Blog World

I'm going to come right out and say it: the blog world is an ugly world. I'm not talking about the mommy blog world whose sunny streets I stroll through most frequently. I'm talking about a place where people I know don their darker, scarier, more cynical personas and write about things I'm not sure I wanted to know about them. Or maybe it's the place where that happens to me--where I turn into a baser version of myself and say what I never meant to say.

It's also a place I could get sucked into almost endlessly. And perhaps that is more dangerous. The blog of a friend of a friend of a friend is really just the blog of a stranger. I must admit that. And why should I be interested in the disorganized musings of a stranger?

But there is no warning on these pages--no "Attention: waste of your time, and you apparently don't know how precious your time is, do you?" or "Watch out: dirty trash all over this site" or the most commonly needed "Just to let you know, I'm an idiot. I have nothing worthwhile to say." You have to really step into these people's worlds (and, by extension, their unfiltered minds) to discover whether their blogs are really bad or just blandly benign.

Of course, there are "good" blogs. I love the mommy blogs of my friends, this blog with tips to organize my life, or that blog easily keeping me up-to-date on an issue I care about. But even all these are doorways, jumping off points, I guess, to the dreary, endless wasteland that is Blog World.