I was sitting on the couch the other evening, eating popcorn and flipping through The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, vol. III, when my husband asked me what I was doing.
“I’m being an abstraction in the capitalist system,” I told him.
“Huh?”
“An abstraction in the capitalist system, you know. An interesting academic feminist visited my blog last week and told me that mothers who stay at home are abstractions in the capitalist system, that they fail to see the ‘big picture’ and that living for others is not good use of their intellectual energy.”
“I see,” he replied thoughtfully. And then, without arguing the merit of any of these statements, he neatly sidestepped the whole conundrum and simply said, “This is what I’ve learned from running a website: reader mail just slows you down.”
* * *
Kind words, meant to console me, I think, (though I was more bemused than distraught) but the truth is keeping a blog is hardly akin to running a website. I don't usually get enough comments to slow me down, and even if I did, bring it on; after all, the key to happiness is slowness. Thus, I certainly don’t mind mulling over comments and responding to them if I have the chance; generally, the one thing that prevents me is sheer physical weariness, as I do most of my blogging in the evening.
I do like the idea of blogging as correspondence. Letter writing is one of my favorite activities, but as my correspondents get busier and busier with their lives, though a letter in the mailbox is always a treat, I sense that the accompanying pressure to reply is not. Blogging should not, and does not, I hope, replace personal correspondence with dear friends—(there are still friends who don’t know I keep a blog, and the ones who do have found out because they Googled me!) but it’s a way for me to ease up on them and yet satisfy the urge to share thoughts with readers who are under no social obligation to respond.
11:47:19 PM 
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