"I've Been Reading Your Blog"

The title of the post says it all. This is probably going to be a little introspective and confessional, even by my standards, but I have been thinking a lot about it and I think it's important.

When I started this blog just a few short months ago I did it for pretty self-serving purposes. Basically, I wanted to be a better, more confident, and more faithful writer. I am, slowly but surely, meeting some of those goals. I started the blog for me, but along the way it has come to serve a lot of other useful purposes.

For example, since I started blogging my relationship with my parents has gotten better. Really. I can skip over some of the stories that I have already written about and get on to explaining more about how I feel about things. Unexpected, and great.

This blog has also been a soapbox of sorts, which I think all writing inevitably must be. I have been able to write a lot, although not as much as I would like, about my work and about border issues. Obviously I think that this is a good thing.

One of my bosses told me the other day that he wants to post a link to my blog from the Frontera de Cristo website, and give the URL in the quarterly newsletter. I didn't really know how I felt about that, and it instantly sent me back to questioning why it is I blog in the first place, what I blog about, and how I do it. I write some serious posts here and there, but I also make posts that only a small and self-selecting group would ever find interesting. The reality is that I started this blog for me, but my readership is surprisingly large. On the advice of my friend Bryce, a more seasoned blogger by far, I installed a stat-counter to tell me how many people visit this site, and where they come from. I confess that I don't really use it very much, but since I was going to write this post I opened it up today, and the results surprised me.

Here are just a few of the things I learned:
- Someone in England has read my blog.
- Lauren Brown (hi Lauren, I was actually just thinking about you!) has a blog, and links to this blog from her own. Her thoughts can be found at http://laurenbrown.typepad.com/weblog/
- More people than my mom, my dad, Bryce, and Mike Cruz, along with a few other usual suspects, are reading this blog. I have to say that I was actually very surprised by that.

I haven't really decided what, if any, changes I am going to make in light of these new discoveries, but I'm sure I will give it some serious thought. In the past weeks I have considered whether or not to blog about the elections, the arrest of Peter Kim, a former youth pastor, and how much I hate the NYTimes Select Edition. I haven't actually written any of those posts, nor am I sure that I will, but if and when I do I now know that apparently someone is reading.

I am aware that no one is commenting, and I have been told that my comments are broken, something I'm not sure how to fix. I have really enjoyed this sense of isolation, a sort of digital journaling where I send out information and no response ever comes. But this period is apparently over. A response is coming now, as I hear "I'm reading your blog" quite frequently, and the stats are telling me that this isn't a lie.

So I send out a question that no one can really respond to: Why do you come here, and what is it appropriate for me to say to you?