Why bother blogging?

I don't know why I want to blog. I'm not even 100% sure I do want to blog. But here I sit, blogging. Maybe I just want to be able to say 'blog' as much as possible because it is a funny word. If anybody really smart reads this and can tell me what kind of word blog is in a linguistic sense of a word which is born of the shortening, the contraction(?), of another word, here weblog (was that one word or two?), then please explain it to me. Maybe I should finally get back in touch with the first girl I ever kissed, Erin McKean, and ask her about this. When we met, on a three week bus tour through Europe with 40 odd fellow recent high school graduates, she was reading an epic poem in the original Latin I believe, and when she told me she wanted to be a lexicographer I had to ask what that was. Now she is a lexicographer, one who writes dictionaries basically, and a kind of superstar lexicographer at that. She is the 'Editor in Chief of US Dictionaries for Oxford University' according to www.wordsmith.org/chat/mckean.html. She is probably the one ex of mine who has the most citations(?) come up when you google her. (Not that I make a big habit of googling ex-girlfriends, but every once in a while, since I don't actually keep in touch with any of them, to my shame, I'm missing out on some good friendships I'm sure, but I'm crap in general when it comes to keeping up with people, so you know, I google them, just to see what they're up to...) And with Erin it has been weird over the last several years because I keep 'running into her' so to speak. First I was shelving books in the bookstore where I've worked since 1998, and I was shelving a book and I looked at the author's name and sure enough, it was Erin.
The book was, and is, Verbatim, a collection of essays from the journal of the same name, which Erin edits. I told a coworker of mine about this experience and she kind of freaked out in a good way and told me that Erin was one of her best buddies at an online Buffy the Vampire Slayer forum. A few days later I got a hug from Erin via my coworker. It is always a bit weird to know that one's self is a subject of other's conversation, but to know that two people who have never met in person are discussing me via computers is double the weird for my mildly computer phobic self. Then I was browsing in a local used books/comic books/record store, and I was looking through an intriguing comic and at the end on the letters page I read a letter signed, I believe, just Erin M., but I just knew it was Erin McKean. Both she and the comic artist were in Chicago I beleive, and it just sounded like her, she might have even said something about working with words. I bought the comic, and I'll have to dig it out of storage one of these days and verify my memories. Then a few weeks later I was flipping through the Sunday NY Times Magazine while at work and lo and behold there was Erin again, filling in for William Safire as author of the 'On Language' column. Then most recently I was browsing the wonderful Powell's bookstore website and there was Erin doing a guest weeklong blog for them. Also in the time all this has happened, over the past three or four years, I have chatted with an old friend of Erin's, Vanessa, who has stopped by the bookstore a few times. So I have passed on best wishes to Erin via a web friend and via an old friend, but I have yet to contact her directly. I'm so wishy washy about these things. My interest in contacting her is in no way romantic, I'm involved and she's married with at least one kid, but part of me wants to just say hey to her and congratulate her on her success and to say how I think she is one of the best people I've had the pleasure of knowing and how it's really cool to see such a good person having success. You rock Erin McKean, and if I never 'meet' you in person, or via a more direct form of communication than this, again, I want you to know that it is a pleasure 'running' into you every once in a while when I least expect it in my day to day life. I enjoy small conincidences which make me go 'hmmm'. So maybe I have answered my own question of 'Why bother blogging?' I think it is interesting to sit at a computer, start writing something, and see where it leads me, and to tell myself and others some of the small stories which populate my life. We are all stories in each other's stories. What's your story?