Meeting a Bevy of Bloggers

Last night, I attended my first local blogger meetup and met the authors of many of the local blogs that I read. I've been reading most of their blog posts (approximately an average of 84% of all of their posts combined, judging from the statistics provided by Google Reader Trends) since April, when they were first recommended to me. Meeting the people behind the blogs that I've enjoyed so much was nothing less than exhilarating, for I liked them just as much in person as I do their blogs, if not more so. I felt a bit star-struck at first, because it is similar to meeting famous authors, except I've invested even more of my life in getting to know them, bit by bit, each day. Here I was meeting a whole bunch of them all at once, which could be overwhelming, but it quickly became comfortable. Soon I was laughing with them, just as if I'd known them in person for months, if not longer.

It reminded me so much of going to my first weekly meeting of Durham bulletin board systems (bbses) users, twenty years ago. I had been debating and conversing with my fellow users for months and finally had the opportunity to meet them face to face. It amuses me that I was so much more sure of myself at the young age of eleven than I am now, even though I knew so much less. Actually, perhaps that's not so unusual. Back in 1987, everything was text based and no one distributed thumbnails of their portraits with every post or comment, so, unlike last night, I had no idea what people would look like. In the long run, that really doesn't matter, but it can take a few minutes to adjust one's mental pointers. I remember that it was that same exhilarating experience of almost instantly being plopped into a community in which one has only existed virtually, a community where people like to think and communicate.

The truly ironic thing is that my meeting twenty years ago took place at what was once Temptee Bagels, literally across the street, just a few hundred feet away, from the blogger meetup last night.