One of the highlights from my weekend in DC was spending an evening with Janet, Zandria, and OPH. We’ve all met before, so I wasn’t full of nerves like last time. My sister dropped me off at Poste for happy hour, and OPH exclaimed, “Yes, you’re wearing green! It wouldn’t be RA without green.” Yes, these are my people.
We chatted over drinks and truffle fries before moving along to dinner, but after our first-choice tapas place estimated an hour-long wait for a table, we headed to Austin Grill and proceeded to graze our way through a table of appetizers. Our conversation covered everything from family and jobs to the wonders of the iPhone and how OPH and I should see The Hangover. It was only when Janet realized that our licenses were from all different entities (Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and DC) that I remembered that we did not come by our friendship honestly, in the real-world sense of it. There are no college stories to relay or job miseries to share. We met online! There’s no stigma, right? When it became obvious that we had lingered in our booth for too long, Janet asked, “Another drink?”
Why not?
The four of us ended up at a bar where Janet’s husband, Andrew, was meeting someone. We made the rounds of introductions and ordered drinks, and Andrew’s friend commenced the ice-breaking.
“So! What are all your blogs called?”
Janet jokingly shushed him up, as though “blog” were a dirty word out in public. Don’t say it!
“Fine, fine,” he conceded. “What are your online writing spaces called?”
Oh, man. Well, hello, blogging as corporate-babble! Everyone had a laugh, and the conversation eventually shifted to other, less-internet-based topics.
But still, I wondered, how the heck do I explain this phenomenon to someone? It seems to me that people’s perceptions of blogs are influenced strongly by their first exposure to the medium. Depending on that first experience, the word “blog” might elicit memories of a dramatic Xanga journal, an eye-searing MySpace page, an everyone’s-doing-it LiveJournal, a blustery political site, a beautiful photography venue, or a professional opinion column. These very different embodiments of what is essentially the same thing (a user-generated website) make me hesitate to describe my own site because I have no idea where the person’s perception lies. If I talk about my blog, will I seem whiny/self-indulgent/egocentric/delusional/opinionated/swimming in free time? Do I care that much? Apparently, yes.
Ultimately, I’m fine with keeping my online and my real-life personas separate, and JG’s teaching career is a convenient crutch for my secrecy. The lines are starting to blur just slightly as I meet more blog friends, but when it comes to showing this site to people in my actual life, I am a cautious gatekeeper. I don’t feel confident that I can articulate what exactly “blog” means to me, so the end result is that I get all squirmy when someone asks me about my online writing space.
6 comments
I act like I am just a casual observer of the blog world and know little about it to those that talk about blogging. I really like the seperate lines. My one nervous spot is that I have a lot of friends that are starting to twitter and my twitter account is my personal blog account. What do you do when the worlds start to run into each other.
La came to my wedding. She was my only blog-friend to do so. I sat her at a table with a bunch of my other young friends who I thought she’d get along with. She did, but several people later said to me something about “that girl at our table… the one you met online or something?” like it was the weirdest thing. Hello, I met my HUSBAND online. That’s what we were all there celebrating. Why shouldn’t an online friend also attend?
My husband has never read my “online writing space” if that tells you how top secret I keep it. I had it before we even started dating, so he respects it as my space. He knows it exists, even knows kind of what I write about, and he could definitely look it up easily enough, but he doesn’t. There are a few people I know from real life (that term bothers me because my online friends are real life friends, too, right?) that read my blog, but mostly it is read by folks I’ve never met face to face. And I’m okay with that.
I don’t think I’d be able to write in my own voice if people in my family or my circle of friends read it. I’ve been maintaining the damn thing for over 5 years now and I’d hate to have to go and edit out everything that mentioned my family or close friends just so they wouldn’t be insulted and/or embarrassed!!
I have a secret hope that my X-husband will never find my “online writing space”…other than that I don’t feel too odd telling people I have a website/blog/space/whatever. It’s harder to explain the relationships than it is to explain the actual writing, it’s hard for me to describe to non-bloggers that I have all these friends all over the country that I would not hesitate to have lunch with…and that we met through “online writing spaces”.
Even writing it out kind of makes me feel awkward.
Sigh. I guess that means I’m still a blogging neophyte.
xox
I know just how you feel. I am hesitant to bring up blog-related stories when hanging out with friends and/or family, but Tim has no qualms about saying “Oh, yeah, Audrey wrote about that on her blog!” And then I feel self-conscious and nerdy and like a big goober, even though nobody is giving me a “you’re a goober” look or reacting in any negative way at all. I’ve gotten worse about it lately, too, downplaying my blog as just this place where sometimes I put a dog picture but you won’t find much of anything meaningful there these days. I need to get over it and own the fact that my blog has evolved along with my life, but that’s proving to be easier said than done.
Great story
the online writing space thing still has me giggling.
The lines for me are so blurry, but mostly drawn at work (definite no) and people who just don’t get blogs/teh internets. But then, those people don’t really care!
Leave a comment