I find this blogging thing fascinating. It never ceases to amaze me how open and honest people seem capable of being in a blog as opposed to real life...if someone sat and ranted the way people do in real life, they would be treated like a total freak and people would run a mile the other way in case they catch this disease called "sharing". Especially the British. Americans love to talk, love to discuss things. They are happy to hear your life story and you only just met them five minutes ago. They will I might add probably forget every word you said five minutes after you're gone but it's the thought that counts eh? When they say "Have a good day" they genuinely mean have a good day. They just like people to be happy. We the British on the other hand are miserable misogynistic self-centered unfeeling race. We don't want anybody ELSE to have a good day. We want to have a good day but it's an even better day if it's at somebody else's expense. I like to talk to people and people tend to respond by talking to me. This seems to make me a bad person according to certain members of my family. At a family gathering once I got talking to this girl and she was telling me all about how important it was for her girls to go to private school (local schools in London being crime-ridden slums apparently), how they cdn't afford to have another child because they wanted the best for the two they had, among other subjects. She even at one point asked her husband to get her a drink so if she wanted to get away from me she had several opportunities. But as far as my sister-in-law was concerned, she was obviously just being polite, tolerating me, and I was persona non grata from then on. My father let slip some time later that she had made some comment about how much I talked and people didn't like being bored by me. Wdn't it have been nice if she cd have had the decency to talk to me face to face and hear my side of the story. Maybe I was the one who felt her friend was boring me but I just cdn't get away from her! I bet that scenario never occurred to her. As it was I reckon the conversation was absolutely 50/50 but I guess her friend had never talked to her like that so it must have been me that was the problem. My point here is how these blogs give people that opportunity to have a rant, commiserate, celebrate or educate and boy do people not grab that opportunity. I found one this afternoon in which this woman was giving an almost day by day report on the difficulties of living with a schizophrenic husband. I admired the detail, the honesty of her descriptions of her husband's hospitalizations and her own depressions. I found myself reading it with such enthusiasm it reminded me of the above situation and I thought you know what, I bet if you asked that girl how she really felt about us talking for so long as we did, I'll bet she'd say the same thing. Sometimes it's wonderful therapy and sometimes you just find you have so much in common with a complete stranger when those closest to you won't give you the time of day. I got the feeling this girl wanted to talk to someone and I was there. Contrary to my s-i-l's opinion, I was NOT the only person talking in that conversation and she seemed to miss that point. I got the distinct impression not many people were in the habit of listening to this girl and she seemed to welcome the opportunity to talk just as much as I did. Isn't it sad that being interested in others and being willing to share their problems makes you a bad person?