Sometime back in the early days of mass blogging (the late 90’s, I think), I occasionally wandered around through other people’s blogs. From time to time, I would post a comment. Yes, I’m going somewhere with this. Be patient.
I remember posting comments on the blog of this one girl from Seattle, some riot-grrl wannabe who was always posting about the band she was in and her car and her job and some skinny sunlight-averse guy she was crushing on and so forth. She seemed to be under the impression that every moment of her life was a profound moment, worthy of lengthy observations . . . which is reasonable, given that she was maybe 21 or 22. I posted a comment at one point that referred to her as being goth, which I thought was a reasonable inference, given that she was cross-posting her stuff to some goth site or somesuch.
A day later, I checked her blog and she had replied that she wasn’t goth. Instead, she rattled off a list of things that characterized her (riot grrl, technophile, etc.), but that really she was too complex for any pigeonhole. She said, with a tinge of pride and a bit of arrogant challenge, that people were always trying to put her into a box and then were surprised that she didn’t fit. I replied that anyone can fit into a box; it just depends on how much cutting needs to be done.
A day later, I checked her blog and she had disabled the ‘comment’ function for non-members.
