I just blogged to say I love you.

Michael at Orange Crate Art invited bloggers to blog today. 

I thought I'd write one thing about why I still blog--something I ponder every so often.

I. First, a hop, skip, and jump through What I've Said Along the Way, selected from posts I tagged Blogging (70 posts since 2007), subset Why I Blog (15 posts). I still feel all these things, more or less. And more...

One of the first things I said on this blog about blogging, in 2008, is that "it's fun". I stand by that. I wrote:

"Could it be blogging opens our minds to whole new dimensions in communications and connection?
Could blogging be one of those blanket-toss/down-the-rabbit-hole experiences, that show us everything we take for granted could, in fact, be otherwise?

"You know? You hang out in the blogosphere long enough and you start to think stuff like, why shouldn't books make noise?
And, when are computers going to add in textures?
Why can't I send soup over my phone?
Pretty soon you get to wondering other things, like--oh, I don't know--maybe, What did Jesus smell like?"

Also in 2008, I wrote that it's good to have a place to complain, which blogging offers. Ha! I'm going to remember that when I worry, for instance, that I'm complaining too much about my current workplace. "It's good for me." At least, some of it.

2008: "Frizzy Logic [now, ten years later, often on Instagram and infrequently blogging] posted a link to Scientific American's article "Blogging--It's Good for You". The article reports:
"According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University... humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a 'placebo for getting satisfied'..."

One more from 2008. Blogging about deciding to go to the Star Trek con in Las Vegas, I wrote:

"What's funny is the role blogging plays in this all for me:
It's like a permission slip to go where I normally would not go. When in doubt or fear, I think,
'I should do this so I can blog about it.'"

I made this Star Trek macro in 2010:

That year I wrote, re: Why I Blog:

[About starting to email in early 1990s]
"E-mail! What a dream.
I started to spend my evenings at the circ desk writing emails. I bombarded friends and wondered why most of them didn't write back in kind. Weren't they bug-eyed with delight too?
I really needed a blog, but they didn't exist yet. . ."

AND, also in 2010:

"Blogging, for me, is in the slow, low realm. I see a theme in this blog of me defending (to my own self) loneliness, grief, laziness... These are low, slow, dark states of being (virtues, even). They are like compost.

I'm always defending them because around me I mostly see lauded the bright, swift, and airy-- the happy blooms in the breeze (or worse, the 'you snooze, you lose' mentality)--and I thrash it out with myself every so often, feeling I'm wrong-headed."

In 2011, I wrote:

"When I first noticed that lots of people were looking at my Freddie Mercury post, I went back and beefed it up a bit. Which made more people look at it, though there's nothing you can't find a hundred other places.
Anyway, I like the idea that strangers pop in and hopefully get a little kick from a shared love."

In 2013:

"For me, blogging grew out of writing [sometimes self-indulgently] long letters and e-mails, and that's what I still want and like. Blogging is a way to indulge myself in writing out loud and not impose it on anyone.

Facebook feels more like sending the same postcard message to 153 acquaintances, which had its charms. I liked choosing fun pictures and crafting little messages. But reading other people's postcards--well, I felt crankier and crankier, wanting something more."

In the years since, blogging has dwindled, and so has the pleasure of meeting strangers on the blogosphere--something I miss.

In 2015 I wrote:

"Honestly, much as I love blogging, it's lonely over here. I used to engage with more than a dozen active bloggers, now it's two or three...

I don't see myself not blogging though---where else can I post the FULL results of five hours of searching a fuzzy image in the apartment of Starsky or Hutch?"

II. Today, June 14, 2019, I will add this answer to Why I Blog:

"Nostalgia makes the present sweeter."

Every so often, I leapfrog back through my blog, looking at what I was doing on or around the same day since I started blogging in 2007.

Today when I reached June 2011, I got all choked up. 
That June, I was walking the Camino de Santiago across Spain with Mz and bink. On June 14, 2011, (eight years ago, today), I emailed this song, below, to my sister for her birthday, from an albergue computer along the way. 

I'd written to her:

"I saw this Spanish music video --Stevie Wonder's song  'I Just Called to Say I Love You' covered by a Spanish flamenco singer & guitarist named Pitingo-- in a bar where we bought ice cream (bars also serve as restaurants and coffee shops). It seemed a perfect birthday message--by a very Spanish cast in very Spanish colors---"

 

Walking the Camino (twice) taught me the power of nostalgia: 
Both times, I was in pain MOST OF THE TIME, not to mention bored for long stretches. The second time I walked it, knowing how memory spins gold out of dirt, I even wrote a note to myself at the end:
"Do not do this again."

Here's the thing: memory is untrustworthy, collapsing days of pain into zings of sweetness––but the sweetness is real.

Have you followed recent thinking about placebos?
In the episode "All the World's a Stage—Including the Doctor's Office", the podcast Hidden Brain looks at how research into placebos shows that they work--no surprise--the surprise being, they work even when the person taking them knows they're taking sugar pills.

Since placebos are harmless substances, some ask, why not harness their power? Their power lies in the theater of medicine.
Not the surgical theater, but the staged interaction between sufferer and healer.
(Ditto religion. I hear people dismiss it as theater, but for better or worse, theater works! Even though we know it's make-believe.
See also, politics.) 

So, I think--the same for nostalgia.
Nostalgia does not accurately reflect the past, but could we harness the sense that the past was better than it was and somehow apply it to now??? 
Preemptive nostalgia? 

Blogging, I can stand outside myself and think, "One day, this time will appear to be sweet."

Or, on the flip-side, "One day I will be glad this time has passed."

Meanwhile, while so many bloggers have gone (to Instagram or elsewhere––a couple, to death), I just blogged today to say I love you, fellow bloggers who remain!