a little introspection

I have always thought blogging to be intriguing and yet a little bizarre. I have had this blog for many years now and cannot call myself an avid blogger as my times of writing are always few and far between and most often I don't really enjoy it. I do however, read several people's blogs daily. Most being people I know or know through someone and find relatively interesting, or some just being design blogs by pseudo well-known design people. This morning I stumbled across an old acquaintance's blog and skimmed it for content to see if I was interested in reading it. This is where I found an article from the New York times by a used-to-be-public blogger. It is very long and I did not intend to read it all, but I did. I found it to be interesting, thought-provoking, and a little sad. It blows my mind how far this blogging practice can be taken and how it is used societally to share gossip, stalk people, and as this article seems to think—turn into a way to comment and ridicule someone else without even having to know them. I'm not against blogging by any means, I've just never quite understood why people take it so far.

Turning back to my personal story on blogging, I feel like a phony. Somehow, I enjoy writing on my blog on rare occasions even though I don't think anyone actually reads it anymore. And I don't know that I really care if they do or not. Of course, it would be nice if someone found me interesting enough to follow, but I don't really set myself up well for that. And I don't think there is a chance of me being very interesting in blog-form. I know myself to be more of a sit-and-have-coffee-with type.

I keep stopping and staring off into space attempting to figure out why I keep this blog and continue to post when I don't think anyone reads it except perhaps my husband on the rare occasion that he thinks about its existence. I never enjoyed or felt the need to journal or write in a diary. Oh, I had plenty of diaries growing up, but none that have more than 1-5 posts in them. I always received diaries for everything. It seems that a large majority of women, especially an older generation, finds diaries and journals to be necessary to everyday life and hoped to urge me to write my random daily activities down for someone many years from now to find and read. I think I received 3 for engagement gifts—none of which I used. I wanted to. I do find the idea of them nostalgic and almost beautiful, as I would greatly enjoy coming across my now passed grandmother's diary, but every time I sat down to start this journalling thing, nothing I had to write down seemed remotely within the categories of nostalgic, beautiful or readable.

And yet, when I do want to write, I keep coming back to the blog. Perhaps it is because I am of the technological generation and I prefer typing to writing. I've always appreciated the quote from "You've Got Mail" when Meg's character says "Good night dear void." Or maybe it has something to do with me getting tired of so many diaries piling up in the bookshelf with only a few pages written in. Maybe I do want some sort of documentation of my existence over the years. Or maybe this is just my way of actually verbalizing thoughts sometimes, especially those that I would not be able to communicate well in person or would have anyone that might find the verbalization compelling. No matter what, here I sit, writing yet again in my unpatterned way and wondering why I do.