#FromTheBlogs

I'm not always current, but there are several blogs I follow.

It was a mini-crisis when Google Reader announced it was going away, but now I used Feedly, and order has been restored. I don't even feel the same pressure I felt with Reader to have everything read, which is nice.

I refer to the blog authors I follow as "my bloggers" as in "One of my bloggers wrote about..." and on occasion I send my friends excerpts in emails entitled #FromTheBlogs.

One of my bloggers is Mayim Bialik. I love reading her blog.  She's vegan, a devout Jew, a home schooling parent, practices attachment parenting, and her ex-husband was Mormon before before they met and he converted.  She likes things simple, natural, doesn't wear pants, detests over-the-top places like Disneyland, and doesn't shave.  Sooo....we're quite different, and it is difficult to imagine that she and I would be friends in real life, but I still adore her (and...do I even need to mention that she's an incredibly talented actress??) Her writing is so easy to read, and I feel like she has found the delicate balance of being personal but not-to-personal in her writing which I strive to achieve as well because what we do have in common is that we are both fairly private.  (Although I think I'm winning at privacy right now by having a completely secret blog).

She recently posted a link to a young woman reading a poem...

http://www.kveller.com/mayim-bialik/watch-this-college-student-nail-how-it-feels-to-be-a-woman/

So I watched it.

I didn't have an issue with the poem itself.  I like poems.  I even liked this poem and its message. But this was at a poetry slam, and so the whole time I was watching it all I could think about was how different I was from the people who were at this event and watching her speak.  Who are these people - responding with murmurs?  How do they know when to respond in unison?  Is that....snapping??

It's like when I'm at a play, and have that very distinct feeling that a "play audience" is so different from a "musical audience" and it's obvious which one I belong in.  What struck me was how strong these feelings were just watching a YouTube video.

Was I surprised by these feelings of discomfort? No...it felt pretty on par for me. I've always claimed to not be a "spoken word" fan. I think what was most interesting was how....the presence of the audience distracted me so much, that it turned a pleasant piece of art into something uncomfortable and basically unpleasant for me.  That I was almost a the point of dismissing the poem because of the environment in which it was presented.  That's what made me stop and think...and write.