another funny thing about blogging…

……….is that blog entries so often need to be, or tend to be, past-tense or obscure sounding things so that others won’t think you’re writing about them. It’s truly a balancing act to not offend, to not reveal, to not be too secretive or too open or too candid or so vague that too much is read into what’s posted. Another thing is that, so often, when someone’s telling a story, there’s this vulnerability or fear that others might be all too ready to critique it on whatever merits they happen to be personally concerned with. Say… a grammarian: always critiquing style and grammatical errors. Very few bloggers have editors. Well, some do (and I’m painfully aware this one needs one!).

A reader might be easily offended bcz their ideal is challenged or misrepresented or discredited. Still another might be critical of the topic, or even of the blog author, for having the temerity to say the things he/she says. Believe me… sometimes it just is easy to spill it all out on the blog-room floor and that’s probably bcz there’s still this quasi anonymity that allows for such boldness. But then… there’s this harness that most bloggers wear. It’s the harness of propriety, confidentiality – mixed with a measure of protection and/or self preservation. Face it… we can’t all say all the stuff we want to say, we can’t all say whatever’s on our minds and we can’t all talk about some of the really deep things we face each day… and yet we blog. I don’t know why we do… and millions would likely say the very same things I’m saying here: it’s like we all hold the same coin there’s some innate need or burning desire to tell our stories — that’s on the one side of the coin. On the other is the stark reality that we all also demand privacy, anonymity and/or protection from those who would disagree, verbally assault or attempt to tear apart the story of our lives. I don’t know how many times I’ve read, in the past few years, some blog entry that somewhere states that the writer hopes no one she knows will read her blog. Or, that no one she knows reads her blog. What? I don’t think that’s possible. Not really.

I remember one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned in my life happened as a result of involvement on an email list. And… one line I will never ever forget was this: “… on the internet. People can get anything they want on the internet.” How did you find that? Where did you read that? How do you know that? Where did you see that? On the internet. And yet we think we’ve got privacy… anonymity. But at the same time, almost in contradiction, I think with all this candor, people think they know a lot more about us than they really know. Bcz as much as we bloggers want to tell our stories, many of us, at the same time, remain very, very private about our lives. I know I do, in part, bcz too many people would/might/do misinterpret things they read. That, or they read too much into what’s written.
And then you know what? There’s this whole other angle to blogging… it’s the angle that we want to share what’s going on, or we’re motivated to share what’s going on in our life, bcz we like reading about what’s going on with other people. We want to know and we want to be known. An example of this is, just this morning I was browsing through Facebook, reading some old notes that then took me to other blogs/websites.

There are a few blogs that absolutely and completely warm my heart and encourage me like few other things. I don’t even know them… and yet, I sort of feel like I do. I mean really know them. And yet I don’t. It’s a blog after all. It’s pictures after all. But it’s their life—their pics tell their story… and their stories make me ‘feel’ like I ‘know’ them. Whatever it is… there are homes on the web where I just love to spend time… I love how I feel when I’m there and so wish I could literally spend the afternoon over tea………………….