Bleaders?

I'm reading Julie & Julia book- about Julie someone cooking her way through the JC Mastering the Art of French COoking in a year, and blogging about it. The blog became a huge hit, and she got a book deal out of it and tons of dedicated readers and TV interviews. Which leads me to wonder about the principles of blogging. Why are we typing out so much of our personal lives on these things, sending it out into the world as if it's not private (when very often it is). Who knows who reads mine. I don't get that many comments, so I'm assuming hardly anyone, but it's an interesting concept. It's fascinating to think about why we do it. To get publicity? Most people are actually trying to get away from that. To pique the interest of someone new and maybe foreign? What do we have to blog about that's so damn important and interesting?

I started this back in August of 05, so I haven't been blogging that long, but I have read plenty of entertaining blogs. Blogs about the life of truck driver, updated about every 15 minutes. Blogs about a woman working as a partner in a law firm, though I heard somewhere that her i.d. was discovered and she was fired. Blogs about wedding planning and cleaning and going through med school. Just general blogs about people's lives. Online diaries that we feel obliged to write in on a semi-daily level and that we treat with the upmost respect. I can't go very long without writing something in mine, even if I have to rack my brain to think of something interesting I've done in New York recently. did I mention I finally saw Ground Zero? Or that I was finally going to a Broadway play tonight? Didn't think so. But I'm sure I've told plenty of stories about stepping in dog poop and not being able to flag down a cab. Or about cabbies who preferred to drive me around in circles rather than take me to my final destination.

In 4th grade, I carried my diary around with me- it was one of those cheap pleather numbers with a page for each day and a lock that inevitably would come unglued. I used it as an actual diary as well as for conversations with my best friend during classes. What happened was that one day in gym class, one of my classmates found it and he managed to read about half of it out loud to an appropriately amused audience until I finally realized what was going on and put a stop to it. I can still feel the way I felt then right now, and trust me it wasn't pretty. I yelled and screamed and cried and actually got excused from the rest of gym class so that I could go and cry in the bathroom with two of my friends to comfort me. I have always been a private person. One of the reasons I made friends so quickly when I got to college is that no one could figure out anything about me. Everything was a mystery.

Yet here I am blogging about it years later, in a place that is incredibly public and not unlike something in 1984. But here i am anyway, putting it out there "anonymously", supposedly.