Looking at You Looking at Me

Blogging comes with a number of side effects for which no medical intervention can arrest. Among them are

1. Your favorite color becomes orange. You’re not sure when it happened, but now you’re strangely attracted to orange things. You have a Pavlovian response when you see something orange: dopamine floods your brain and you feel oh-so validated.

1. You start to appreciate the under-appreciated things in life. For example, if you published what you think of as an excellent post and nobody likes it, you’re not above liking it yourself. Maybe blogging is like kids or farts. You may appreciate others’, but you only like your own.

1. You begin to go into a strange recursive loop. You wish you could “like” the likes that appear on your site. Not indiscriminately, of course — who could like all the stuff that they produce? — but for particular likes that you deem most discerning. Maybe those people who appreciate under-appreciated things like yourself?

1. You constantly have to fight the paranoia. These people who “follow” me, do they really follow me? Why do they do that anyway? How did they pick me out? How come I never hear from some of those supposed followers? Just because I RSS a bunch of blogs that I hardly ever comment on doesn’t mean others are “rendering unto Caesar”, does it? Between hypocrisy and paranoia is a thin line over which bloggers razor.