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.