What Is The Deal With Blogging?

The first time someone invited me to visit their blog, my reaction was "Why would I want to read what you have to say?" The approach had a familiar ring, "And if you invite three friends, and they invite three friends, we'll fill our garages full of crap we can never sell or ever use ourselves in an average lifetime."

And then I saw a few more blogs that reminded me of Christmas newsletters. The ones where the kids are fresh from perfectland dripping wet with self-esteem and the parents, in all modesty, are doing more that year than the rest of us schmoes could possibly do in a lifetime, bless their hearts.

And then my daughters, perfect darlings themselves, started blogging as did other family members and friends and suddenly it looks there is a movement going on here--like iPods, avocados, and going to the gym.

Suddenly, I'm late. Everyone has a date to the dance but me. But wait, "You there in the back room, sweeping. Is that you Cinderella?"

So here I am blogging. I have a picture so far; I have a bunch of words tossed about. But my question remains, "Why in the world would anybody want to read what I have to say?"

And maybe that's the trick. Nobody is actually reading blogs, it is just a weird conspiracy by devious English teachers trying to get people to write again. Or maybe it is a consortium of the people making digital cameras needing distribution.

Or maybe it's just fun to amuse ourselves and the twelve people we pay to come to our blogs. And that's enough. What better amusement can one be involved in? True there is a lot actually, but what the hey, if scribbling blog droppings can be as amusing as this first blog post, perhaps I will post more.

One of my self-proclaimed titles is "writer", so maybe this will just be a place where I do that, so I can say to people I am trying to impress, "Yeah I have a blog, several iPods, and just this morning I went to the gym.

I guess if real people start to read this stuff, beyond the other three personalities in my head, I hope they (you) don't expect much. I have this weird perfectionist thing going where if I think actual humans will be reading this I will spend forever making it grammatically correct and put commas, where they should go.

I also might be tempted to skim off part of the sarcasm and make sure I don't offend people--at least on purpose. So I guess I give myself licence to dump rough draft stuff here and maybe even some stuff that is a little more polished like the stuff I wrote on a train commuting into New York City many years ago, or my thoughts on the Vermont Maple Blueberry salad from Zupas.

Well that feels like enough for a first blog entry. Now how do you spell check this stuff?