I think everyone should be required to keep a blog.

Maybe it’s just me, but I like being able to catch up with people and find out what they’ve been doing lately by reading about it instead of actually having to interact with them. Now I know that that sounds incredibly anti-social, but I really only meant it to be partially anti-social…

Think about it: you call a friend up who you haven’t spoken to for a long time and chat with them for maybe an hour or two on the phone, but chances are unless you happen to be rekindling some old friendship or something, you probably won’t chat with them again for a good length of time, when you’ll proceed to talk for a couple hours again and repeat the cycle. The thing is, in doing so even in a couple of hours at a shot, you’re still probably only getting the highlights – what they’re doing for work now, how the family’s doing, possibly anything interesting that happened that week. You may not have time to get into what they thought about The Dark Knight or just how unqualified they think Sarah Palin is to be anything more than Cheer Mom for the Wasilla hockey team, even though you’re probably curious regarding both.

But if they kept a blog up to date, you’re free to browse through those thoughts at your leisure, whether you keep up on it regularly or even binge and go through several months of entries one lazy night when you find yourself wondering how Danny’s doing. Even better, if you are keeping fairly up to date on the thing, you have the option to comment along the way, so you can get your own replies to those thoughts in without having to try to find time to make the call, hoping that they’ve got time to answer it! I know it might sound a little crude to someone who doesn’t blog, but when I’ve got such a limited amount of time during the day that I literally can go weeks without having time to call somebody for a general conversation unless I can squeeze it into a car ride somewhere, it’s kind of nice to still be able to follow other people’s lives by reading what they have to say online, even if it’s 3:00am and they haven’t been awake for hours.

Of course, for this little scenario to work in Scott’s perfect world, everyone would also have to actually enjoy writing enough to have the desire to put their thoughts down every couple of days … which I understand is the reason why this plan would never work! Between those of us who have legitimate blogs who still can’t find the time or desire to write in them and all of the MySpace “blogs” that have exactly four posts in them before the author got tired or too drunk to be able to login to MySpace anymore, I do understand that actively blogging on a personal level is something that not everyone cares to do. To each his own, I suppose, however I will confess that I still have a good time every now and then jumping back into even my own archives here to see what I was thinking two years ago or even five years ago at this point, and ultimately I think it’s kinda cool to have that sort of resource available to you. I never really got into keeping a diary or journal growing up, but I enjoy blogging – even if occasionally in spurts and more often than not just rambling that no one else will ever care about!

Talk about a cool concept – if my oldest post is from May 2003, right now I’ve got more than five years worth of memories stored in this blog. What about five years from now, when I’ve got a little baby running around terrorizing the house, or even ten or twenty years from now, when said baby is now running around terrorizing in an entirely different manner?! Why sit down and write my memoirs fifty or sixty years after the fact when I can just pen them along as I go?