Melrose Place

     It’s getting really Melrose Place around the blog world lately.  You can see smaller groups of bloggers forming and reforming these tight knit little groups.  Then there will be one that’s in two or more groups, and people start group hopping to the new blog groups, and suddenly its mass chaos, and the next thing you know you might as well be popping your cousin, because that’s how tight and sometimes bizarre that it gets around here. 

     You can always tell who your true blogger  buddies are, because even through this whole Novel in a month and post a day November thing, with Relatives running amok, the Holidays coming, Black Friday shopping day on the day after Thanksgiving to plan and strategize over, your buddies and lovers, as Fringes so aptly put it, are the ones still stopping by your blog every single day come hell or high water, and when you do post, they’ll always drop a comment even if it’s “Yo, hip post, Dooood!” 

     I think, if I had my druthers, that I’d like to meet some of my buddies and lovers in real life, just to see how well it translates, or how much of their true selves is actually coming out in their writing and how much, when it comes down to it, is just well written fiction and acting.

     I guess, if you’re trying to truly portray the real you, and write about yourself, that most bloggers believe that their whole personality is coming out straight.  But its truly hard to see the distillation of your true essence that actually occurs when you write about yourself in the first person.  It’s like hearing yourself on tape.  Our voices sound different to us on tape because the actual vibrations of our voice are affecting how we hear ourselves.  Listening on a tape, you hear the same voice that everyone around you has always heard, appalling as it might sound to you at the time.  Blogging about yourself is much the same.  Everything that comes from your soul to the computer screen is distilled, changed, and screened to some extent by all of your innermost feelings on the subject matter in question.  You think its you, but its an image of you that you are subtly trying to project.  Others perceive you through your words differently as well.  Your inbound information for them is altered in transit by their own internal beliefs, prejudices, and prejudgments.  In reality, the information you record in your blog is altered twice before it ever makes it into the reader’s brain.  When you meet that person, in person, there’s clues, body language, facial expression, etc. that lends more accurate meaning to the info that they gather about you while you talk, react, and function.  It still goes through their internal filter, but the info is more accurate.  So why doesn’t the info sound different, like the voice, when I go back and read it later, similar to the sound of the voice thing?  It can sound different.  But every word you read invokes at least a portion of the emotions, thoughts, and feelings that you were having as you wrote, so it “sounds” mostly the same.  But if your feelings were intense, or your mood has swung, those same words can sound much different than when you first wrote them, because the information is coming through different “screens”.  You can look at that entry and go “Why in the holy hoo hoo did I write THAT last night?” 

    So at this point, I’m totally weirded out as to how I got on to this whole subject anyway.  >>Banging head against door<< >>Nice resounding BANG to that<<  I mean, we’re talking in one sentence about Melrose Place, the next about internal filters.  My apologies for rambling, I think.  Dunno.  Perhaps someone got some insight out of that.  Perhaps not.

    So back to Melrose, and our tight knit blog groups.  They always had that thing in Melrose, and 90210, One Tree Hill, you name it.  It was like Clique Sex.  No matter how many years the whole drama goes on, it seems like everyone in the group just ends up switching partners within the group, and like the Soaps, the character that tried to stab you in the back a month ago is now your bride to be.  We’re starting to get Melrose Place here.  So, on the count of three, EVERYONE SWITCH PARTNERS!

 

Michael