People are wondering if I like this website.
I'm not sure yet. This seems strange and new. Not at all comfy like my old site. It was all broken in and familiar. I knew all the ins and outs of that one.
Okay, okay, so I didn't. But I knew more ins and outs than I do on this one. The old site was simple enough for an idiot to use. I could just bumble around frantically tapping keys and eventually something acceptable would happen. That's why I stuck with it for so long.
For those of us who are so technologically challenged we need a guide book to figure out how to unlock our front door, blogging is a mind boggling labyrinth of epic proportions. I don't know what I'll do if smart homes become the norm. Sleep on my door step a lot, I guess, or become a hobo.
So why do I do it, you wonder.
Because people don't write letters anymore.
I was a letter writer back in the day. (Waaaaayyyy back.) I loved the feeling of using pen and paper and recording thoughts with them and seeing those thoughts with my eyes. I had lots of stationary. (I still wander through stationery sections of books stores, longingly fingering the paper and deciding what I would have bought if there had been someone to whom I could write a letter.) And buying stamps was fun.
I'm sorry to say, I didn't have very good correspondents, besides my grandma. (That's what real love does for you.) My mom sent me form letters, which I was thrilled to get, at least they came every couple of months. (What can I say? She had a lot of kids. She adores email now.) I'd write friends and family and acquaintances regularly and enthusiastically and they would eventually send off a few hastily scribbled lines in response -- more often than not, pointing out words I'd misspelled. (I get about as much written feedback on my blog as I did for my letters. And in case you haven't noticed, my blog readers aren't keen on commenting.)
And yes, I was an avid note passer in middle school and high school. And yes, I was in detention a lot.
In my naivete, I thought when email became a thing that my correspondents would be more excited about-- well--corresponding. No such luck. Then the other social media came along and I hoped that would open up new vistas. But no. I simply don't have writing-inclined friends, family and acquaintances (or even strangers for that matter).
It comes down to a love of writing. I love it - others don't. It's that simple.
But it makes me wonder how many bloggers would have been letter writers 30 or more years ago? Perhaps blogs are where all the reliable correspondents went?
And I love reading. I'll read anything. Books of all kinds, ingredient lists on food, instruction manuals, prescription labels, magazines, newspapers, letters, you name it. I love to read. I love to write. I'm the perfect pen pal.
This is the tragedy of my life.
But just as I was in my epistolary years, I'm undaunted by the lack of written enthusiasm and I keep on going anyway. I've been well trained to write in a vacuum. While technology killed pen pals, at least it opened up alternate venues for incurable writers like me. Welcome to my blog.
