Questions

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Friends Through Writing and Bloggers vs Non Bloggers

I have some bloggy questions for you today. But what inspired this post is a little interaction I had with my husband, who is a Non Blogger. As in, he doesn’t blog and while he may read a few blogs here and there, he doesn’t ever comment on blogs and sees them purely as informative. 

Earlier this week, I had the absolutely delightful thrill of connecting with a longtime blog friend. That night, when my family sat down to dinner, my husband asked how my day was, and I went on at length about how fun it was not just to interact with this person, but to see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices. 

“You’d never met in person before?” Carla wanted to know. 

Nope.

“How did you get to know each other?” my husband asked.

Just… through the internet. 

But that wasn’t enough of an answer for either of them. They were super curious about not just how I’d met this person, but how we’d built a friendship online. For reference, my husband is Not Online; he doesn’t have any social media presence at all. And my daughter is a baby*, so, same. 

If I go back to the very beginning of bloggy time, which for me was 2009, I think the possibility of friendships is what prompted me to start blogging. At the time, I was working remotely from my apartment, and I was the primary breadwinner for our household. My husband and I had just moved to a new city for his medical residency. I didn’t really know anyone and I didn’t have the temperament to go meet people in the wild. But I had spent two-ish years reading a bunch of wedding planning blogs, which led to finding and reading people’s personal blogs. I was a lurker and never commented, but I could see in the comments how people were getting to know one another. This was very appealing to me and my personal situation. 

So I started a blog, and began commenting on other blogs. Slowly, and despite the fact that I was semi-anonymous online (I am shy and pretty private, which may or may not surprise you), my online community grew. 

Speaking of anonymity: My husband knows I have a blog; my parents do as well, and one college friend. (And now Carla, whose primary knowledge of blogs is via really terrible sitcoms.) But that’s really it. If the topic comes up, I may share with offline friends that I have a book blog, but I try to keep my online world private from my offline world. WHY this separation is important is something I have never fully been able to articulate. Maybe something about feeling freer to be myself online when I know I’m not being observed by people I might see during a playdate or around the holiday table? This blog is a space where I can talk about only what interests me, whether it’s weird interactions at the UPS Store, or too many words about shampoo, or rants about stupid rules, or fretting about the great unknowable job of parenthood. I don’t have to discuss politics or make intelligent commentary about world events or craft beautiful prose. It’s my space and I can fill it with mundanity and silliness and whining. The people who read it are here despite – or because of? – the subject matter, so it feels comfortable to keep going in this vein. I don’t feel any pressure to Write Important Things or be succinct or have fewer rambling sentences. 

I admit, I have sometimes felt a little weird about posting certain things with the knowledge that my mother or husband could be reading. Not that I am in any way different online than I am off, with the possible exception being that perhaps I try a little harder to be funny in my posts than I do in person. Also, I talk a LOT more when the talking is via words on a page rather than verbal utterings. But it’s not like there’s anything secret going on here. I’m not a covert Flat Earther or anything. 

All this is beside the point, which is community. I blog for the community. To keep in touch with people, and learn about their dogs and their kiddos and their aspirations and their frets and their passions and their own everyday putterings. And I feel like I’ve found that community. Twice, now – once before the days of Twitter, which I blame, perhaps unreasonably, for the sharp decline in blogging in the later half of the last decade, and again in the past few years, with a handful of stalwart bloggers who’ve bridged the distance between the two. I love that some of those friendships have bloomed beyond the confines of our separate blogs.

But even though I have had this experience, I found myself really struggling to explain to my husband and child how I’d developed a friendship with people I’d never met. How could I KNOW such a person? How had we made the leap from blog reader / blog commenter to friends? 

I don’t know. Maybe it seems strange, to a non-blogger, that you can develop a real relationship with someone purely through written communication. That you can come to know a person, simply by what they choose to post online. That you can form a relationship that’s as genuine as any friendship formed offline. 

Maybe some of us simply communicate better via the written word. I feel so strongly that this is true for me. When speaking with people in person, I trip over my tongue, or the words cling together in a way that changes my intended meaning and I end up kicking myself later for not getting my point across accurately or well. I struggle to keep up with the flow of conversation, to take part in a way that doesn’t feel lagging or stilted. There’s none of that in writing. I can think things through. Usually I can go back and revise and make sure I’m saying things the way I want to say them. When I respond to your post, or your comment, there’s nothing distracting me or making me nervous. If there’s more to say, or things to clarify, I can follow up in an email. 

