You've got a friend in me.

This blogging thing is an interesting ride. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting when I started this, but here I am and I have to admit, I kind of really like it. I like to think my writing has improved, that I'm a little bit funnier, a little more concise, a little more interesting, well I hope it I am anyway. I've even managed to garner a tiny little following. Sure it's largely made up of family and the girls from work, but hey I'm not complaining.

What I've come to discover recently is you can get quite a feeling of community from blogging. Case in point, the always amazing Sognatrice from bleeding espresso fame suddenly went AWOL. Now I have been a faithful reader of hers since she started her blog and she was my first really regular commenter here. And there's not a blogger alive who doesn't live for the comments. She had me at hello. After one day had turned to two days, then three and four and so on, I have to admit, I started to worry. Where could she have gone? What horrible thing had happened to keep her form her daily posting? When another day went by I knew I had to take action. So I fired off an email to the other side of the world and basically said HEY, WHERE ARE YA?

Turns out she's fine, well as fine as anybody can be who just lived through a week with no internet. Being the nice lady she is, she replied to my email, thanking me for my concern and telling me she'd received multiple emails that expressed similar sentiments. That led to a tiny conversation about the blogging community. More specifically, how do we label these new people in our lives? Let's take sognatrice for example, living on the other side of the world as she does, it's not likely we will meet face to face and yet she knows tons about me, my kids and my Michael. She could totally go out for a girl's night and hold her own with my "real life" BFF's. And yet do I refer to her as my friend in conversation? No I do not. Instead I try to explain this bizarre online world us bloggers inhabit and if you aren't a blogger, odds are you just won't get it.

So what is exactly to be done about this? Well, I for one am taking a stand. I may not ever stand face to face with sognatrice. I may not be available to give her a hug when she's having a bad day. She may not be handy when I'm stuck for a babysitter. She might not be close enough to cook me one of her fabulous pasta dinners. I say despite all that we are friends. It may not be traditional or even conventional, but it doesn't make it any less true.