e-stalking

Posted by: Mom

I posted a blog yesterday that Jeremy asked me to take down, so if you caught a glimpse of it, you saw that it was pretty funny. Inappropriate, but funny. All of you that read this know me pretty well, and so nothing I say really shocks you. However, I just need to remember that there are more strangers reading this than I care to think about, so I need to be careful of what I say sometimes...but only sometimes; I'm still me ;)

I wrote a post last week about “why I blog” but this incident reminded me of the flip-side, “Why I love other people’s blog”. I always thought that once I got married and had kids, I would see my friends more often because we could have our kids play together and we would have nothing else to do but go to lunch and hang out at parks. Well, after actually having kids, I realized that was a complete fairy-tale and it takes a great deal of planning to even make a phone call. I am really lucky to see the same girls every month at Bunco and another group of friends for girl’s night out a couple times a month. However, there are old friends from my childhood, High School and even long lost family members that I’ve lost touch with over the years. Sure, there’s the occasional phone call or email, but that’s not enough for me to feel in touch with them.

This is why I am so happy that blogging has become main stream. With gas prices as high as they are today, I can no longer afford to do a drive-by for everyone I’m stalking. I’m grateful that you have all made my stalking much easier by bringing your lives into the comfort of my home, at my convenience.

Most of my friends have blogs now and I love seeing pictures and reading about the things they find interesting. I also love reading blogs of people that have no idea that I’m e-stalking them. I’ve recently found out, however, that I’m not the only one who does this. A few of my friends (you know who you are) have come out of the closet and admitted to being e-stalkers themselves. With that said, I think I give a lot of personal information out on my blog, but it’s usually about experiences, feelings and thoughts. I’m always careful not to give too much specific information such as what city we live in, what school my kids go to, when I’m going out of town and so on.

There are negative aspects of reading so many blogs. First, it’s time consuming, so I would recommend using Google Reader. This allows you to subscribe to the blogs you want to read and it notifies you when a new blog is posted, so you don’t have to go through your list each day.

Secondly, keeping up on my friends this way gives me a false sense of intimacy. I feel like I’m up-to-date and know what’s going on with them on a daily basis. So when I finally see them in person, I realize it’s been a year since we’ve actually seen each other. How can that be? I just saw you and your baby at Lagoon yesterday? Oh, wait, that was on the internet.