Blog Watch Update 1

I started keeping track of a few blogs online over the past few weeks. A few of them have not posted since before Valentine's Day - one woman gushed on her blog that her husband was so romantic because he made a roast and they ate Twizzlers while watching a chick flick, not my idea of romantic, but hey, whatever gets you going. Another blog updated the status of their building project, and I'm pleased to report that the house is coming along quite well. They have gone from laying the foundation a few weeks ago to putting down the trusses for the first floor this week. I'm interested to see what happens next week.

Needless to say, this experiment in snooping isn't nearly as interesting as I had expected, largely because it is hard to discuss baby pictures to great lengths. I picked rather mundane blogs on purpose, so that's part of my frustration. I think part of my fascination with this comes from my struggle with privacy in the digital age. For example, yesterday I had a store ask me for my phone number in case they had a problem with their credit card machine. I balked and gave them my office number, completely turned off by the idea of this nice woman in the knitting store having my phone number. I also recently joined Facebook, which I have always resisted because of privacy issues. I am finding that the number of setting available on Facebook are a little bit confusing, though I feel pretty confident that you can use the site to keep in touch with friends and still keep some level of privacy. I have no idea where this fear of invasion of privacy came from, I don't think it stems from an unhealthy fear of identity theft (part of me would be flattered if someone used my identity for something else). I have had a few instances of people having my information and abusing it by calling me and leaving scary messages (changed my number once because of this). Maybe it is more of a general feeling of "none of your f**king business" that runs deep in my personality. Which brings me back to putting pictures of your children on the Internet where any stranger can look at them. When there are great social utilities like Facebook and MySpace which allow you to only let people you know look at your site...maybe they don't know. Maybe they aren't that concerned. I'm fascinated by this.

Voyeur

It is kind of funny how interested I am in cruising the Internet just looking at other people's lives. I'm not really into trying to find anything serious out about them, but I did spend at least a half an hour just flipping through the 'Next Blog' function on Blogger and just looking briefly at the page that came up. Most of it was simply a mix between family photos and artists, but there were a lot of people who were pretty excited about their knitting and craft projects. Being a person who also knits and picks up random crafts occasionally, I understand this completely - most people don't want to listen to you talk about knitting unless they do it themselves, and we tend to seek each other out online for tips and ideas. However, when I do run into another knitter, it is very hard to start up a conversation. "I really like to make sweaters." "Really? I prefer socks." See, it only goes so far! But back to blog watching. There were a few people who had started a blog on their wedding, which again I can understand, though I want to mercilessly ridicule these people at the same time. They will someday turn into the people who blog about their family, which will be read by other family members and friends and the random stranger like me. I thought as I was cruising by these blogs, "Should I leave a message? What would I say, something like 'Nice family'?" It was as if some part of me wanted to let them know that they were advertising their life online and allowing people like me, or people with not so pure intentions, into that life. Most of these families seemed like the pretty religious conservative types, talking about going to church and their kids going through first communion or whatever the Protestant equivalent is. I didn't accidentally run across a blog about a family who lets their kids dye their hair and start a band. I would like to read something like that.

I could definitely see how you could get obsessed with following these blogs. I find that this could become a perfectly interesting way to replace celebrity gossip as a mind numbing pastime. I firmly believe that everyone needs an activity that just dulls them a little and makes their mind relax. I think that is why TV is so popular. Watching hours of TV isn't the answer, but there are other ways to do it. I think if you are watching hours of documentaries that is a different thing. Gossip sites serve a similar purpose, but leave you with the same dirty feeling as daytime soap operas. Really, we are just paying attention to either soaps or celebrities to see the clothes and the hair. We know they are just as deep as a bathtub.

I think this will become a new pet project, a new form of wandering. I'm going to spend some time looking through the random posts on blogging websites and see if there are any families that post regularly enough for me to report on, and then I'll keep track of what they are up to and report every so often. We'll see how this goes - I could quickly tire of this as I do of other new project, or I could work on turning myself into a Perez Hilton-esque pseudo celebrity via other people's mundane everyday lives.

Oh what's the use!

I have not posted in a long time, perhaps because I have been busy with other things, like finishing a thesis, reading other books for entertainment, and following the Britney Spears saga to an embarrassing degree. The rest of my life has been continuing though. I enjoy my job, but there are times when I get frustrated. We are expecting a lot of Iraqis this year, and while the numbers are not as high as many had hoped, only part of the reason lies in the admissions process - another part has to do with Iraqis not convinced that they want to come to the United States once they learn how hard life can be here. And those that are here are finding that things they had expected, like free education for as long as they need, does not work out the way they think it should. They are rather jarred by the fact that we expect them to get jobs even though they are not fluent in English. They also don't like that they are expected to do just about any job, not just the ones they think are best suited for them. I'm not impressed. I had one fellow tell me he wished he had not come here. I was thrilled.

But there are only a few days when I am frustrated by that. Today was only one of them. Tomorrow I expect will be better.

I spent a lot of time online talking to an old friend, and it got me thinking about people I have lost touch with, some intentionally, others not. There is a temptation to look these people up online, though I'm not sure what would come of that. I mean, what would I say? I think I want a chance to prove that I have changed, but I fear that I would only find out that I really haven't changed as much as I had thought. Life has turned out much different from what I had thought, but I think it is better than what I had envisioned. I thought I would have a lot of conflict in my personal life, but really that has become a quite dependable and nice thing. I have a nice place to live which always surprises me...I'm not sure why I have this temptation to find people from the past. Seems crazy, don't you think?