Pondering Blogs

These days, I rarely read other people's blogs. I want to distinguish between the kind of blog that is aware its audience is huge, say, Joel Spolsky, with the kind of blog that is small, say, mine.

I doubt anyone reads my blog that regularly, but if you do, you amaze me. When I get on a roll, I'm writing pages and pages of stuff, which meanders from one topic to the next. If you don't care about a subject matter that I care about (say, movies and sports), then my blog may seem half interesting, half boring.

I was reading a blog from a coworker. Several of my coworkers have blogs, but their suitably neutral. One guy merely points out interesting websites. His personal life is mostly left out of it. Another person has a little more to say, but again, not a lot of details. The one I'm reading isn't that much more in depth in terms of what's going on, and I respect that. After all, no matter how few people you think read it, someone is reading it. You didn't put it out on the Internet to keep it from the public, even in the back of your mind.

The thing that's fascinating about reading a blog of someone you know is that you see another side to that person. You say to yourself "is that what he (or she) was thinking?"

To be fair, some people only write in a certain state of mind, say, when they're depressed. That can give you a skewed view of who they are. And, if they're blogging, they know it's out for anyone to read, so there's a sense, like getting dressed for a night out, that you need to make yourself look better than usual. At the very least, maybe, caring a bit about grammar (which I generally don't).

Now it's possible, reading a blog, that you might get only one view of that person, and most likely, you are, assuming there's something to be mined out of reading a blog.

Perhaps the most jarring difference I saw was my friend Justin's. It's really hard to call what he writes a blog. It's not always about something real. The blog would come across rather intense while his personality seemed rather calm. I found it difficult, at first, to reconcile that he had written it at all.

As it turns out, Justin can be intense as a person, but you just don't see that right away. That kind of intensity can drive people away. I've told him that he's less nice to people the better you know him. Sometimes I find it surprising he keeps his friends, except that he's actually rather loyal to his friends.

I know people who read blogs to gain insight into people. Sometimes, it's to gain insight about a specific person. Sometime, that person serves as something representative, i.e., a guy's point of view, a girl's point of view. I've known guys who say they read blogs by women because they want to understand them, though I find that thinly veiled to mean, they're kinda hot for them, and want to figure what makes them tick.

In fact, that is one of the plot points in Casanova where Heath Ledger plays Casanova, and discovers this intellectual feminist has written some inflammatory prose under a nom de plume of a man. He's able to use what he's read to try to impress the woman.

But, in a sense, isn't this what people try to do anyway? Try to figure out how other people are, what makes them tick? My mother has tried to arrange for me and my brother to meet women, given that both of us should have been married by now. Needless to say, these are Asian women, as my mother would find it exceedingly difficult to find non-Asians in her endeavor (to be fair, my dad is also helps out in this regard).

However, what's made it challenging is that I (and my brother) are dealing with women from a culture we simply didn't grow up in. My mom's worldview might work well in Asia, but it doesn't always apply to people in the US. She believes people can be far more conniving and manipulative than I generally see. Perhaps that's my naivete, but I just think that she understands her world, and I understand mine. That leaves me trying to deal with folks with a different cultural background, even if it's technically my cultural heritage.

I am reminded of a story I heard about Turks working in Germany. They raised their kids in Germany, expecting, in ten or so years, to return back to Turkey. But by the time their kids had grown up, they had become assimilated into the culture, and thought of themselves as German. This must have come as a shock to the parents, and yet, they must have seen this slowly happening, though so slow as to not realize until was too late.

I recently read an article about Hines Ward, wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who just won the Super Bowl. Ward, on first glance, much like Tiger Woods, looks African American. I suppose, technically, he is. However, Ward's mother is Korean (and Tiger's is Thai), a product of an African American soldier stationed in Korea.

His father brought his mother to the States, but they eventually separated. At some point, he wanted his son to live with his mother. At first, he didn't like living with his Korean mother, but eventually grew to respect what she had done to live in a foreign country and make ends meet. He's become quite close to his mother.

As it turns out, there's a side effect. Due to the Super Bowl, his Korean heritage has become news, even in Korea, where there are some children of mixed parentage. Korea, having been taken over by other countries, has always been dubious of foreigners, and has often believed in pure bloodlines. This sounds a bit like Nazi Germany, but could also be the kind of thing that Jewish Americans worry about. If Jewish people don't marry one another, how do they survive?

People like Hines Ward have been making Koreans rethink this idea. I suspect the ideas are going to be hard to revise. I found it surprising that Korean attitudes on homosexuality seemed to lag far behind other Asian countries, and only recently, with the huge success of King and the Clown, a kind of Brokeback Mountain for the Korean set (though it looks far more like Crouching Tiger) have people begun to talk about this outside hushed circles.

Hines Ward grew up in the U.S., and so his worldview should be mostly American, but how did his Korean mother shape his view of the world? How did my own parents shape my own views? I know that I'm a far different person that I would be had I grown up in Asia, and, lacking another perspective, I'm rather happy that I did grow up here.

So as I read my coworker's blog, I am trying to read a view, filter it through what I understand, to make sense of what's going on about that person, and realizing that, as with anyone, I'm getting an incomplete picture.

In one of his entries, he points out that writing a blog, to some people's eyes, is incredibly narcissitic and pretentious. It's all about me, me, me. And I've read some blogs that are just like that, though they tend to be rare (or I don't really seek them out). And I think, that's exactly the kind of self-conscious comment that one makes when writing blogs. ("No, wait, I am not narcisstic! Really! Come back!")

One of my earliest entries was about how I felt I couldn't be completely honest about everything in a blog, not that anyone ever could, but because it's out in the open. And even as I write this, I'm thinking, what the heck am I babbling about. And you're thinking "how much time is he going to talk about talking, and why is he talking in the third person, and how dare he put thoughts in my head, and I'm gonna stop reading this blog, dammit, cuz I have better things to do, like eat ice cream, or watch Lost, or something, but not follow this incredibly inane, convoluted sentence, that just won't end, my goodness, why won't he stop, that son of a biscuit, that pretentious so-and-so".

You see, I'm having fun at this, no?

Well, there, I've put some thoughts in words, and it doesn't make that much sense.

I think I'll go back to reading other people's blogs.

And there is no Demosthenes and Locke. We'd rather read the sports column.