Just some random thoughts inspired mostly by other bloggers:

• There's a section on Well, La Di Da! (who linked to us on Halloween--danke!) which addresses the whys of blogging (well, to be more accurate, the "why" of this particular blogger), which boiled down, in her case, to "Well, I put interesting stuff here rather than spam my friends," which is certainly a Noble Sentiment™. But it got me thinking, as someone who never sent interesting facts over email, exactly why I blog. It was therapy, and may still be to some extent, but I discovered that if you put worrisome things on a public web page, (shock and awe!) people worry. But somehow it wasn't as therapeutic if it was private; if I wanted to write without an audience I'd be a novelist (oh, wait...). So now I'm pseudonymous, but of course if I vent and rant and rave, the readers who knew me before will still get worried, although presumably if I say "don't worry about me" often enough, they'll just tell me to go to hell. So the question remains: why do I blog? The answer: "That's a stupid question."
  
  Well, the real answer is, like so much else, the audience. I hope for fame (I've given up on fortune), and I strive to entertain. But how do I entertain without revealing so much of myself that I destroy the anonymity that I hope for?


• Karen, another longtime reader (or at least I've been a longtime reader of hers), has a nice piece on trying to explain the weblogging phenomenon to non-webloggers. That's something I've not yet had to deal with; there's only two, possibly three, people who I know face-to-face who know about my blog. One of them inspired me to start one, one found it on his own and has been mentioned in these pages before, and the third, like Karen, met her luv via weblogging and so doesn't really need an explanation. (No link in this case to protect her privacy; besides, like I said, I'm not sure she even reads Rooster Spice and/or makes the connection. [Was "and/or" called for there, or would "or" have sufficed? Discuss and compose a three-part essay.]) There are also folks who I met over the 'net who I consider... well, if not friends, at least people I'd like to meet someday. But what worries me (and it's only a matter of time) is when a friend Googles me and comes to Rooster Spice to find out what I really think about them.


• More on the above: My wife and I actually met via e-mail, but this was OLD school, before most of the world even knew what it was: 1991. On a UNIX system like the school's mainframe, you can issue a slightly obscene-sounding command called "finger" to get information about a person; i.e. "finger squelch". Well, back in the day, you could also customize your profile, or "plan," and I had made a plan that covered an entire screenful of text. So, K, curious about the various people logged in, no doubt, typed in the finger command, saw my plan, and wrote the following email (an approximation; I didn't know its significance at the time):
  

  From: k------t@colby.edu
  
  To: s-----h@colby.edu
  
  Subject: wow...
  
  
  
  what a plan!

  
  And so, having blazed that trail, we fell in love immediately, if by immediately you mean "next year when we coincidentally were on the same floor of the same dorm."
  
  (Well, come on... I wouldn't have gone out with her after one email. That'd be, like, creepy.)