Wednesday Wonders #13: The Blog

I wrote something very similar on my knitting blog today, but what the heck, I want to honor the same Wonders on both blogs today!

Today’s Wednesday Wonders aren’t people, but they are the ways I communicate with people: My blogs! Today is the 4th anniversary of my blogging adventures. This personal blog goes back to April 1, 2005. It is always good, I think, to start a Fool’s Journey on April Fool’s Day! I mixed my everyday life with my knitting adventures until May 2007, when I had to separate into two blogs, one that shows up on search engines and that I give out links to strangers to, which is for my knitting thoughts, and one for life updated, chatting and opinionating for an audience of just friends. If you’ve read for a while, you know why that happened. If you haven’t, well, I found out the hard way how innocent statements can be twisted and taken the VERY wrong way by someone who is upset!

I am really grateful that someone thought blogs up, because I have always been one of those people who kept diaries, journals, logs and other kinds of personal records. I don’t have the best memory for details, so it’s helped me that I wrote a lot down in my past (and grrr to the ex husband who threw away my graduate school journal). It helps remind me of what I have learned from my mistakes, and what joys have popped up among the sorrows and drudgery. I love having these bloggy records of what I’ve been going through the last four years. I get a lot of laughs looking back! I am glad I wrote down so many fun and funny kid stories, and glad they aren’t publicly searchable, though!

This personal blog, especially, has a lot of meaning for me. It has helped me avoid repeating mistakes and shows me how much I’ve learned about job searching, which seems to be the topic SO darned often! I am happy that so many of my memories will be here to read in the future…at least I hope. Something has been nagging me in the back of my mind lately, saying maybe I ought to print out all my blogs. Readers, do you see your blogs as permanent or ephemeral? I am I weird to worry about losing this stuff? I am trusting Blogger.com with my life here!!

And of course, there’s one more reason that my blogs are Wednesday Wonders: they have introduced me to people I’d never have gotten to know otherwise, and I treasure the chances I’ve had to get to know some of my readers, and to at least get glimpses of some of the others. Where else but in the “blogosphere” (which I think of as the place mean and somewhat ill-educated people who pick at newsmakers live, but I realize also includes US) can you keep up with the daily lives of fascinating women and men from California to Wisconsin to New England, or from Denmark to Pakistan…to right down the road! I know I’ve said it before, but it’s time to do so again: thank you all for reading, and to those of you whose blogs I read: thank you for writing!
I really enjoy blogs. They are as dramatic as novels, but they feature real people. They are as educational as textbooks, but funnier and more “real.” Blogs are human, and they bring people together. There’s so much that separates us today—so much “us vs. them” thinking, so it is great to see how people with different views , of different backgrounds and from different places do share so much in common. We love our families, we love saying what we think about world events, AND we respect others. I am glad I have respectful people reading!

Hmm, on an email list (another thing I like!) today someone asked what makes us happy. I guess my answer is my blogs, who are four years old, and the blogs of all my friends, mentors and knitting companions!

Leave my blog a happy anniversary greeting if you’d like to! I thank you all for reading commenting, and sympathizing.