Let's Pretend

I am sitting here pretending that I don't still feel sick. But I do. I feel tired and ill. I'm not completely out of energy, but I don't have much to spare. I've been grocery shopping today, and have just spent some purgatorial time dealing with Will's room, and it feels like time to nap, but weirdly enough, napping doesn't help. In fact, it seems to make things worse.

So I thought I'd take a break to blog, and then I'm going to go put groceries away and maybe make some soup while I watch my new favorite soap opera, Grey's Anatomy. I've been hearing about it for years, and when I saw I could download instantly via Netflix, I thought, 'What the hey.' Now I'm hooked. It's your basic hospital soap, but it's fun and likable and fairly preposterous. Lots of pretty people.

I've spent much of the week just sitting there. Also becoming addicted to other people's blogs. Sara over at Shiny Red Houses has culled her blog list to her absolute favorites (I am proud to say that Left-handed Housewife made the cut ). I decided to check out a blog she likes called Irretrievably Broken, and oh, good goobily moobily, I'm hooked. I swear, it's like reading a novel. In fact, over the last couple of days I've read the entire thing. This woman can write, baby. And even though her situation is so different from mine (essentially her blog is about life post-divorce and trying to co-parent with your ex), it doesn't matter. Amazing.

Then, through Irretrievably Broken, I found a blog called Here be Hippogriffs, also addictive. I just jumped right in with the most recent post, then began reading backwards compulsively. I have no idea who this woman is or quite what her deal is, but I landed on a post about her first husband that actually turned out to be about her turbulent early twenties and could not stop reading.

It's a little weird, I have to say, to land in the middle of these strangers' lives and get so caught up in their stories. I don't know what to think about it. Is it good to know so much about people you don't know? Is it in some way akin to watching a soap opera, in which other people's lives become your entertainment? Or is like checking out a good book of nonfiction from the library, in which you become involved with the characters (who are in fact not characters, but real people) and feel connected to them and somehow enlarged by their story?

I don't know. Do you? Does it matter? Is this the fever talking?

Time to go put away the groceries.

Edit (upon re-reading later): I should say that with many of the blogs I follow, I don't feel that soap opera feeling, but a lot of blogs I follow are more like slice of life/domestic diaries--here's what we ate, here's what I'm making, here's something funny the kids said. It's more like checking in with friends (and many of the authors of these blogs feel like friends, there is a back and forth, and sometimes snail mail) than reading a book. The blogs I mentioned in this post have a much more confessional feel to them, in which the whole life is brought out and presented for inspection.