Many Chanukah Gifts for Me!

To me, receiving comments on my blog is like getting Chanukah gifts. Of course, I’m not Jewish, and never having received a Chanukah gift in my life, I’m certainly not an authority on Chanukah. Still, from what I know about the tradition, I’m sure that little Jewish children feel just like me! My last four posts have gotten at least one comment. I’m rolling. For awhile there, I thought that no one was logging on. But my hit counter says that I’m getting steady flow, so I guess people have just been silent observers. That, too, is cool, because I do find my own voice soothing in a sort of pre-pubescent Garrison Keillor kind of way. But I do love opening up y’all’s comments, so keep ‘em coming. I really do look at them as little tiny gifts.

In other news, I’ve decided to try and find some like-minded blogs. So far, no luck. I’ve tried to use that nifty “next-blog” function on the top right, but after clicking it a million times, I’ve only come to the conclusion that blogs fall into 4 categories. They are either (1) in a foreign language, (2) journals, (3) porn, or (4) written by certifiably crazy people. For all I know, the ones in foreign languages are journals, porn, or written by crazy people, or all of the above, which would mean that there are actually only 3 categories of blog. Granted, I’m still not sure what exactly I’m doing here, so maybe my blog will end up being one of those three. Maybe it already is. Maybe, in the end, I’ll find that whatever a regular person has to say will never be as interesting to anyone else as it is to that person. But what is our lot if we are left only to such self-service?

I say ‘regular’ people, because the extraordinary people know they have a gift and charge people for it. The rest of us, it seems, fall prey to some force like gravity that drives us to insanity, pulls us down to publishing the monotonous details of our every day lives, makes us post pics of naughty ninjas or some such, or pushes us to describe the world in Mandarin or Portuguese. Maybe we can’t stop this.

The end may be near for us, but until then, I’ll try to make this less about me and more about us human beings, the lives we lead, and the choices we make. And if in trying to talk about “us,” I fall into bad habits and end up just talking about “me,” then remind me, reader, that that is not what I sought out to do. But if we fail, maybe it will show us that people will only suffer to refrain from talking about themselves for a short period of time, if at all. Or, maybe we can only be interesting (or stay interested) for so long. Maybe there’s something to learn if we treat this like a relationship and see how long we can last and take care to notice what drives us apart and after how long…