One of my dearest offline-world friends is also a friend-through-writing, even though we have also met many times in person. He and I worked together at my last full-time job. While I was in the home office, he worked remotely, from a different state, and it was several months before I met him in person. My first introduction to him was via a series of long emails he wrote me, outlining things he thought I might want to know, describing the position as it had been before I’d arrived, and laying out some things he thought we might work on together in the future. It was informative and provided such insight into the way his mind works, the way he approaches things, the meticulous and thoughtful nature of his personality. And, although we did talk on the phone and in person many times over the years, our primary method of communication was email. Even though we have both since left that company, we have remained good friends. We still communicate a LOT through email, although we also have regular Zoom chats. 

Meaningful, real relationships can grow through writing alone. I’m sure people had similarly strong friendships back in the days of letter writing – and how much more slowly those friendships must have formed! (Can you imagine pouring your heart out in a blog post, aching for commiseration or advice, and then having to wait for the postal service to deliver your post and then wait even longer for your correspondent to respond?) But I imagine it does seem strange to those who have never experienced it.

I don’t know if I fully addressed my husband’s curiosity about blog friendships. But his interest made me wonder about you, and your blogging experience. Would you share your experience with me? Here are some questions to get the words flowing. (The first few questions are for bloggers, but there are some questions in there for non bloggers as well.) Also, please do not feel the need to be succinct in your answers. I am a huge fan of novel-length comments; never hide your wordiness light under a bushel around here. 

Questions for Bloggers

  1. Do you have a blog, and if so what is your blog url? 
  2. How long have you been blogging?
  3. Why did you start a blog? 
  4. Do people in your offline life read your blog?
  5. Do you tell people you have a blog?
  6. Have you ever met a blogger in the offline world?
  7. What do you like best about blogging?

Questions for Non Bloggers

  1. Approximately how many blogs do you read?
  2. Do you comment on all the blogs you read?
  3. Why do you seek out blogs (vs or in addition to other, more formal sources)?
  4. Have you ever met a blogger in the offline world?
  5. Would you ever consider writing your own blog?
  6. If you at one time had a blog (especially one I loved reading), what made you stop posting and how do I persuade you to start blogging again?

Okay, I want all the deets.

And, in case it isn’t clear, I love knowing you. I appreciate your reading the nonsense I post here, and the support and kindness and advice and commiseration you offer. Thank you so much for being here and making this blogging thing such a satisfying, meaningful part of my life.

* Not a literal baby.

I am kinda sorta attempting to complete NaBloPoMo, with the full expectation that life will make it impossible any day now. If you want to follow along, or join the fun, check out San’s blog here. 

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A Few Furniture Related Questions

We have come to the portion of Moving Into a New House where we are considering buying some new furniture. We have plenty of furniture, from the old house, but there are a few things that are missing from our collection. Plus, there are a few things that we’d prefer to replace because they just aren’t right for the current space.

The thing is, we have never really had to buy furniture before. We are deeply spoiled: most of the furniture in our house was handed down to us by my husband’s parents, who have moved several times over the years and who accompanied each move with gifts of furniture. Hand-me-downs from my in laws include two couches, two loveseats, an armchair, a kitchen table, The Piece, a desk, some filing cabinets, a baby grand piano, and lots of artwork. I know. We are very, very lucky.

This means that, aside from purchasing two bedroom sets and assorted furniture for our child, we have no experience buying furniture. But… buying furniture is kind of hard? And unpleasant? Like, how many couches do you have to sit on before you decide that THIS ONE is the right combination of firm and comfortable, that it is formal enough for the space, that it will fit in the room, that the quality is good, that the price is reasonable? And then you have to choose the fabric?! Yikes.

In an instance of great good fortune, my friend Jen (HI JEN) happened to send me a photo of her couch (it wasn’t really of her couch, it was of her beautiful and charming children), and I asked about it (because it looked comfy but also aesthetically pleasing) and she gave me the details. And THEN our local Macy’s had several of the very same couch IN STOCK. There was only one person working in the entire Macy’s so my husband and daughter and I were able to sit on all the different options and examine the different sectional combinations and look at all the fabric samples completely unbothered by salespeople or other customers. With Jen’s assurance that this couch is a good couch, and the evidence of our own sitting, we are now going to order this couch. SO. That’s one big thing to check off the list.

But we have other furniture needs and I don’t really know where to begin. You have Furniture Opinions, yes? Because I need your input please.

