Lost in Translation

Whew... I think I'm going to make it through my first weekend of posting... ever. YEAH me!! Only three more weekends to go!! :-)

So a few months ago I downloaded this software onto my computer. It takes your blog posts and puts them into book format. It's not perfect, I can't get the pages to look exactly like I want since there are only 10 - 15 page layouts to choose from but it is a start. So I slurped up (that's what the software calls it) my entries from 2005.

For the past month or so I have been messing with them and changing page layouts and colors and such. All of this in an effort to get the book ready to "publish." Basically another paper product to add to my already buried office. But we won't talk about that.

Anyhow, after a month of doing this it just dawned on me yesterday that none of the comments are on these posts. And more importantly I didn't really miss them. I was so caught up in remembering all the things I was writing about and enjoying that trip down memory lane that I never even noticed that none of the comments had been picked up in the "slurping."

Lately I've had some people come into the comments who obviously have not been reading long. They come here, they make some hurtful or off the wall comment about a situation which they really don't know much about and then they move on with their day.

Sometimes for me, at least, it is hard to remember that these people don't know me. I have to remember to take some of these comments for what they are, a passing drive by. As if someone on the street yelled something at me. They wouldn't know me and I wouldn't let my feelings be hurt by them but somehow in the blog world those "boundaries" if you will get lost.

We find ourselves getting attached to these people, whom we barely know and we get hurt if they say something rude or inconsiderate. However, what we must remember is that these people in the computer only know little bits of our lives. They know what we tell them, no more and no less.

These people also have lives of their own and sometimes they can just be having a bad day and take it out in the comment section of some one's blog. Sometimes when the screen is protecting us we hide behind it and say things we would never dream of saying in real life.

Thus is the nature of the beast. So while I love all of you coming here and following my life I need to remember that if someone stops reading my site I can't take it personally. Sometimes people just get busy or their interest change. I know I have about 80 blogs on my favorites and I don't always get to them all every week. Sometimes I only get to some of them once a month.

It's not that I have developed a disliking for the ones I don't check it's just that things get busy or my real life gets in the way of my blog life. I also seem to check into the ones who are having a crisis more often then the ones who are living regular life. I notice the same things happening in the stats of my blog. When things are not going well or when I have lots to write about more people come back more often then when things are boring.

Such is the way it is. No more... no less....