Count the hyphens, kids!

It just occurred to me that of the nine blogs that I currently link to over there on the left, fewer than half of them are written by people whom I know in the old-fashioned sense (but not the really old-fashioned sense (none of them is that, actually); I just mean the people who are my friends, like in the real-life, able-to-recognize-each-other-in-a-crowd sense). The other five of them are: a friend-of-a-friend, friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend (all in an interesting, interlocking bloggy chain beginning with Meckhead, who was the first to say the word "blog" to me), or people whose blogs I just randomly happened upon and enjoyed. And when I went home, I found out that there are plenty of lurkers in the community too, mostly of the real-life-friend variety. Just out of the blue a friend would say, "so, did you ever get that rice cooker?" or "I thought of a book I wanted to recommend to you" or whatever. It was cool, in a slightly eerie, Twilight-Zone-background-music sorta way.

(I know that it's not cool or hard-core for bloggers to reflect upon the medium of blogging, but who cares, I am not pretending to be a hard-core anything and I feel like being self-referential and pseudo-profound and I have jet lag. So there.) It boggles my mind sometimes when I realize that people who have become a part of my life--people I randomly think about during the day, people whose challenges and triumphs are starting to mingle with my own, people whose stories and advice I treasure--are probably people I wouldn't even wave to on the street. What a crazy, whacked-out world we live in. Viva la blog!

One of these years I will go to a bloggers' convention, if I ever live in a city that houses more than two bloggers.