Half Changed World

Both the New Yorker and the New York Times have had recent stories about "Article III Groupie," a gossipy blog about judges, supposedly written by a female lawyer at a big NY firm, but actually written by a bored male prosecutor.

A tip of the hat to Judge Posner, who last year suggested that the supposed author might be a fiction.

"I have a theory that the author is not a she, but a he," Judge Posner told The ABA Journal eReport. "The thing is exaggeratedly feminine and constantly drawing attention to her gender."

It reminded me a lot of the fake Harriet Miers blog that got a lot of attention when she was the nominee.   It showed her as obsessed about her appearance and everyone’s opinion of her, and generally sounding like someone out of Sweet Valley High.  I don’t see anyone making those sorts of jokes about even equally mediocre male candidates, even though in real life, it was Michael Brown who was busy sending email about where he got the suit he wore on TV during the midst of the Katrina crises.

Another famous fictional blog is Anonymous Lawyer.  It’s written from the supposed POV of a hiring partner in a big firm, but was actually started by a 3rd year law student.  He fooled a good number of people though. 

This week’s book is The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, And Keeping Friends When You’re Not A Kid Anymore, by Marla Paul.  Someone recommended it on one of my email lists a while back and the title hit a nerve for me.  I often find myself thinking longingly of my circle of friends from college.  When I used to watch Sex and the City, I was never jealous of the characters’ shoes or their dates, but I did drool over the idea of having a group of friends who met every week for long brunches.

Paul’s book isn’t profound, but it’s an easy-to-read discussion of the reasons that women (and the book is really directed to women, in spite of the gender-neutral title) find themselves short on friends, and how to overcome them.  She talks about the concerns of women who have moved, new mothers, divorced or widowed women, and women who have left their jobs, whether to be SAHMs or for retirement.  Her recommendations for how to meet new people are basically common sense — try new activities, go to support groups, introduce yourself to neighbors — but she’s open about how scary this can be.  I think most people have a notion that making friends is easy for everyone else in the world, so it’s reassuring to be told that it’s often hard work.

I hit my "friendship crisis" several years back, when I got hit with the double or triple whammy of four of my closest friends moving out of the DC area within a couple of years (one to Pennsylvania, one to Massachusetts, one to Israel and one to Senegal), having a baby (which severely limited the time I had available to socialize), and dropping several of the activities that I had been doing before (due to the same lack of time).  I was pretty depressed about it for a while.  Things are better now, but not what I’d like them to be.  That’s one of the reasons that we’re starting the Drop In Dinners.

In the last chapter, Paul talks a little about online friendships, and gives some examples, but I don’t think she really gets what makes them special, not just a second-rate substitute for "real life" friends. Ronni at Time Goes By wrote a terrific post about this last week.  She writes:

"In my early years of reading blogs, before I started TGB, I was often astonished at how personally revealing many bloggers are. Much more so, I think, to unknown readers than most of us would be in the first few meetings with a new in-person friend.

This might be an advantage to getting to know another better; sometimes it is easier to be honest at a remove from one another."

Exactly. I think in some ways my online friends (from email lists, conferencing systems, and blogs) have spoiled me for in-person friendships, at least in the early, awkward, getting to know you stage.  I don’t have the patience for the meaningless small talk.  I want people to talk about the things they’re passionate about, what rocked and what sucked about their day.  And people don’t generally talk about those things with people they’ve just met.  I guess I could just start doing it.

Just wanted to thank two bloggers for very generous mentions of this blog:

• Personal / Political for including me in the Second Carnival of Feminists.  It was very fun to read the mixture of posts from bloggers who I read all the time and from ones that were new to me.
• The Mom Salon for featuring this blog as one of their first spotlight blogs.  This is a brand new site that aims to help people find interesting mom blogs.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says:

"During that time, I let all the houseplants die.  After the book was finished I noticed them; the plants hung completely black dead in their pots in the bay window.  For I had not only let them die, I had not moved them.  During that time, I told all my out-of-town friends they could not visit for a while."

I read this passage in college, or shortly thereafter, and I think it did quite a lot of damage to my writing.  I interpreted it as Dillard saying that if you didn’t have the single-minded passion for writing that let you turn away your friends and let your plants die, then you were never going to be a real writer, and you might as well not try.  And so for years, I didn’t write.

