Hello!
Sorry for the long absence around here. I wrote a few more when I was on vacation; unfortunately I didn’t have a safe internet connection so theyre collectively stewing in their own petulant juices on my laptop. I wonder if it would be worth it to even put them up here? Their going to be password protected, due to the aforementioned petulantness (I like that word. Im going to officially appropriate it). I’ll think about it. One does incorporate my very first sports metaphor, which is rather exciting.
Ive been thinking about my blogroll lately. Three of my favorite blogs have shut down or gone on an extended hiatus in the last month. These are people Ive been reading for over a year, in one case it was one of the first blogs I ever read oh so many years ago, and I had a really nice connection with her, and then we just… drifted apart. I miss them.
Three blogs quietly dying in a month isn’t that rare. I read a factoid somewhere that 1/3 of all blogs die within the first three months, and half of them are inactive after 6 months. People get scared, or bored, or distracted with the dreaded myspace and never come back. They all surf their old, ghost town blog communities, obsessively checking everyone else’s pages and getting frustrated that no one’s updated, don’t even bother to turn to their own (what would they say?), then eventually the fad passes and the group moves on to… I don’t know, talking to each other? Unheard of.
I don’t think that’s why my favorite blogs up there ceased to be. I think they just… Im not sure exactly. Maybe they just ran out of that compulsion to share, or they got what they needed from a blog – more support in their community, or maybe now they feel normal or proud of their life – and they don’t need it anymore. I have no idea. I still miss them. I wish them good luck with whatever the hell theyre doing now.
There’s an odd sense of artificial closeness that comes from reading someone’s blog for a long time. The author is more likely to open up to a faceless, usually supportive audience, and tell things to you that they normally wouldn’t tell their friends and certainly wouldn’t tell you if you met ’em on the street. You learn that people feel the same way you do, and you feel like you know them even though youre only getting to see a very small, carefully selected fraction of who they are. Since youre not getting a complete picture, you can fill in the details to make their story more interesting. You can project yourself into their story, and you feel like youve bonded with the image of them you have in your head.
We all do it. Admit it!
Im not going to even talk about those friends that you make through blogging. That’s a whole other kerfuffle that can lead to stalking on one end, good friends in the middle, and marriage on the other. Never underestimate the almost instant intimacy the internet can bring.
Mistress Matisse was noting that since Time magazine couldn’t make up its damn mind and said that all us blogger folk were Person of the Year (People of the Year, maybe?), that blogging is now “hopelessly out of fashion.” Maybe this is good, maybe the only people who decide to start up blogs will be those who actually have something to say, and have that need (like I do) to reach out to other people, however superficially, and put some effort into their work. Maybe there’ll be more punctuation! I’d like that (says the girl who commonly forgets her apostrophes). I would gladly trade the quantity of new blogs to read for quality.
In any case, Im going to massively revamp my blogroll. Many have gone dark, some Ive kept on, and will continue to keep for sentimental reasons even though they haven’t updated since May of 2005 (and are now evidently password protected – huh!), some have changed their focus so I’ll need to recatagorize them, and many are getting more and more interesting. Im also going to add a few new guys.
If anybody has suggestions for blogs Im missing out on, please let me know. Ive noticed Im gravitating towards blogs that have authors documenting their slow recovery from crippling depression, so anything uplifting but interesting would be nice.
I promise to be around more, too. School is starting up again, which means more time in front of a computer doing some quality procrastination exercises. Ya’ll be good til then.
Punctuated Palaver 