  • Where do you get lamps? We have looked at Target, and the lamps are… limited, and also a lot of them look kind of cheap. I am aware that Target does HAVE perfectly acceptable lamps; our old bedside table lamps were from Target, and they lasted a long time and I liked them just fine. We would not be looking for new beside table lamps had I not broken mine during the move. I have been suffering for my sins, lampless, since August. I looked at Crate and Barrel for lamps and it seems like you can’t get a lamp for less than $100, which is far more than I feel like I want to spend on a lamp. So maybe my question is not, “where do you get lamps?” but “where do you get nice, sturdy, aesthetically pleasing lamps that aren’t a million dollars?”
This lamp costs $350! $350!!!!!!
  • What is the deal with slipcovers? My husband and I had a hand-me-down loveseat in our bedroom for twelve years. Neither of us noticed until now that the loveseat is wearing a slipcover. The slipcover is not, as I would have assumed, covering anything; I would have thought you would have purchased a slipcover to conceal a fabric you no longer liked, for instance. But now that we KNOW, we feel like we might want to get a new slipcover. One that is more our style. That is as far as I’ve gone with this line of thinking because I don’t really know where to go next. And also, are we stuck with the skirt part?
Sheesh this is a terrible photo. And I couldn’t even straighten the cushions before taking the picture? YIKES. P.S. The side table is a hand-me-down and I hate it so much. I can’t even articulate why. I just HATE IT. But it has utility so I haven’t yet donated it. The lamp in this photo came from World Market, which no longer exists in our city.
  • Do you have a yoga mat you’d recommend? Does a yoga mat count as furniture? Let’s pretend it does for the sake of not wanting to revise the post title. One of my favorite parts of the new house is a dedicated room for exercise. But the flooring is Very Hard; my princessy bones have apparently grown accustomed to working out on a yoga mat on top of a plush carpet, and my tailbone and shoulder blades scream at me if I try to work out on a yoga mat on top of the floor. My solution was to get a nice thick yoga mat from Amazon. But, while the new mat is technically thicker than my old yoga mat, the material is much squishier, so it is not any more comfortable than what I already have. I tried to stack the yoga mats, one on top of each other, but they slide around. What I really want is a GIANT yoga mat that is also thick. Does such a thing exist? Rephrase: Does such a thing exist for under a million dollars?
Another terrible photo! And the floor is so dirty! Mainly because we had boxes filling this room until three days ago. But also because it is surprisingly difficult to clean this kind of flooring. Also, my husband and I discovered that the bottoms of his shoes, which are highlighter yellow, are shedding when he walks on the treadmill, leaving two yellowish tracks on the treadmill belt and a film of yellow dust on the floor. So weird.

Those are the most pressing furniture questions I have at the moment. Don’t even get me started on end tables. I think we’ll need at least one – maybe two – for the upstairs living room. We will also need couches and chairs and a rug for that space, but we’re living with our old hand-me-down couch and no rug for now. I don’t have the mental fortitude for ordering more than one couch at a time.

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Ask Me Anything Answers, Part 5

I got so many wonderful, thought-provoking questions from lovely readers during NaBloPoMo, but I took a rather lengthy break from answering them and still have a few to address! 

Gigi of Gigi’s Ramblings asks:

A follow up to the How I Met My Husband – how long was the engagement? 

Once we got married, friends and family alike said, “FINALLY.” We met in fall of our junior year at college and fell in love rather quickly. We moved in together in two years later while I attended graduate school, and then moved together to a different state two years after that so my husband could start medical school. We finally got engaged in September of the second year of medical school, and then got married halfway through his final med school year. That’s seven years from meeting to marriage. Seven. Years.   

One of these days I should post about our engagement. And maybe I should post the story of my engagement ring, which is a “fake” family heirloom.

And, I’d love to hear about the wedding too. Based on the description of your dress at the college formal, I’m guessing that your wedding dress was pretty amazing too. 

My wedding was a dream wedding. My parents offered us a down payment on a house or a wedding, and we (I, probably) chose the wedding. I am cringing at that now, because WHAT A POOR FINANCIAL DECISION?! I suppose I was 25 at the time I (we?) made this decision, and should have been capable of making a wise choice. But looking back, WHAT was I thinking? And yet, it was a fairytale day and I have (mostly) wonderful memories and everything worked out okay and I don’t regret it.

We got married in my home state, in a space that has been special to me since I was very young, and which I had been able to share with my husband in the many years of our courtship. We had a fairly small wedding – I think we invited about 75 people, and I’m guessing about 50 were able to attend. We got married in a tiny, non-denominational church, its alter backed by enormous windows that overlooked the snow covered mountains. Then we had the reception in the restaurant of a ski lodge.

The food was spectacular. Our dinner menu included a make-your-own pasta bar, tiny shot glasses of perfect creamy butternut squash soup, and miniature Brie grilled cheese sandwiches. We had huckleberry mimosas and a candy bar at which guests could fill up their own favor bags. Nearly all of our college friends attended, which was special to us; my husband and I met at college and we had a very tight-knit group of friends that we shared. We spent the evening dancing together in a big happy group enfolded by warmth and candlelight while outside enormous snowflakes drifted down from the sky.