My houseplants aren’t quite dead, but they’re pretty close.  I don’t water them nearly enough, and the cat gnaws on their leaves when she gets the chance.  My garden is vibrantly green, but only because it’s totally overgrown with weeds.  There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I’d like to do, and plant care is pretty far down in the list.  But writing — at least in the form of this blog — has become part of my routine, something I do even if I’m not fully in the mood.

In honor of my 1 year blogoversary, I registered the domain www.halfchangedworld.com for this blog.  Observant readers may have noticed that the change showed up in my permalinks a few weeks ago.  The old URLs will continue to work, but feel free to update your bookmarks.

On this occasion, I want to thank you, my readers.  When I started this blog, I had absolutely no idea how much fun it would be, how much I would learn from your comments, or how much sense of community I would come to feel.  I don’t respond personally to every comment, but I do read and appreciate every one.  (Well, except for the spammers.)  If you leave a link to your blog, I always stop by and check it out.  I truly couldn’t do it without you.

Any requests for the next year?  Suggestions for topics you’d like to see me discuss more often?  Less often?   Recommendations of books I should be reading?

Kevin Drum went to BlogHer, and didn’t have much interesting to say about it.  But the discussion in the comments section is worth reading. Bitch, PhD posted several times on how "non-political blogs" often talk about the ways that politics affect real people’s lives.  I’ve argued before that personal blogs may even have more influence than political blogs, because they reach people outside the echo chamber. 

Someone named Nancy wrote:

"As long as people like you [Drum] define what the mainstream political topics are, anything women are interested in becomes, by definition, off-topic. Further, writing about political topics with a subjective voice has always been defined as "personal" even when it concerns a mainstream political topic. Part of the point of inclusiveness is widening the definition of political topics to include those that concern women and widening the voice of journalism to include the more subjective, personal language women sometimes use and like to read."

And someone named Maynard Handley wrote:

"bhpd, I am well familiar with your sort of blog, or, for example, profgrrl. And I don’t read them. Why? Because I’m a busy guy who isn’t interested in learning about other people’s private life. There are PLENTY of blogs out there. Why waste time on those that dilute their content with material of no interest to me?"

Differences in taste make the world go around.  I get bored by blogs that cover the same topics all the time.  Very few people have enough interesting things to  say about politics (or about knitting or anything else) to be worth reading day in and day out on that one subject.  But a lot more people can say something interesting about each of five different subjects in the course of a week.

Lisa Williams wrote it more eloquently than I can manage:

"Blogs give you an opportunity to challenge this limited idea of what is important and to say, The rest of my life is important too. I am not a brain in a jar that emits 700 word screeds. I have a family and I have interests and I have favorite foods and a dog, and I am going to place these on the same web page as my essay about Kierkegaard and my instructions for how to crack open the case of my X Box, because that is a more truthful and honest representation of my life, and because I trust and respect other people to appreciate me as a person and not as a narrow pipe spewing bits on a narrow subject…  I also suspect that the general tendency of bloggers towards including personal commentary and “off topic” adventures makes the blogosphere a more polite place than either the mass media or Usenet."

Lisa later wrote another post about work blogs, acknowledging the need to sometimes keep things compartmentalized.  This issue also has been discussed at length in the wake of BlogHer.

So, continue to expect a little bit of everything here at Half Changed World.

Jody pointed out that Typepad screwed up all the archives when they did the big upgrade last month.  If you use Typepad and haven’t republished lately, you probably want to do so.

I did republish, so if you notice anything not working in my archives, let me know and I’ll try to figure it out.

I also noticed that Typepad only lists 10 months of archives in my sidebar.  However, if you click on the word "Archives," the older months are still available.  (Anyone know how to make it show more than 10 entries?)

For the last couple of days, I’ve been playing around with Bloglines, which lets you go to a single web page to read almost any blog.  The big advantage of it is that it tells you which blogs have new posts, so you don’t waste time checking blogs that haven’t updated.  There are some disadvantages, too, however.

