August 28, 2007

IT DOESN'T HURT AS MUCH AS YOU'D LIKE

While I'm admittedly over-sensitive, there are some criticisms that are just too laughable to let them bother me. It appears that my "nemesis" has rediscovered all the reasons he fell in hate with me in the first place. Ha. I've never linked to him before because he doesn't really deserve any traffic, but what the heck. Go see how much I get under his skin, for some hilarious reason. You can just feel how much it galls him that I like Walmart.

War Cheerleaders, Laptop Warriors, and Other Everyday Loons

How touching that he hasn't posted since February but took the time today to crank out an entry on me. Gosh, I feel so special.

I guess I'm supposed to feel bad that there's a war on and I'm knitting instead of running to the nearest recruiter's station. Sorry, that's not as unique of a jab as it may seem. Besides, all those squares I crocheted will be assembled into an afghan for wounded servicemembers, so even my yarnwork is doing its part for the war. Plus, saying my husband's service isn't enough and that I need to join too, isn't that the grown-up equivalent of playground logic: "If you love the war so much, why don't you marry it?"

So thanks to No Name Person for coming out of blog retirement to make fun of me again. And thanks a bunch for coming and leaving a comment for me so I would be sure to see the post; it was such a classy move, and otherwise I would never have known that your precious little site was still in operation.

And let me know when you come up with more material for ridiculing me in the future. I can't wait!

Posted by: Sarah at 04:40 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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August 13, 2007

GET OVER IT

Are we still worrying about females blogging? Sheesh. Teresa knocks this one out of the park. Oh, and those Dennis Hopper commercials rankle my husband to no end.

Posted by: Sarah at 04:33 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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A NOVEL IDEA: TAKING A DEEP BREATH BEFORE I BLOG

Normally, I blog the minute my temper flares. I don't draft, I don't proofread, I just bang out my emotional diatribe and shove it onto the internet. Sometimes I later wish I'd said something differently, or taken a different angle, or avoided blogging on the topic altogether. But I hardly ever learn and continue to blog without mulling things over. I'm glad that being on vacation prevented me from doing that this week.

On Wednesday, I found out that a very good friend from high school, one I hadn't seen or heard from in ten years, was right under my nose. I walked into his office thinking I'd knock his pants off and was a tad puzzled that he didn't seem to be as surprised to see me as he should have been. The first words out of his mouth: "Hey, Sarah! Good to see you! I read your blog, and I'm one of those dirty liberals you hate." Gulp.

We had a pleasant talk about other stuff for a short while, but on the drive home I was fighting back tears. I figured I may as well have shown up to his office naked. Because of this stupid blog, he already knew everything there was to know about me and had pigeonholed me into nutjobland before I even opened my mouth. And what is with this telephone-tag group of my high school friends reading my blog? Here's a tip for incognito bloggers: when someone from your high school gets murdered, don't blog about it. People googling the story will find you. I hadn't talked to this friend in ten years, but he heard from Billy Bob who heard from Betsy Sue that Sarah has a blog. He's been reading it for lord knows how long but has never commented, emailed or left any hint of his presence.

I tried to imagine if other bloggers ever get that naked feeling when they meet someone new. Surely Glenn Reynolds is surrounded by liberal profs who know more about his blog than they do about him as a person. But my husband unhelpfully pointed out that Reynolds is a lawyer and far better equipped than I to handle shock and exposure.

So anyway, on Wednesday I was done as a blogger. I was ready to shut down this site so I could avoid the horrible feeling of being outed, which seems to happen more and more frequently these days. I don't even know if I have any strangers left reading my blog; it's all my uncle, my parents' next door neighbor, my entire high school physics class, and my neighborhood from Germany. And if I hadn't been on vacation and having to go home and prepare for my husband's birthday party, I would've headed straight to the computer and announced that I was shutting down this infernal blog.

Luckily, I actually had to calm myself down and think as I cooked the creamed corn. I reminded myself of all the wonderful things that have come from blogging. That my blog friends were calling and emailing me during my vacation. That people online took up the slack when my husband was deployed, and people like Toni sent me postcards of encouragement while people from my real life were ignoring me. That I wouldn't be heading to Hawaii next month for a blogger's wedding. Would I fly to Hawaii to see anyone else in my life? Doubtful...

