It's like Rear Window, but without the wheelchair or murder

Having spent some time in the last few days trying to get these pages to look the way I want them to look, it seemed like a good idea to look at other people's pages and figure out how they did what they did. I'm especially fascinated by the layouts, colors, things they chose to include and so on.

I thought a good way to find pages that might appeal to me where to go through the webrings that had titles I could relate to. (This was after spending two days going through the member directory at random, first the Ms, then the Ts, and so on.) So here are the webrings I looked at: all the ones with the word Mom or Mommy in the titles, and everything that said Disney or Mickey Mouse. Because that's a whole lot of who I am. I completely forgot until just now that I could have looked at the Star Trek rings; there's no chance that there isn't one. I also tried the Moody Blues ring.

Funny, these web rings. First, except for two of the mommy pages, not a damn one had anything to do with any of the webrings they were in. So I guess I don't get the webring thing.

Second, and I guess I'm not the first genius to figure this out, was that, after checking out the layout and all, I had to start reading the entries to see where was the mommy stuff, or mickey mouse, or whatever. So I've basically been spending the last couple of hours reading essentially random blogs.

In the Hitchcock movie Rear Window, a guy who basically refuses to get really involved in life finds himself with a broken leg and stuck in a wheelchair in his New York City apartment during a hot summer. He can't get out and he has to have the window open, looking out into a kind of courtyard the the other apartments also look out on. The plot is that he thinks he witnesses a murder and tries to prove it. But the magic of the story is that this uninvolved observer of life -- a professional photographer, hmm -- watches and watches these other people in other apartments go about living their ordinary lives. They are lonely, they are troubled, they argue, they live, they survive, they find love. (And he solves the murder, of course, and gets Grace Kelly, too.)

It is like reading these blogs, looking in at the ordinary lives of strangers by reading the little bits they leave for us. Some of them seem so personal and private, as if they were written because they needed to be, but not really for anyone else to read. And here I am reading them. Some of them are funny, and you know they were intended for an audience. Some of them are desperate, as in, I know I am alone and no one will ever see this. And I'm reading that.

Why am I reading that? Why am I spending my Sunday afternoon reading other people's blogs? Why am I sitting at the window? I don't have a broken leg.

entry #4