Blogs from the Past

My best friend just sent me links to two blogs - both from old high school friends I haven't seen in 15 years. One, her old boyfriend (whom I always thought wasn't nearly good enough for her), another from a guy I had something of a lust-hate relationship with. OK, it totally wasn't a relationship. And he basically had lust-hate, not-really-a-relationships with almost every girl I knew.

So I clearly had to check these blogs out.

My first thought was - yes, he really wasn't good enough for her.

My second was - does running spellcheck really take that long? Is it really so hard? Or, as my friend Jonathan would say, good grammar costs nothing, people!

And then - did I really once know these people? If you'd told me the last time I saw them that it would be the last, would I have been sad?

I was at a wedding recently and saw a handful of friends from high school. Again, friends I hadn't seen in 15 years. It was weird and wonderful to see them again, but things stayed at the "so, where do you work, how's your family, what's new with you, do you remember that time when we..." level. With these blogs, I was getting a stream-of-consciousness entry into how these guys see themselves, how they think, what they are really like today.

Holy crap.

I get it. I do. Blogs are inherently self indulgent. As I type this - I'm being entirely self-indulgent. Look at me! Aren't I smart? Don't I have important thoughts that bear writing down and being read by total strangers and old high school friends? Check me out in all my witty brilliance. But despite its misspelled and painfully articulated drawbacks, blogging is a phenomenon - a user-generated, unedited-prose-spilling-unfiltered-from-one's-brain phenomenon - that I find entirely fascinating. How much do you share? How much do you show? Do you blog about dinner last night? Rant about rantworthy topics in politics and life? Or barely blog at all, you lazy bastard!