And as I went through all the things blogging has brought into my life, I began to feel much better. I decided it doesn't really matter deep down if people from my high school are reading this thing, because I only talk to them once a decade. I talk to my blog buddies every day. Last week, CaliValleyGirl asked, "At what point does someone from one's blogging life, become someone from one's Real Life?" I think I'm making that shift, or at least realizing that my blogging life matters to me a whole lot more than my real life does. I don't even have any friends in my real life anymore.

And as I stirred that creamed corn, I also realized that I was right to start this blog. I had less like-minded friends around me than I even thought. Four years ago, I wrote:

I care about my friends and I don't want to lose all of them. But I wish I had friends that I could talk to about how I feel about the world. I have my husband and my mother, and that is basically it...and my mother lives an ocean away and my husband will be gone for a year. We're new to our post here in Germany so I don't have any strong relationships yet, and despite my efforts, I don't hear from my old friends that often. When my grandmother died, I called my mom's best friend to talk about it, and I realized how pathetic I am that I don't have anyone I can count on anymore. And the few relationships I've been trying to hang on to really disappointed me this past week.

I'm at a crossroads in my life where I am realizing that people don't stay friends forever (remember, I'm only 26) and that it's OK to grow apart and move on. I'd like to maintain a casual friendship with some of these people, but I'd really like to find someone who understands me and shares some common ground. I'm at a point where I more look forward to an email from Tim or Marc than from any friends back home, and that bothers me. It makes me feel lonely, but not lonely enough that I think I should keep pretending to be something I'm not so that someone will stay my friend.

I started this blog because I thought that all my friends were too liberal for me and I wanted an outlet for my true beliefs. It bothered me when all those friends found this blog and learned the shocking truth about Sarah. And in reading this old blog post, I see I haven't come as far in the past four years as I wish I had. I still worry that people won't like the real me, when in fact I should just focus on the fact that I have made friends like Tim and Marc who do like me for who I am today, not for who I was in physics lab a decade ago.

And again, if I had banged this out in typical blogging fashion, I wouldn't have been able to include a postscript: I got an email from this friend I chatted with in my hometown, an email in which he mused that it must be really hard to have a blog where everyone assumes they know everything about you, and that there's nothing I could write that would stop the two of us from being friends. And he signed it from "your pinko commie friend." And in the end, I feel better that he knows the real me than if I'd gone into his shop and chitchatted about inanities for half an hour.

For those of you who missed me while I was on vacation, be thankful you didn't hear from me on Wednesday; I would've quit. It's amazing what a few deep breaths can do.

And for those of you from my physics class, this is the real Sarah. I hope you like it, or at least tolerate it. And that it doesn't detract at all from your memories of the girl who nearly set both her partners on fire during the experiment on angular momentum.

UPDATE:

I'm afraid after rereading my post -- dang, and I drafted this one too! -- maybe my friend came off sounding mean or rude, which was not the case. He has been nothing but nice over the past week; this post was about my reaction to feeling exposed, not anything he did or said that bothered me. Please don't think I was mad at him. But if there are others out there from ol' RHS, I'd love to hear from you before I walk into your place of business and feel like a jackass.

Oh, and this is the friend who handed me The Fountainhead. I have him to thank for that, no matter how dirty and pinko he is. And the physics experiment: that falling pendulum making sparks on the paper around the pulley fell a little too fast and made a nice fire instead of a little hole in the paper. And Sarah stood there stuttering while her friend got singed fingers and the teacher barked at her to stop being a moron and put the fire out.

Posted by: Sarah at 02:54 AM | Comments (21) | Add Comment
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August 08, 2007

FEEDING THE ADDICTION

It's been more than three years since I made that eight-hour day trip to meet my first blogger in person. And now I think I'm addicted to meeting bloggers. I get as excited (if not more) about meeting them as I do seeing people from my Real Life.

Thus it happens that, on one of our many car trips circling the Midwest this month, we ate breakfast with Butterfly Wife. And Butterfly Wife is one of the few bloggers who's yet to meet my husband, so there's a milestone. She was gracious enough to meet us at the crack of dawn for a coffee before we headed out of town. I'm so glad she squeezed us into her schedule.

So who's next?

Posted by: Sarah at 05:59 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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