I find the words "you" and "we" particularly interesting. With the inclusion of these words, the writer of a sentence would appear to be making a connection with the reader. I'm not sure if it's just me, but reading a blog full of "you" and "we" just feels different from reading non-fiction. It fascinates me that if someone were to write an entry containing "you" and "we", even after he/she's dead, a reader would, for a moment, think that the writer is alive and interacting with the reader.

It is a strange feeling to be looking at pictures of my father in BMT. He was 18 then, younger than my current age(which is 19, to facilitate my future rereading of this blog). A trivial but important thing about age is that if you are younger than someone, you would always be younger. But when you access the past through memory of others or your own, or through artifacts, it enables you to look at the actions and mindsets of elders when they were young from a slightly more mature and modern perspective. It is quite refreshing that while an elder of the present is more experienced and mature than you of the present, you of the present can be more experienced and mature than an elder of the past.

It is also quite amazing to meet someone of the same age who lives in a different generation and environment from us. Remnants of them reside in the memories of the elders. There are so many 19 year olds around us.

I am glad that there are many who blog about their lives. Provided they do not delete their blogs (or blogspot doesn't crash like a diary-x), they provide the newer generation an outlook of their lives when they were much younger, if the younger are interested. (Oh yes, NLB is archiving popular blogs, good for all!) I mean, wouldn't you be curious if you could read your parents' petty squabbles with their classmates, or random rants about homework/particularly irritating people when they were, say, 15 years old? Or even more cute, with the benefit of hindsight, your kid could read how you had a crush on someone, while your spouse(his dad/mom) is still completely oblivious. Reading their blogs side by side would be like real time action for them. (Though there would still be a lot of self-censorship, since it's a public domain after all.)

Sometimes I do find it easy to forget that a 50 year old elder hasn't been 50 years old for 50 years. If the youths of the future do get access to their parents' blogs, those youths are going to have a heck of a time reading their parents growing up. I know, my children wouldn't have a chance, since I don't blog much about my life anymore.