Em's thoughts on blogging made me think about why I blog. I know why I started my blog, over a year ago - my husband was losing his battle with cancer and I was more or less housebound with him, and going crazy in a world that revolved around medication schedules and CT scans. I went weeks without talking to anyone who wasn't a medical professional of some sort, and that really sucked. Blogging was my contact with the outside world and a chance to talk about something frivolous, most of the time, though the reality did intrude on the blog fairly regularly.

I do edit myself on my blog - I edit my thoughts before I write, I sometimes go back and delete because What the Hell Was I Thinking? I seldom edit my language because this is how I talk. I don't check my punctuation enough (like you hadn't noticed) and only spell-check when I really suspect I spelled something wrong, and often don't notice my typos until later. I seldom try to sound Deep and Insightful because, well, I'm not, and I can't quite pull it off without feeling very self-conscious. I have no rich and colorful stories to make you laugh and cry and bring a tear to your eye, I have a new coffeemaker and home improvement projects and a job that drives me crazy and a bunch of UFOs and an aversion to knitting from charts. You want deep thought and wonderful writing and gorgeous, complex knitting pictures and no cussing, look elsewhere.

I guess blogging is my lazy equivalent of Morning Pages, though in this case it's more like whenever pages, and they aren't as Open a Vein honest as Morning Pages apparently are supposed to be, but I'm a private person and I'll decide what I want to share with the world. But at the same time, I like the feeling that I have a readership besides me, in a way it keeps me more honest than if I really did keep totally private morning pages - I don't know if that makes sense, but it's how I feel. All previous attempts to keep a journal were canceled due to extreme boredom on my part, but the blog isn't boring (at least to me) yet. And I'll blog until it stops being a pleasant diversion and becomes Another Job, and then I'll give it up and find some other outlet for my need to share my lamest innermost thoughts with the universe.

I'm a lousy commenter. I don't leave enough comments when I see things worth comment, not because I don't want to but because I'm usually stealing blogtime from something else I need to get done and it would be too easy to get into commenting and eat up even more time. I need to try to leave more comments and give more feedback, because as Em said, it does matter. I do like the feedback I receive, though I'm honestly still amazed that anybody besides my kids acually reads this thing.

And them's my thoughts on Em's thoughts, which were very good thoughts indeed. Now I think I'll get dressed and take the dog for the morning walkie. He has moved from his bed to sit under my chair - this dog has an atomic clock hard-wired in his brain - which means it's time for me to get moving.