Well, now, how did we end up here?

Since the beginning of the month I've been meaning to write about how I ended up in the midst of the blogosphere. I often find it really frustrating that my friends don't get the attraction. These days more of them are getting pulled into the Geekdom and even some who aren't are reading this blog. What better place to explain and what better time to do it than the homestretch of NaBloPoMo? (FYI every time I write that abbreviation - or say it for that matter - I have to slow down, screw up and back space a bunch of times.)

When I told Miflohny about this blog she said she'd read whatever I was mentioning but politely declined the invitation to the blogosphere since she felt it was an awfully impersonal way for people to keep up with friends and family. I had never realized people used blogs that way and this is the story of why.

Many, many, many years ago I was working for a specialized circulation magazine. The people there liked me so would often give me jobs for which I was entirely unqualified simply to keep me fed and clothed and because they felt that smart outranked experienced. (Love that attitude!) I showed my gratitude by surfing the internet a lot. It's so good they don't know what an awful person I am.

At the time Dawson's Creek was on. I was just getting obsessed with it and, somehow, I really don't know how, I ran across this site called Dawson's Wrap. Two extremely intelligent and well-educated hipster chicks wrote snarky, incisive recaps of Dawson's Creek every week. I loved the feeling of rehashing the show with someone since, at the time, no one I knew watched it. (Apparently I was not alone. That site became Mighty Big TV and then Television Without Pity. It's one of the biggest pop culture web sites on the web and employs way more than just 2 chicks now. It does not employ me, however. I didn't even get an interview. It's OK, I'm not bitter. Just crushed.) They published just that once a week and I lived for Thursdays.

As I poked around the site during the rest of the week I noticed some links. Each of the women had online journals. So did some of their friends. So occasionally I would go over to one of those journals and read. Sars had a specific publication schedule - every Tuesday, broke up the week nicely with the Thursday recaps - and I fell in love with her humor and began to read religiously. I clicked on every link since I had no grasp of the preview bar at the bottom of my window and since it was all so new and fresh that every link seemed a stroke of genius. It was years before I could pass by a linked word without clicking even though it didn't take me long to realize that if she was talking about a book that'd just be the book's Amazon page.

Some months later Sars was nominated for a Diarist Award. These awards were (Are? Pretty sure were is right. There was some controversy. Some ballot box stuffing. It was a popularity contest not a talent competition. It got ugly in only the way that anonymous commenters and flame wars can be ugly.) given out quarterly. The nominees are posted for a period of time so people can vote then winners are announced and they can put a shiny new award picture on their web site as long as they know the correct code. I toodled over there and read some of the nominees. I read the archives, sometimes all the archives of certain nominees, and I picked out a few favorites. It then became my routine at work each day to go to the Diarist page and click on my old nominated favorites for updates (Hello potential employers! I am efficient and trustworthy.). Many quarters later I was still confining myself to the elite group first nominated with Sars. Most of these people wrote anonymously and if their family or friends read there were strict disclaimers about what sort of meddling was allowed. Almost everyone who wrote about personal stuff had a horror story about someone being offended by a rant that was meant as a brain cleanser or about something that was meant as a joke and came off a little too true. A lot of those people had closed up shop on their known blogs and come to a new space with their anonymity and their stern disclaimer language intact.

Eventually I branched out into the nominees and winners from other quarters. From there, as I'm sure you all know, it was like a virus. Each blog just tells you who their friends are and links to interesting posts or people with riveting life stuff happening and you end up reading more and more almost without meaning to. I had 10 or 12 people I read weekly and I'd read about someone who had 100 or more daily reads and my mind boggled. Not so much anymore. It seems an easy thing to have happen. If people are prolific (Hello NaBloPoMo participants!) it can take me an hour or more to get through my daily reads. I have weekly reads too, and then there's the new people from NaBloPoMo who I'm getting to know. I don't have time to read someone's whole archives these days, that way madness lies. But god I'd like to with a lot of people. Miflohny, once she became pleasantly surprised that I wasn't just chronicling my commute for the information of my out of town relatives, made the supreme commitment and read all of my archives in order from the very shaky beginnings. Now she will occasionally e-mail me a comment and say, "I'm almost caught up." Which is how I know it's time to post a couple of new entries. Oddly enough I haven't had that e-mail this month.

I find myself overwhelmed with the sheer variety of people I'm seeing through the randomizer (please keep that baby running come December 1st and beyond, it's like yummy candy and I need candy). I want to read all day and all night but I am expected to work rather a lot at my job these days and at home there has been massive overhaul pre-party and now there is Christmas to be hog tied and beaten into submission with a tinsel covered stick. I'm not the sort of person who can read one entry and be all, "Not for me." I have to read everyone for a little while, check out some archives, look at the Flickr photos and then eventually trickle off with the reading if it's actually not for me. I'm stubborn like that, I don't like to let anyone go.

So what I'm really looking forward to is the awarding of NaBloPoMo prizes. I feel like that'll be a manageable (though still extensive) list that I can treat like the old Diarist Award nominees. I can cuddle with them over the next year and get to know them and decide with whom I gel before we embark on this delicious freakshow again next year.

In the event this whole prize list thing doesn't pan out for me, though, please stop by the comments section and tell me where to find your favorite blog.