(This was written Monday afternoon. When I was hamstrung from doing what I wanted to do because of NO PRINTER CONNECTIVITY (boo). Depending on the weather and cancellation-whims of a particular group tomorrow, I will either be at home, comfy knitting, or risking my neck trying to drive safely through likely ice to go to a workshop over in Ardmore).

Anyway. More on the blogiversary.

Ironically enough, A Very Popular Blogger (Yarn Harlot), who even Has Written Several Well-Loved and Well-Received Books is having a blogiversary - as noted inwhat this post.

(I don't read the blog regularly - pop in now and then - I figure if she's said anything particularly earthshaking I will hear it on one of the blogs I do surf through regularly, or on Ravelry.* Nothing against her, it's just, I guess, I prefer to give the less-well-known blogs a little reading love with my limited reading time.)

(*I know I don't have near the commenters, or the readers, that she does. So when she refers to her Blog as a sort of collective of her writing + comments from readers, that doesn't really apply here.

I WILL say I love and cherish every comment I get, even if I'm sometimes bad about responding to them. Hint hint).

Anyway, one of the comments she makes about the blog rings true for me, even if, as I said, some days I open up my mailbox and am a bit saddened to find 40 people who will happily sell me a "fake genuine rolexxx watch" (or at least take my money for same) but nary a comment-notification.

As she says:

I am less lonely because of The Blog.
I feel welcome many places because of The Blog.
I am less of a crazy knitting person because The Blog is crazy too.

Less lonely: that is true in both an immediate and a more cosmic sense. "Immediately" speaking, I often feel lonely because I am, quite literally, the only person I know in real life who is as craft-obsessed as I am. Some of the other people I know MAY quilt once in a while, or MAY do embroidery, or knows how to knit. But I don't know ANYONE (well, outside of my mother) who ALWAYS has some project - let alone more than one - going on at a time.

But in the blogworld, that's more or less the norm. People who knit have several projects going (except for a few smug sorts who claim they ONLY buy the yarn sufficient for a single project and then ONLY work on that project until it is done). Life is messy, people are weird. But there were a lot of times that I felt like the only one that was weird in this particular way until the blog.

Lots of other people don't understand. My colleagues try to, and they comment favorably on things I've knit, but I don't think they really understand the drive to make stuff. I've had a few people (not friends, more commonly random strangers when I was knitting somewhere public) speculate on WHY someone would "bother" to do such a thing, when as we all know, you can buy socks for next to nothing at Wal-Mart.

The explanation I could give would not only take too long, but I sometimes wonder how well it would be received. So I just smile quietly and shrug and affirm to myself that I may be "wasting my time" knitting socks, but I am also sitting in the doctor's waiting room doing something other than just sitting...

But the blog also makes me feel less lonely in a larger sense. I have a few regular commenters, a few contacts, people I've come to think of as friends.

I'm not that great at making friends. I have to be honest about that. It seems that it was easier when I was younger (I seem to remember, though this is probably a false memory, that my friend K. and I became friends while standing outside the Intro Bio classroom waiting for the class previous to ours to end. We had a brief conversation and as I remember it, one of us said something along the lines of "You seem cool. Want to be friends?" and the other one said, "Cool. Yeah" and it went on from there...but as I said, it probably wasn't that simple in real life, even though that's how I seem to remember it.)

But now, it's hard. Everyone gets fossilized into their own beliefs and rituals and such once you pass out of your early 20s. Some people have families that take up all of their time. Some people seem to have more drama in their lives than seems right.

Most of the people I regard on a friendly basis are busy enough that I do not feel comfortable calling them up and going, "Hey, want to go grab lunch together tomorrow?" As easy as that was in grad school, it's different when you're out in the workforce. When you have meetings. Or when you have kids prone to getting sick. Or when you have a spouse you'd really RATHER eat with, not this crazy-haired socially-awkward bespectacled woman who just called you up and asked you to EAT with them, of all things....

But somehow having the blog, and sometimes getting feedback (hint, hint) makes it a little easier to live in a world full of those closed-door nuclear family units.

As for Feeling Welcome In Many Places...maybe not so much for me. I presume what she is saying is that the fame generated by the blog has opened doors for her. That she's been welcomes (even lionized, I dare say) in places where her presence as an "unknown" would probably be ignored, or as an author-but-not-blogger would be met by 40 rather than 400 at a book signing.

So of course that does not fit this little blog. And I don't always feel welcome in places, even places where maybe I should. And while I am (at times) socially-awkward enough not to realize that I'm being "frozen out" or that people are consciously trying to make me feel uncomfortable so I will leave, the blog has little to do with that.

Perhaps, well...I have met one other blogger. And I'd meet (and even eat lunches with) others if schedules and locations ever worked out. (Being in the literal middle of nowhere has its drawbacks). So maybe that's some form of feeling more welcome.

And then finally: being less of a Crazy Knitting Person because The Blog (in the sense of the collective of readers and commenters) is Crazy too.

I don't know as much about this. I'd never presume to opine on the Craziness (or lack thereof) of readers and commenters. Perhaps I would be more prone to say I FEEL less Crazy because every time I post some worried screed on how I think a certain way or do a certain thing, and I think that makes me Officially Crazy, some kind commenter will talk me off the ledge, so to speak, and reassure me that whatever it was, while perhaps not statistically "normal" (in the sense of "The norm is for American families to have 2.5 children" - and of course there's no such thing as .5 child), is really not that dangerously unhinged. That some of the things that I think certify me as Too Weird for the World are really actually things a lot of people feel or do or think about, but because other people are maybe better at dissembling to the world (and perhaps, to themselves), I never see The Weird that exists in other folks.

And that perhaps, in even a few cases, the traits that I condemn as Weird in myself are actually, perhaps, even a little bit endearing, and certainly traits that make me different from the mass of humanity.

I do also think the blog (lower-case, here - I am talking about my own writing rather than the Collective Blog of the Yarn Harlot - where the comments take up more space than her individual posts) perhaps makes me less crazy because it serves as a sort of safety valve - a place where I can post about things that bug me, or things that make me wildly enthusiastic, or things that I worry about, so I'm not going around SPEWING them to colleagues or people at church or the few friends I have outside of either of those circles. And that makes me less crazy, or at least it makes me APPEAR less crazy, which is maybe enough of the same thing.

So, happy birthday little blog. Seven years is a long time in the Internet world - long enough for the Really Cool People to have abandoned blogging (apparently in favor of Twitter or perhaps some app I haven't even heard of). The fact that I've stayed at the same place and with even the same template shows either an extreme interest in content over style, or an overblown sense of loyalty, or perhaps stuck-in-the-mud-ness. Make of it what you will.

Now we begin year eight.