maybe some blog rules?

Here it is. A week of two incidents involving this blog – the rambling, sometimes incoherent and entirely subjective drivel that I spout – and so it is time for some RULES to be laid down in manner of Camp Mother.

1. A blog is like a journal, kind of. And when you come across a blog, or get invited to take a look, I think it requires a form of two-way generosity. Generosity from the reader – who, for whatever reason, actually bothers to spend a few minutes searching for and then reading your words, taking them into their heads for a bit, laughing or disagreeing or nodding off or becoming outraged or even just mildly bored. That is an act of generosity and for everyone who has ever bothered with what I write, I am grateful.

Generosity also on part of the blogger. Because blogs are like a little peek into someone’s journal, an invite into whatever is bouncing around a blogger’s head at a particular time, it is quite the act of openness and trust and respect and generosity to publish these things, whatever they may be. It can lay you quite bare, and can give the reader an in-depth understanding into Proper Private Stuff (or tales of mundane cake disasters and plum tree crises, if it is my blog you choose to read). This is generous of the blogger and should be respected.

2. So, with this in mind, I want to say that in reading a blog, you may come up against something you do not like. A lot like reading a journal. You enter at your own risk. Do not read if you might get snippy, or cranky, or outraged (unless you like feeling that way).  Do not read a blog unless you are prepared to share a little of someone else. People get shitty, irrational, annoyed at their husbands and kids and traffic jams and Louis Walsh – this is the stuff of real life, ugly and precious and demented and marvellous and all those things in between. If this is too real, then go read fiction.

3. Comments. I love them. Thank you to anyone who bothers to make one. I like a bit of praise (am motivated entirely by praise, actually, so the more you write, the more I write. No pressure or anything).

4. Um, I think that is it. Lecture over.

Next blog post will be full of tales to make you snigger. I promise. I may even put makeup on the boys again and take photos purely for your pleasure. Now I am off to eat dinner and despair at the school run on the morrow, and at the full-sized fridge that has made its way into our hallway and for all intents and purposes seems rigged up and ready to stay. You get rid of the leather jacket, you inherit another fridge. SIGH.