Today at lunch with some friends in a delightful Virginia hamlet close to a battlefield –a description which I realize is far more vague than it sounds— I came to a very funny conclusion.

Well, to be fair, it is a conclusion to which anyone who’s ever acknowledged to writing a blog arrives sooner or later:  that everyone wonders whether a conversation will end up in your blog, in some form or another.  And moreover, that they kind of sometimes seem to hope that it will.

_________

The chronicled vignettes you find in a blog, dear reader, are just a slice of life viewed through the bias of the blogger.  That there is some truth hidden there is doubtless –after all, whether biased or not, the person who lived through a particular incident is choosing to memorialize it.  But the question is of course, how much of the incident is scripted and how much has been an entry in rough draft in the blogger’s mind, just begging for the right circumstances to arrive. 

And of course, the rest is just ~magic~, as we say in the Blog Biz (not really).

_________

Now, I don’t know how many of the readers of this blog out there are also regular bloggers, but I suspect it’s a fairly large percentage.  The rest of the readership is, as we also say in the biz, those people who kind of have to endure me talking about my blog and then get hassled to read the blog and then read it and then tell me, "hey, you should blog about this," or, "my favorites are the Momzilla entries," or "you misspelled the word ‘misspell’ on your entry of last Tuesday."

They are also known as "friends and family" and they, apart from the comments, are the best kind of feedback for several reasons:

1. Because it’s "that thing" that we can talk about as if it were a shoe.
2. Because these living breathing people are the embodiment of the commentators
3. Because somehow being written about and using those stories and recognizing yourself as described by another person is a little flattering, perhaps?  Is it like a mini-celebrity?  Or is it just funny?

Actually, I don’t know?  Is it?  Because, you see, whenever my own mother includes something I’ve said, done or written about in one of her sermons, it’s kind of cool in a weird third-person kind of way.

It’s a little bit like being part of posterity.  Not that a blog per se will ever be part of posterity as a single item  –like for instance, this blog in particular will never make it to posterity because come on,seriously– unless it’s one of the biggies, and seriously, some of the biggies are kind of scary despite being well-written and stuff, you know? 

But yes.  Being part of the written word –even if out in cyberspace– is important.  Even a little bit.

(Or is it?)

Anyway… this was a shoutout entry to friends and family who put up with my demands and actually read this drivel.  Thank you for giving of yourselves by reading this, and for commenting if you do!  And thank you for the material ;o)

12 Nov This entry was published on November 12, 2007 at 7:58 pm and is filed under NaBloPoMo. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.