Musing about musings

Yesterday was blistering hot in Los Angeles. 105 in Studio City where I live. The sky was filled with smoke from fires raging in the hills east of us. It was not a day to go out and play. So we didn’t. Instead Richard and I spent the day watching Ted Kennedy’s funeral mass, wondering what to have for dinner and musing on our computers. I posted another food essay on one of my blogs and worked on another for someone else’s blog I write for.

Now I’m musing about my musings. Why write a blog or blogs if no one comments? I’ve been writing my MySpace blog for a couple of years and though I seem to get a fair amount of ‘hits’ – I have nary a comment on any of my essays. Are they being read? The same holds true for the “someone else’s” food blog I write for. But there I don’t even know if I get any hits, though the “owner” of the blog seems to like my pieces and always publishes them.

Last week I finally saw “Julie & Julia.” I loved it! I laughed and had a great time. Meryl, Amy, Nora and food – what could be bad? Years and years… and years ago when I was just starting to write professionally, a friend who knew both Nora and me thought we had similar ‘styles’ as I wrote my rock’n’roll pieces for magazines like Teen Beat and she wrote for Rolling Stone. I was younger by a few years and looked up to her even though she hadn’t become “Nora” yet. Then she became “Nora.” I was happy for her. Who am I kidding… I was just jealous.

Now Nora has given me another object of jealousy. Julie. Julie is young (well, that’s enough to be jealous of already, right?) and, we all know her story by now… she wrote a food blog and became famous. Not an irreverent blog on food and life as mine can be, but a “reverence” blog about cooking her way through Julia Child’s first cookbook. That’s when she became “Julie.” Great idea! Why didn’t I think of it? Oh, I know – I love writing about food, but would rather Richard cook (he’s way better than I) or just have some chef in a restaurant make my meal. So I’m not really jealous of her idea. What got me jealous and now has me musing is – how did her followers find her? How do people find someone’s blog? When I search for my own blog on-line, the key words that I think should bring it up don’t. Besides my MySpace blog and the “someone else’s” blog, I also started posting again on my own Google ‘dashboard’ blog… one I had set up some years ago and then abandoned. I have no idea how anyone finds that one even though the blog name is the same as my MySpace blog which does pop up in a search on occasion, yada, yada, yada… Soooo, why do I continue?

No, I’m not a masochist (well, maybe I am just a little). What I am is a writer and when I’m not working on my latest book or a screenplay, I love writing essays about food and random moments in my life. Blogs are the 21st century’s diary or personal journal, but definitely not the diaries and personal journals people kept in the past. The ones you needed a key to unlock. The ones you wanted to keep private. Today, everyone wants the world to know who we are and what we think. Especially writers. We write to be read. But we also write because we have to. I just wish someone out there was reading…

By the way, in case you’re wondering, we figured out what we wanted for dinner. Richard has this great Barefoot Contessa recipe for grilled salmon nicoise with anchovies (I love anchovies!), along with the olives and hard boiled eggs, etc… but I’m sick of salmon, so he got some lovely Ahi tuna to sear as a substitute. Delicious.