Wednesday 12 August 2009

Why Blog?

A few days ago I had an interesting conversation about my blog.

Yes, you read that right. I used 'interesting' and 'my blog' in the same sentence.

This discussion about my blog began innocently over the personal postings of my blog. A friend of mine and I have spoken about my blog from time to time. He doesn't get it. He'll read it when I write a little review or something to that effect that interests him and tweet about it, but other than that he doesn't see the point. We speak on a semi-daily basis and he knows all about my life, so why read about it? Also, he is vehement disagreement of my postings about my love life and when it has gone wrong. He has reason to be in vehement disagreement. Many, many, many years ago, long before I was blogging on Blogger even, he and I were an item and it went horribly wrong. He wasn't aware of my blog and in my rage I told the world what he did and directed them in an indirect manner to his MySpace profile by giving several obvious hints. Eventually he found it, read it, and deleted me from his friends on MySpace. We had words. I changed my post and he re-added me as a friend. Ironically, this whole incident opened us up to becoming friends somehow. And, we have remained friends since.

Since then I have been honest with anyone I may date about my blog. Not that they all dash out and read it. Believe me it says a lot about how someone really feels about you if they are dating you, know you have a blog and DON'T bother to read it. I tend to get a bit reckless with my blogging in those relationships, as if I'm daring them to have a peek. However, I still don't expose confidences. I also do not name them (Well okay, when I'm REALLY angry I have, but have since removed those names). I do, however, expose my feelings and insecurities about said relationships.

So we were having the usual disagreement about my blog and he brought up some interesting points. First, he pointed out that my posting about someone else and what they've done is the same as someone taking naked pictures of me and then putting them up but with the face blacked out. I did not agree. I said my angry posts about injustices were similar to someone taking pictures of me doing something wrong to someone else and then posting pictures of it for all to see but with my face blocked out. And, if I were caught doing something like that then yes, posting pictures with my face blocked out was justified

He pointed out that instead of blogging about it I should TALK to the person. I responded that with the exception of him I have always done both. In his opinion that's just weird. Who cares? Who reads that stuff? I said it was surprising the amount of people with voyeuristic tendencies. (However, in my head I was thinking about the average amount of visits Sitemeter tells me I get a day- five. Yes, five people a day read my blog and those who are not part of 'My Stalkers' to the right find it by accident while they're searching for something else. I love Sitemeter, but I digress)

Then he pointed out that people can and do change (he did) and just because someone did me wrong when that blog post goes up, it's up there forever. What if an ex’s new girlfriend came across it and judged him based on what was there. My response to that was 1. my name isn't even on this blog or any site linking to it, so aside from my picture how would the ex's girlfriend know it was me 2. no one who has done me wrong has their name on my site (anymore). Thus it would be a bit difficult for people who didn't know me personally to make the connection and 3. if my ex's girlfriend is researching my blog to find out about him, then my ex should be more concerned about the tenuous state of their relationship or the fact that he's possibly dating an obsessive bunny boiler rather than the fact that there's something not very flattering about him up here.

Finally, my friend said something powerful that stuck with me and has bothered me since. He said that in his view my putting up private details of a relationship was unethical. He went on to add that when I posted what I posted about him it felt like an invasion of privacy and a breach of trust. He also said that in the past few years he has sometimes worried about spending time with me in case he did something to piss me off and I posted a blog about it. That hurt... a lot. I didn’t have anything to say in response but to apologise over and over for something I did years ago and got a bit teary. He told me to stop being melodramatic and it wasn’t as bad as I was making it out to be.

Maybe I've just breached his trust again by posting this but he made some very valid points about my blog and that last one followed me around like a pack of yippy dogs snapping at my ass.

I took my bitten-up butt over to some friends’ house a few days later and told them about this conversation. My friends just laughed. “I can see his point about invasion of privacy,” one of them said, “but he’s one to talk about a breach of trust after what he did to you years ago. If you have remained his friend and trusted him for this long after all of your history, then he can trust you…and does. He was just making a point and you were being melodramatic.”

“Frankly," another added, "maybe we should all be worried about being called out for treating others badly. If we all lived in fear that unkind acts towards others would be posted for all to see, maybe we’d all treat each other better.”

Somehow I don’t see my blog as some type of societal moral policeman. And, I’ve not been too nice to people myself at times. Maybe somewhere there is an anti-H~ blog.

I had a hard serious think about the reasons why I blog and came up with the following reasons:

1. I blog when I have a thought that might possibly perhaps maybe be somewhat kind of
a bit profound.

2. I blog when something strikes me as funny and I want to share it.

3. I blog when I've done or seen or read something interesting (or horribly dull) and I want to review it.

4. I blog to keep peeps back in the good ol' U.S. of A. updated on what I've been up to, although I've not been too good at that lately. They can find more about what I've been doing on Facebook or Twitter than on here.

5. Finally as previously discussed, I blog as an emotional outlet in lieu of therapy. It's psychologically purging to tell the world my thoughts and fears and get anonymous support (and sometimes free advice) either through comments or emails. And let's face it, when I'm angry I want to let the whole world know. I scream it from my rooftop and then after having a friend pick me up from the police station for a noise violation, I come home and quietly blog about it. Sometimes I'm quite open and a lot of times I exaggerate. I'm talking about being angry at things in general--from current events to love life kafuffles.

But maybe I should be a bit more editorial about what I put on here about my personal life. After all isn't it kinda like throwing stones in a glass house?

Stop by in a few months and see if I've had a change of opinion about being too personal.

Oh and if you're going to go back to my old blog to try to figure out who my friend is, maybe you should think about the quality of your own life. Why is who that friend is even important? In the greater scheme of things why was writing about all of this even important?

I think I've just entered some type of blogger's existential crisis.

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