My dress was strapless, with a sweetheart neckline, a lace bodice, and a full, satin skirt with a long train. Do I have a photo of it? No one had iPhones back in 2008, so it seems unlikely… Oh, right. Our photographer gave us a big binder full of thumbnails of all the photos he took, so here are photos of a few of the thumbnails that at least give you at least a sense of the dress. I never had a “this is it!” moment with my dress, and in fact ended up working with the designer to create a custom dress that I loved by piecing together parts of other dresses. And then I got sick in the weeks leading up to the wedding and lost so much weight we had to do an emergency last minute fitting session and my dress was QUITE baggy in the boobage area. 

Looking back at these photos brings back some of the angst of the day. The person who did my makeup was running late, so we were late to the church and ran out of time to take proper photos. So I don’t really love ANY of the photos from that day. I’d wanted the kind of artsy pictures you often see of the dress hanging in gauzy light in front of a window, and pictures of the shoes and rings, and fun photos with the bridesmaids. But since we were so behind, all our photos took place in the basement of the church. I don’t know if you’ve been to many church fellowship halls, but they are not known for their beauty, and this one was no different. (My husband and his groomsmen got to take AMAZING photos outside the reception venue, and they are very cool and beautiful.) Also, while I had a hair trial with my stylist that went perfectly, something was wrong on the day of the wedding and she could NOT get a good curl in my hair. So when I look at photos, I haaaaaaaate my hair. Apparently I am still salty about wedding imperfections nearly fifteen years later. Obviously, none of it matters at ALL, then or now.

Here. Look at a slightly blurry photo of of a thumbnail of our cake. It was vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream (NO FONDANT) and huckleberry jam in between the layers. I loved it; my husband wasn’t as big a fan, unfortunately.

Much to my mother’s horror, the candles had real flames. Our best man gave his toast in front of that stone fireplace and as he talked, he kept backing closer and closer to the candles lined up on the stone, filling my head and my mother’s, I’m sure, with visions of imminent conflagration. He did not knock any of them over; there were no fires.

Another thing I loved about our wedding were the flowers. I adored my bouquet. Irises are my favorite flower, and it turned out exactly as I wanted it to. My bridesmaids each carried a bouquet of pure white flowers, each one chosen because that flower was special to that bridesmaid.

My something old was a handkerchief from my husband’s grandmother’s wedding. It was tucked into the wrap of the bouquet stems.
Roses, tulips, hydrangeas, and calla lilies.

Okay, that’s enough reminiscing about our really very magical wedding! On to the rest of the questions!

Any siblings? And are you close? 

I have one sibling, a younger brother. We love each other, and I enjoy his company, but I don’t know that we are “close.” He is six years my junior, which means that he was in middle school when I went to college. That’s a big gap. It also means that I perpetually think of him as my baby brother, with glasses that were too big for his face and skinny limbs and straw colored hair that stuck up on the top of his head. In reality, he is a six foot tall former soldier in his mid-thirties. He and his wife live four thousand miles away. We got to see them twice last year, which was wonderful. But it may be several years until we see them again. We never talk on the phone but we do text and email occasionally. (More about our relationship here.) He is in law enforcement, so he very patiently answers all the ridiculous questions about policing I come up with as I’m writing my silly murder mysteries. He is brilliant, hilarious, brave, and one of the most level-headed people I’ve ever met. 

Are you on Twitter? (Is this even a relevant question since Twitter seems to be in free fall as I type?) 

Technically, I am on Twitter. I have a Twitter account – one for this blog, one for the book blog – but I don’t really tweet. Twitter makes me VERY nervous, like I’m forever on the edges of a conversation other people are having. I do have a book-focused Instagram account, and I am more active there… but “more active” is not active active, if you know what I mean.

I know for this particular type of question the answer will vary (or, it would for me) depending on various factors. If money, school/work obligations, time, etc., were not obstacles where would you go for your dream trip/vacation?

If money/family/time were not obstacles, I would go on an extended trip to Europe with my husband and Carla. It would be so fun to rent a house in different countries for, say, a month, and then drive around to various cities in each country to really get a sense of what it’s like to live there. It has been my great good fortune to visit Europe several times and I love it and want to go back. There are a bunch of countries I’ve never visited, and a bunch that I would love to revisit, and old favorites (like France and Germany) that I have visited multiple times and still want to enjoy again.

Thanks for all the fun questions, Gigi! If anyone else has any questions or topics you want me to touch on, please feel free to ask me anything.