Strange Phenomenon...

Isn't the whole blog universe odd? It's kind of like that old saying "Any friend of so-and-so is a friend of mine." It's like if you have a blog and I have a blog, we're automatically interconnected. I read up on lives of people who I don't know well, perhaps through a friend of a friend, and suddenly I feel terribly concerned with the workings of their lives; I feel vested in their successes, their failures. I find myself feeling I have an awful lot in common with someone I've never actually even met. Blogs can be the beginning of lovely new friendships or revive old ones.

Case in point: Eric. I would consider him one of my closest friends, and to quote Kyle from yesterday, "Wait, you only just really met him around La Mancha? Seriously? Weird." The combination of chance encounters, friend-of-a-friend syndrome, and blog updates made it seem like we'd known each other forever. But we suffered that same weird sense of awkward comfort when we first started conversing, and it happens all the time - you know the situation: I feel I totally know you well enough to hug you and chat like we're old friends, but would that be weird for you? I find myself talking about events and people in a blogger's life, either with the blogger or with someone else, like I'm immediately familiar with those events and people. I refer back in conversation, "Oh, so-and-so said that was a really good book/movie/play/CD," but it may be the opinion of a person I don't know well, or hell, even at all.

I love that!!! It does bring up what amounts to an interesting ethical dilemma, though: how much information is it okay to absorb or disseminate about someone without knowing them well or even meeting them? It's tantamount to the celebrity craze - I know infinitely more about, say, Julia Roberts than she knows, or even cares to know, about me. But if the knowledge is disseminated first-hand, as in a blog where the writer knows they're putting their words out there for all to see, does that make it okay to use that information as you choose? I ask because it seems almost creepy to refer in conversation to specific details of a person's life as if you were a part of that when you, in fact, were not even remotely a part of that.

I wish I was in grad school - this would make a kind of interesting topic for psychology or ethical studies.

Kamikaze subject change: Whatever happened to standing when a lady enters or leaves a room? I know, it's so atypical for me to think about this, being that I'm apparently supposed to be some sort of militant feminist because I'm reasonably intelligent and politically-minded, but I still sort of miss those old chivalrous ways. (I'm impressed enough when a man holds the door and allows me to enter first.) I think I'd get annoyed if that particular thing came back into fashion and everyone did it, but I would find it immensely charming on one person. Of course people frequently rise to greet you when you enter a room, maybe for a hug...but if I ever walked into a room where there was a man who could manage to rise without tremendous formality when a lady joined or exited the group, I would be terribly impressed. I'm quite certain I'd look at him like he was crazy, but inside I'd be swooning a little.