Blog as High School

Now before I start I have to say that I did not attend High School. Yes I went to school until I was 18 but we do not have High School in England, not in the sense that it exists over here. Organised sports are less organised, cliques still exist but are much less obvious - in large part because of the school uniform, and teachers for the most part cannot be mistaken for students. You can also leave school and enter the workforce or go to a community college of sorts at 16 if you so choose.

I am becoming aware that the blog world is much like the high school I have seen in Molly Ringwald movies, it is even remarkably like my own experiences. There are blogs I like to visit and blogs I avoid but can't help looking at occasionally. There are bloggers who I would like to be friends with and who, when they deign to respond to a comment, make me sweat profusely and hope to not say anything dorky in response. There are bloggers who look good no matter what they "wear" or say, just by virtue of who they are (who they are to me anyway). I am sure what they show in the blog world cannot be entirely who they are, unless large doses of Valium and a horde of manservants are involved. Then there are the rest of us!

My own blog? Well that is much a reflection of me in high school. Occasionally it shows who I really am, occasionally it shows who I would like to be. At other times it emulates bloggers I admire. On occasion it just blatantly tries hard to appeal to the 7.25 of my followers who I am pretty sure read with some regularity - to show them the reasons they liked me to begin with still exist no matter how many times I post about my obsession with Christmas Music.

But what is the blog all about, is it for the writer, the reader or both? I struggle with that. This started as a way for me to hone my writing skills and as an advance proof of a column/novel/pulp piece on living in America. I think that lasted for about two weeks. Somehow I got lured into the seductive world of mommy blogging when what I intended to write was a pithy blog observing the things you observe when you live in a country that is not of your birth. Don't get me wrong, I love the world I discovered, I love reading about the ups and downs of fellow tech savvy mums, I could not do without my weekly dose of Nella on Enjoying the Small Things and I certainly couldn't have survived last week without Cha Cha's peppermint bark! I read The Pioneer Woman and The Bloggess but I am pretty sure they would have been on opposite sides of the cafeteria throwing spit balls at each other. Or at least The Bloggess would have been, PW would have thrown butter.

I guess the question of to blog or not to blog has become more a question of content. Honestly when I started I had PW in mind, different pages for different things getting rid of the need to focus on one aspect of life, you can be everything to everyone, if they don't like it they can read one of your other pages. I very rarely read PW's homeschooling or photography pages because neither holds much interest for me. But I like blogger, mostly because it's free, and it does not really support that desire. So I have fairly redundant pages that hardly ever change, and one main page that is really the translation of the chaos that is my mind into web formatting.

I'm not saying this to introduce the 7.25 of you to a drastic change in my blog, nor am I proclaiming yet another return to my original intent. Chances are nothing will change except the void will be filled with something other than christmas music! As long as the void is filled and I enjoy it I think that's the point. Now I'm off to make something with butter and take bad pictures of it!