Real life and something to shill for.

OK I'll lead with the shill.
If you're in the market for a Christmas tree or wreath or you just want to support a good cause, come by Dupont Italian Kitchen Saturday or Sunday (corner of 17th and R NW) between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. and lay down some cash (or check) and carry home a tree. Or we deliver. The sale benefits the nearby elementary school. This year is the ninth year for the sale and it helps the school greatly. And eat at DIK while you're at it -- the food's good and they're donating the space for the tree sale. Keep in mind it's a fundraiser, not a giveaway.

Now back to the program.
Teh Internets is a crazy place. It isn't real. None of it. Yet it's where people are living more and more of their lives. Part of the reason, I would guess, is that it's a hell of a lot easier to fire up the computer than it is to shower, get dressed, and head out to a bar or coffee shop. It's easy all around. The internet proves a great social equalizer: don't feel your real body is desirable enough? don't think you drive a socially appropriate car? live in your parents' basement?

It doesn't matter.

The internets take care of all that. Rather than allow myself to go out in the world and be judged, I can control the information I disseminate and become whomever I want to be. Maybe I'm only playing at being a 36 year old married father of two with little hair and out of control weight gain. I could just as easily be a seventeen year old acne-crusted fry cook at McDonald's. Or maybe both of them. The sage Walt Whitman tells us:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

On the internets we can become whatever we want. Social awkwardness vanishes. We butt into conversations as we please. We gather communities and leave them as quickly. We are harsh. We are extremists. We are promiscuous. We confess to everyone and no one.

Finding the real world too difficult, too time consuming -- too damn hard to work with -- we invent ourselves again to live anew in the virtual world. Obviously, blogging is part of it. The basic theory of the blog -- the understanding that most people carry in their heads -- is that the blog is a slice of life, a documentary of sorts that may be as simple as describing the day at the grocery store or as complex as dealing with sexual abuse. However, in general most people believe they're reading something that's real.

Knowing the genre's conventions is the first step toward exploiting them. Anyone who edits a post, whether it's to rephrase a sentence or excise information altogether, has taken that second step in removing the "real" of the blog. It becomes a product, a way of marketing yourself online. Not that self-marketing is new or necessarily bad.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.