Interesting mess

I've been trying to catch up on my blog reading backlog. 7000-plus unread, Bloglines tells me, and I know it's hopeless. I want to 'mark all read,' but that would marking read the ones I really want to read as well as the ones I don't mind missing. That would be annoying. I decided to catch up on the ones I want to read.

I started off with Ms Mac, who never fails to entertain, and I haven't neglected her for TOO long so there wouldn't be so much to read, I thought. (I was wrong. Ms Mac is prolific.) I only left one comment, on an oldish post, but read them all. I can't figure out whether Ms Mac should be writing for sitcoms or is living in one.

Then I moved on to Gordon, and the rest of my evening was gone. I KNEW that would happen, and that's why I had been avoiding him. Since August. (I am so ashamed.) But he does great links (which inevitably lead me astray), and writes some thought-provoking posts.

There were two posts I wanted to comment on but didn't (because they were old), one about culture and the other about why RSS doesn't quite work. That second one is basically what I was talking about at the beginning of this post, and in fact using Bloglines to organize my RSS feeds COULD work, if I organised it properly. If I had all my 'hot' feeds in one folder, and my 'cold' feeds in another, I'd just need to click on one folder (the 'hot' one) to get rid of the ones I had no need to read all the backlog of. (Horrible, horrible sentence. Quick - move on.) But I gather he is talking about off-line RSS readers...? I'm not sure. I didn't even know there was such a thing. It is true I don't know much.

Actually there were a few more posts I wanted to comment on, but didn't. One was his latest one, Hard Times, which begins like this:

Blogging is not life and my life is not centred around blogging. There are a lot of things that go on that I have never and will never mention on here...

I don't know why I didn't comment, except that I had nothing to say, really, except Yeah, gotcha, me too, and doesn't it go without saying?, and that's not very interesting, is it?

The culture post, on the other hand, I wanted to think about. Because what IS your culture, when the culture you live in is not your own (and can't be, because Japan's like that), and when you hardly ever watch TV (and that's what most people talk about, isn't it? It's the common ground) and the various circles of people you socialize with (when you have a social life) are all different and come from different cultures (and watch different TV programs from each other), and when you've been so long away from your own culture it has moved on and you haven't? Do I even have something that could be called a culture?

And does it matter?

Oh, and somewhere in there I managed to visit the Auspicious Dragon Bookblog, where I discovered that out of all the books reviewed there I had read three. She has been reading a lot more than I have, but still, I read two of those books fairly recently. It was one of those things that made me feel ... I don't know, connected. Like maybe, just maybe, I share a little bit of culture with someone, even if it's someone I have never met.

So maybe it does matter. And maybe that's the way it always is. We don't share whole cultures. We share parts, with different people, in a great big glorious and interesting mess.