tell from the elegance of my prose, but it's true.

AP Spanish lit is another thing I am in, but yesterday my teacher wasn't. She had a doctor's appointment and decided not to tell anyone. So we all showed up and screwed around for twenty minutes and then left. During those twenty minutes, we got to talking about various teacher's websites (you can visit http://skynelson.com for a taste, but I don't recommend it), and someone mentioned that the pit beneath the trap door that is the link above was "almost as bad as [name omitted because I like the guy]'s porn."

Now, I knew something of this already. [Nobilg], my stats and computer science teacher, had an old personal website, which he had censored after kids at his old school found it. There was nothing too terrible on it, just some descriptions of sex games and a dead link to a porn site, but that's plenty nuff to get you fired some places. His version of 'censoring,' though, involved commenting the objectionable parts out in the html. So I found it all last year, was like, "huh." and didn't care overmuch. Still, I was surprised other people knew about it, and it sounded from what she said that there may have been more to it than what I'd seen. So I googled "[Nobilg]" +porn, and boom, there was his livejournal. Which had nothing to do with porn, really, he'd just used the word.

He had been very, very careful not to use his name anywhere in the body of his posts. But he'd posted a link to a personal essay type thing he'd written about Burning Man in which one of the characters used his name. So we started reading his livejournal. Excerpted from his list of self-descriptors:

kinky
bi
poly
left-leaning
radical
slut

I happen to know that not all of those actually apply to him, but still.

At lunch, I continued to read. It got much, much worse. He described a sex party in moderately graphic detail, mentioned being stoned, etc. He also posted some great poetry and an awesome short story he wrote. Overall, great stuff, but not so much when it gets into the hands of the school community at large. I showed it to a few close friends, but not many. Andrew Fischer, a kid my class, decided he needed to go run and tell [Nobilg] right away, which was annoying, but in the end prolly for the best. He told some people who had overheard that it wasn't him, and then came out to ask me about it. I showed him, and he went and deleted his livejournal. After that we talked, and then the dean of students talked to me, and the magnitude of the consequences of my distributing it further were impressed upon me.

It was an interesting experience. It was fascinating to read all the stuff he wrote. He has always been almost closer to a friend than a teacher, and this certainly hasn't changed that. If anything, we might become closer because of it. To me, it wasn't that big a deal, really - I half suspected it all anyway, and I had read the stuff on his old site. So more than anything it showed me how he was as a person, with his friends, outside of a school setting, which was valuable and interesting. I hope it leads to more discussion and good times, and that nothing bad happens...

I feel like all of that was more plot summary than analysis. I didn't say much of what I wanted to. So here's some more:
The line between teacher and friend is a weird one at my school. It is very liberal, very informal, and very good, so there is a lot of one on one work and little bland lecturing and busywork. And the teachers are mostly awesome people. As a result, many students becomes quite good friends with one or more teachers. But there are certain places teachers just can't go. And there's always this tension between being informal and having fun, and it being the teacher's job to keep the kids in line (and not show favoritism). Anyway, i don't know if I'm getting anything useful across, but it is something I think about a lot.