I love blogs. And I hate them.
When it comes to writing, I have been paid more than most people for my brilliance. (Given most writers are poor, I’m clearly not all that brilliant.) Being paid to write makes me neither a great writer nor a grammar cop. I consider myself a storyteller. Having been paid to tell stories for many years, I’d like to think I could spin a good yarn when I really want to.
That doesn’t make me better than those who aren’t paid to tell a tale. The problem is that too many people who think their life is outlandishly fascinating also think they can write a brilliant blog. Some can, others not so much.
Despite my love/hate relationship with the blog community, I’m always in search of a good blog. My favorite blogs are those that chronicle a mission, especially when it comes to a mission tied to the author’s personal life.
A few years ago a woman working for Good Morning America decided she was going to go on 31 dates in 31 days, and chronicle the experiences through her blog. In the end she would pick one person to pursue for a second date. She played by a set of rules she established for her nightly dates, had no problem lining up potential suitors, evidently, and ended up as the subject of more than one GMA fluff piece about her quirky experiment. (That’s how I found out about her pursuit of happiness.)
Postmortem: She got married about a year after completing her stunt in early 2009, has a forthcoming book that will share her keen insight with the masses and has spawned several copycats looking for their 15 minutes, some of whom she now pimps via her website. #envyandjealousy
When I stumbled, quite randomly, upon a blog by a woman trying to reinvent her life in her mid-30s I thought I had hit the jackpot. Her effort to restart her life after a long-term relationship that didn’t pan out was fascinating. Her story of a disastrous date cultivated through a personal ad was highly entertaining, and I have gone back to reread it more than once. (And no, I won’t share a link to it. It may be a public blog, but I don’t have her permission to promote her writing, so I won’t.)
Her blog was intended to be a daily chronicle of her life, but for reasons I still don’t know she abandoned the effort. She didn’t seem to have much of an audience for her blog, so perhaps it wasn’t worth it to her to follow through with her plan, although I sensed from one last post she made that technical issues (lack of Internet access) kept her from sustaining the online project. I recall her noting that she was chronicling her continued adventures in an old-fashioned journal, with the intention of one day providing updates for the online world, but that didn’t happen.
I guess by default all good dating blogs come to an end with either the writer finding a soul mate, at least temporarily, or the writer giving up in defeat after months of trying, and failing to achieve a level of online celebrity status through his or her blog.
Thanks to the fancy email address you’ll find at the end of this column, I have a new fix. Leah has been chronicling her experiences and observations in the dating cesspool for a while now. She has written on a variety of topics, one of which I’ll explore in more detail next week. She seemed to be on vacation in June, but she was back at it earlier this month, proposing the concept of a 30-percent boyfriend.
Her proposal is not a friends-with-benefits arrangement, it’s more than that, but less than the obligatory daily phone call and implied date on a Saturday night. It’s a great idea, but it’s doomed to failure should she ever obtain it, and she admits it’s probably just a fantasy.
Two people having a part-time relationship, but still free to pursue something long term with anybody else on the planet … it sounds like a great arrangement. But it doesn’t take Dr. Phil to figure out one of the participating parties is going to want 40 percent, or more, and the other person is going to be content with less than 30 percent of a relationship.
Leah dares to dream, which is more than I have the energy for these days. You can read about her 30-percent fantasy, as well as her dating experiences and observations, at http://lmz87.blogspot.com/.
Her blog isn’t exclusively about splashing around in the dating pool, but there are a variety of nuggets for those who want to stand at the edge of the pool, like me, rather than jump in and swim.
One of her nuggets reminded me of a few online experiments from my past. I’ll chronicle those next time around, I promise, Leah.
Have you turned your love life, or lack thereof, into an online expose for the peeping Toms and Tinas of the world? Wave your freak flag and tell me about it.
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