I am beginning to like this internet business, where I proclaim my wants to the world, and the internet sends me postcard vendors and potential friends. Behold this wonderful email:
Hi, this is a note for Megan. (Hi, Sherry, you're an awesome writer too and I'm very glad you have joined forces with Megan!)
So Megan, I've been a fan of your blog writing for quite some time now. I like your voice, and I like the way you think about things. I feel like I already know and could be friends with your blog persona, and I was wondering whether you would be interested in hanging out sometime in real life.
What are my qualifications for potential real-life-frienditude? I live in the East Bay, I have a delightfully cute baby (and an awesome dog and husband-type-person), I'm a lawyer by trade (I work in the public sector and care about education policy). Like you (or at least your blog persona), I love California, and fresh local produce, and doing stuff with friends, and being kind to people, and thinking about stuff, and drinking beer, and making food for people, and doing athletic stuff with my body, and smiling, and eating, and reading, and laughing, and compliments (giving and receiving), and throwing parties, and talking with friends, and making pie, and talking trash.
Anyway, I think I'm going to quickly hit "send" before I lose my nerve. I feel like I'm asking for a date or something, but not a date per se. I guess I'm inviting you to come over to our house for dinner sometime. Or to go to the dog park with me and the dog and the baby. Or to get coffee or brunch or go for a walk or something.
No pressure...if this doesn't seem like a good idea, then please accept again my appreciation for your wonderful blog writing, and I will go back to admiring you from afar.
This, my friends, is perfect. The familiarity, the awesome-sounding author, the suggestion for activities. The only thing wrong with it is the hesitation. OF COURSE I WANT TO DO STUFF WITH YOU. I am so touched that you would write. This is exactly what I started blogging for. I know other people blog for self-expression or the big dollars or something or other boring. Not me. I started this with the goal of meeting a boypeople and making friends. That part has worked pretty well. You guys are all bright and charming and show me neat things. Then I brag to my sister that my imaginary friends take me on adventures we'd never know about otherwise.
The only other thing that caught my eye was the word "fan". Oh dude. I do not want fans. This lady sounds like a super neat and cool person and potential friend, not like a fan. Which is just right, because I partially quit my old blog because I thought I had fans.
I was trying to figure out what was going on at my old blog, why I was bridling at mostly innocuous comments and what was introducing that weirdo inauthenticity. A couple weeks later, I decided that some readers had started acting like fans. Fans get super invested, right? And then they feel proprietary. Fans think they can critique whether I am acting appropriately for the Megan brand. Fans decide you were better last season. Fans tell you that your narrative arc has stalled. A friend would never do those things, because a friend doesn't think of you as a shared creation, subject to revision. Friends always know that you are a person walking around in the world, seeing what you see and doing what you do. But I think that seeing a person mediated through a blog, with an element of presentation, lets people who are prone to be fans become fans. For a person who is expecting friendship, that is really annoying and creepy*.
I don't think that having a fan reaction to a blog is wrong. There are very clearly bloggers who enjoy having fans and encourage fan attention. (I think this is a dangerous game, btw, because fans develop expectations beyond the control of the object and turn on the object for not meeting them.) You can see it. There's a twee, self-aware tone in their writing: "Oh that wacky, irrepressible me!!". They post lots of self-portraits. Some talk about their cliques or mention other status indicators. None of this bothers me, because I don't read those bloggers. If they suction off people who are prone to fandom, I think this is a great service and I wish everyone in that type of relationship the best of it. Fan behavior is only a problem when the relationship is mis-matched, against professional interactions, against friendship, against romance.
So, for the record, yes, absolutely write me and suggest things to do. I love that and want to meet you. We may or may not become close friends. But I've never regretted spending a few hours chatting with the people who find me here. Y'all are neat. But as much as I hope for getting anything from the blog, that's what I'm looking for: a connection on the personal level, based on doing things. I definitely want to get coffee or brunch or go for a walk or something.
*Fandom is probably hard for anyone to handle, not just bloggers. But bloggers aren't being compensated for handling it and they don't know what they're getting into in advance.