Friday, April 29, 2005

one of us, one of us, ooh goo ga ga...*

I'm surprised to find myself here. I have a few friends that post regularly (by few I mean, well, two) on their own eblog sites, and I'd never have guessed that I was going to join them. Some inner prompting sent me here, at my computer when I should be in bed, writing to some vaporous and hypothetical electric audience. I was always the type to start a journal and then find it a year later, with several dutiful dated pages and then nothing. This could easily be the latest version. But I have found some comfort in checking in with my friends while they weren't actually looking--like some window onto their daily life distinctly different than one I might glimpse on the phone.

I don't go out and read random blogs, or spend time browsing the weird or wacky (and then emailing them to others--do we all have friends that do that? I'm not complaining, mind you, I just don't do it myself), for me the internet is functional with a few frills. I'm sure I have some mistaken unreal notion of what it means to identify one's self as a "blogger," brought on by NPR stories of the new "is it journalism" debate. And I don't really feel like that "blogger" thing has anything to do with me. Yet here I am, typing away, and I bet anything that the first thing most people do is write a nice little blog about blogging, whatever that gerund means to them. Perhaps it's tedious to my imagined jaded and experienced blogophiles--"not metablog," they sigh, "again?" (This begins to sound like Monty Python--I'll have blog, blog, blog, blog, blog and eggs and blog.) Tough. I like meta. In small doses. Which is why I forsee copious use of parentheses in future posts, if I ever get that far. Be warned.

Did I also mention the wandering train of thought? Right. I guess I've been busy enough for three years straight (more on that later, I'm sure), to give my inner voice pause. It says--"right, and where are you again exactly? Perhaps you ought to be checking on that a bit more frequently." So maybe a little technological journaling is in order. As well as forcing poems on the unsuspecting populace (warned again), because of all the poetry books on my shelves which grow dusty and wan (OK, maybe not wan) from disuse. And besides, besides meta, I like poetry. So when I get tired of myself and my own unique mundanity, I'll post poems instead. And if you've read this far you are obviously not simply the 5 second American I thought you might be. In that case, welcome. *

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