Andy and I were watching ‘House’ last night and it happened to be the episode where the fabulous Donna Pinciotti, er, Laura Prepon played a woman who had some disease that definitely wasn’t lupus, but also was a blogger who blogged about every single detail of her life. At some point during the show Andy asked me to pause the show to ask me if I read any blogs like that. I had to admit that I have and do read blogs like that (I would link to these blogs but I’m honestly terrified that it will somehow come back to haunt me). I think Andy might have also asked why it was that I blogged, but that might be a figment of my imagination. I do remember telling him, though poorly, as it was later on in the evening and my brain had shut off and I was really interested in seeing what disease Donna, er, Laura had that definitely wasn’t lupus. Or cancer.
Why do I blog? That’s a fine question really. So fine of a question that I’ve just sat here for 5 minutes looking at that question. Why do I blog? I’ve been writing in journals and diaries and such since I was 8 years old. I’ve been writing short stories since before that. I really enjoy writing. That isn’t to say that I’m any good at it, in fact I’m rather crap (a creative writing class in my short stint in college was proof to that statement), I just enjoy it.
Blogging is such a natural step in the journal writing process. It benefits me two-fold. One, I get to catalog my life so I don’t have to physically remember it (everyone who knows me knows how bad my memory is). Two, because a blog’s natural existence is PUBLIC, I benefit from laying down my personal thoughts in an edit mode. Stay with me here – when I still wrote in paper journals, you wouldn’t believe the shit I was putting down to record. The whole “I feel ugly today” or “I don’t think he loves me anymore” and “I think so-in-so is a fat, back stabbing bitch!” While it might be what I was feeling on that particular day, there would always be an entry two pages away with a “I feel fantastically pretty today” and “He DOES love me!” and “So-n-so apologized, she’s such a good friend!”. When I go through those old journals I just roll my eyes and cringe.
You could argue and say that writing is therapeutic. If you did, then I agree with you. Nowadays I tend to write out my frustrations in a Word document, save it to my hard drive, and when if in 3 days later I think its emotional crap, I delete it. All the benefits without the wasted trees and the possibility of some curious 10 year old child stumbling upon my anxieties 100 years from now thinking that people from the 20th Century were crazy whiney.
The last thing I want to mention is the audience aspect. Bloggers would be damn liars if they told you that they didn’t enjoy the audience aspect. We like to know people are reading what we’re writing just like you enjoy knowing that people listen when you talk. We’re addicted to stats logs. We’re addicted to comments. We don’t expect millions of readers, we don’t expect book deals (though, c’mon, how cool would that be?), we just want to know people are reading.
I just realized I’m getting too serious. Here’s a picture of a hermit crab wearing a hat that I got off the internet. FACT: I wrote ‘hermit crab wearing a hat’ BEFORE I looked to see if such a thing existed. Because I know the internet has everything, I wasn’t too worried.
I seriously cannot believe how easy that was.
Testing the comments.
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