silly me

So I was looking through my links today (okay, putting off my laundry) and I popped on over to the compost resource page to find out what's new in the world of worms. The page is gone, with a friendly little note that says it's been retired after ten years. This wasn't a page I watched real closely, mind you, so don't be sad. The site was www.oldgrowth.org/compost, so I decided to see what else "oldgrowth" was and started picking apart the address. The site is owned by a young man and includes a funny page on Dean (no, not that Dean. Some random Dean) and a baby page. Seems that he and his wife are expecting their first child--any day now--and have been keeping a log for the past five months about Baby Stuff: painting the nursery, going for checkups, feeling kicks and tumbles, practicing a diaper change, thinking about being parents. It's all very beautiful and very very strange for me to be reading. I feel like I'm in their living room without their knowledge going through their photo albums. Intensely personal. In other parts of the page, they have vacation and wedding pictures... so I suppose that the site is mostly for their family and friends and own use. I feel some guilt about looking through it, much different than reading through someone's LJ page. These journals are meant to be found and read by other people, and this one I think was not. All the comments are from relatives. But now I feel like I'm *involved* in the whole thing, wondering if she's born yet (the last post was yesterday and she is overdue), wondering what they're going to name her, whether it's going to continue to be a beautiful, poetic, internet-recorded experience for them or whether it's about to dissolve into a frenzy of feeding schedules and sleepless nights and arguments. The truth, I guess, will lie somewhere in between. But it just seems crucial now for me to know how it "ends", as if this were a TV drama that will be neatly wrapped up in a few months. My pathways for social learning now seem irrevocably shifted from books to tv to acquaintances to internet.

Hmm, wonder if I were to create a fictitious journal and filled it with anti-social lessons? Created a character that constantly did wrong and profited from it? What would her name be?