What a blog can't replace

"Well I wrote about it on my blog... didn't you read it?"

This is a question I often asked the last time I was blogging regularly. In a way, it was just laziness, or fatigue. A lot of energy goes into these posts (although not as much as for other people, I'm sure). I learned yesterday that when it comes to writing, I am a "gusher" (as opposed to an "eker").  That means that the words come to me quickly, but not really in the way that I really want them to. I can think in writing, which means that my first drafts (or zero drafts, or sometimes, really, -1 drafts) are more long hand notes, reacting to what I've read, a long way from analysis. And while analysis is the goal of a dissertation, it doesn't have to be of a blog. And I don't think it will be for this one.

Yet I digress. What a blog can't replace is actually telling your story to a friend, face to face. And while that may seem obvious, for any number of reasons involving media, presence, etc, it was something that took me some getting used to. And still does.

It's a little like when I'd tell my mom something, and just assume that she'd tell it to my dad, and vice versa. But of course the fact is, he wanted to hear it straight from me, too. And as might also be fairly obvious, even though I'm writing candidly about some aspects of my life here, I'm filtering, sifting for the good parts, panning for anecdotal gold. Real friends want to hear the story, mud and all.  Some just want to hear the mud, and the nuggets that appear here are superfluous. So as I keep this up, I'll try and remember that even if I'm writing with friends and family in mind, I should be ready to tell them the "real" story, when they ask.