• You don’t get to see the design of the website as the creator intended it.  While I use an off-the-shelf Typepad template, some bloggers put a lot of creative effort into their designs.
• Similarly, you don’t get to see people’s blogrolls and other side-bar content.
• You don’t show up as hits on the bloggers’ site.  This is particularly an issue for bloggers who are trying to make money by selling ads (again not me), but I don’t know any bloggers who aren’t at least mildly obsessive about how many hits they’re getting.  On the other hand, you can see on Bloglines how many people have subscribed to your feeds.
• Not all of the blogs I read have feeds that Bloglines can read — it couldn’t find either Jo(e) or Suzanne’s blogs.  I’m afraid that if I get into the habit of reading via Bloglines, I’ll forget to check out what they’re up to.
• Perhaps most critically, Bloglines only shows main posts, not comments.  And in many of the blogs I read, the comments are at least half the fun.  It’s easy enough to click over to check them out, but my sense is that only a small fraction of bloglines readers do.  You’re missing out.

I’ve been emailing back and forth with Little Pink Flower’s mom trying to find a time that we can get together before they move out of the area.  We finally settled on a time, and then we needed to come up with a place.  She suggested a pancake restaurant, but I hate taking my older son to restaurants, since he doesn’t care enough about food for it to be a distraction, so he wants to wander around and meet everyone in the place.  I suggested a free outdoor concert, but it’s supposed to be hot and sunny, and she’s worried that the baby will burn.

Finally, I wrote: "I know you’re not supposed to do this with ‘people you’ve met over the internet,’ but it sounds like it might be simplest for you to come over here.  Would you be comfortable with that?"

I’m a long time member of several email lists and online communities, and can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gotten together with people I’ve met online.  I like to tell the story of the time I was riding down to Myrtle Beach for the marathon with some people from my running list.  I was squashed in a back seat that wasn’t really meant for people to sit in, so when we met up at a Wafle House with Lady G, another member of the list, and she offered me a ride in her truck, I was happy to switch vehicles.  It wasn’t for another hour that it occurred to me that I didn’t know Lady G’s last name, and that the people giving the original ride were the only ones in the world who knew who I was with.  It turned out fine, of course.

My sons are way too young to be meeting people over the computer, but I’m sure that in 10 years or so, I’ll be struggling with what boundaries to set on their encounters with people they’ve met over the internet.  I’d certainly be horrified if they were hopping rides with internet friends without my knowing who they were with.  I know there are some scary people out there, but I wouldn’t want to ban all face-to-face encounters, which have been a rich source of pleasure in my life.  I’ve got time to figure out the rules, but I suspect they’ll involve adult supervision and public meeting places.

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On a related note, if you’re a blogger, and haven’t yet taken the MIT Weblog Survey, I’d encourage you to check it out.  Their goal is "to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other."  In addition to the usual demographic stuff, they ask some interesting questions about the people you link to and whether you know them in real life, how often you read and comment on other blogs, what topics you discuss on your blog, and whether you know people in various occupational categories.

Once you answer the survey, you can browse the results so far.  Given the mass media focus on political bloggers, I was particularly struck by the answers to the question: What percentage of your weblog posts would you estimate are about the news, current events, or things you think are newsworthy?  I was also happy to see that, even among bloggers, I’m not the only one who never uses IM or SMS.

Via Feministe, I learned about the bruhaha over at Daily Kos, caused by Kos’ snippy and obnoxious response to some complaints about one of the ads on the site, and the "women’s caucus" site that has been developed as a result.

I’ve never really spent much time at dKos or similar sites.  I haven’t figured out how to navigate them in a reasonable manner, and so I find myself sinking in a morass of posts.  Is there a way to bookmark the people whose posts I like?  I’m used to conferencing systems based on Caucus and Motet, which are basically modern versions of the old BBS model, with conferences, items, and posts, and get lost in the diary model.

This week, I’ve been trying to figure out the new TPMCafe, which is an offshoot of Talking Points Memo.  It’s a bit of a hybrid, with a bunch of  "professional" bloggers (including Anne Lamott), a complicated rating system for comments, and separate sections for reader blogs and discussion boards.  It looks interesting, but I’m not quite sure what the goal of the whole thing is.