she's overthinking again

not to harp on and on....but i have few more things to say about this whole process of writing the five interview questions and doing these bloggy interviews.  first of all, i've spent the past year writing for a living and part of that has been interviewing people, so this shouldn't be unfamiliar territory. however, it seems somehow to be different.

there are a number of reasons that come to mind:

1. in this case i'm interviewing friends.
2. in this case i'm interviewing friends who i've never actually met in person.
3. interviewing someone via email is different than sitting down and talking with them, tho' i've tried to imagine that i'm doing that.
4. this is more personal.
5. it's a different audience than it is when i write articles for a living. a more elusive, harder-to-imagine audience. in the end, i pretty much decided that the audience for MY five questions is me, so i asked the things i want to know. 

one of the things i've done in order to compose my questions for each person is go back and read their blog. lots of postings, all in one go, rather than reading them from my reader on a post-by-post basis. actually getting into the groove and rhythm. and it's very interesting, because a picture begins to emerge in a way that it doesn't if you just read on a post-by-post basis. you begin to get a more coherent sense of the blogger as a person who actually spends their time out there in the world, living and breathing. interestingly, it seems to remove you all from cyberspace, where i imagined you resided and into the real world. 

i had an intuition about this being the case from my own blog. every month, on the last day, i print the month's postings and put them in a binder. i always enjoy tracing the development of my own thoughts over the entire month. and one of these days, i'm going to sit down and read the whole year's worth. because i'll bet i've come a long way without even realizing it.

the WAY we read something would seem to be really important. with all of the information and all of the beautiful things out there to read and look at all the time, we read in a really fragmented way these days. i read lots of blogs and surf many sites every day, clicking from one to the next. very often, i find myself telling husband about something and then trying to find it again...trying to remember where i saw some snippet of inspiration or information. and because of the fragmented way in which i read, i can't always recall where i've seen something. luckily, i'm pretty good about using bookmarks or dragging a picture into my "inspiration" folder in iPhoto, so i very often can find the best stuff again. 

i guess what i'm trying to say is that i've enjoyed this bloggy interview exercise, because it's helped me see a clearer, more whole, coherent picture of you, my friends in the blogosphere. and i very much like what i've seen.

and now, you must go read tangobaby's interview. she's so fabulous.