Blogger A Day Call: Hello is Steven there?

Steven Streight and I were looking forward to our call for special reasons. He lives in the city where I went to University — we’d already emailed about things we had in common. Yet when the appointed time came, the connection didn’t happen. . . . It happened that he was being bombarded with ringing from a crank during that exact time frame.

I tried the number, but I didn’t leave a message. I get self-conscious about such things — I don’t like to bother people. Steven called me later that night, and we made up for the delay with a heck of conversation. Thank you, Steven, for making that happen.

Steven and I started right off talking about how blogging raises the level of conversation. Steven wondered at the fact that the same sentence said in person in a bar has a more powerful meaning when written in a comment box. We discussed how the actuality of seeing the words right there might make them more powerful. The idea that people think harder before they write also came up. We speculated that maybe the expectation that the words had more meaning made it so.

We started with talk of my university. He went to another school, but he spent a whole lot of time at mine. Steven reported that my school was changing the name of the school mascot. The choices, he told me about were dismal — clock, squirrels, gargoyle. All I could say as a writer was YUK!!! It’s a technical term.

You can bet that Steven and I got to talking about Political Correctness. I mentioned that it was happening in school books for ten years before it was even called that. I told him how people actually count how many of every race is represented, that I learned always to show Mom with a hammer and Dad cooking dinner. He didn’t seem surprised. He didn’t seem to like it much either.

Steven said he was late to the Internet, but he’s been here longer than most bloggers I know. His archives go back to 2004. He says he’s about usability and that he’s a direct marketing copywriter. We talked in depth about one of his ideas. I thought it was WAY COOL and would love to be part of it. He thinks about ideas and wonders the way I do.

We talked about emoticons — with noses and curly hair and earings, people and nations, what we think of governments, music, pay per post, what will happen to the blogosphere, SEO attitudes, what Peoria, Illinois is like and places I used to go, including a restaurant with grandmas as waitstaff and a hotel with a grizzly bear in the lobby.

We remembered all of the ways our paths have crossed over the last year — the people we’ve watched, how we’ve changed, how our respect for each other has grown.

Then Steven asked where I grew up and I told him. I had to explain where it was. When I placed my hometown for him, Vaspers the Grate said the coolest thing to me.

“You really are the girl next door.”

Steven Steight made me feel exactly like I was that girl. That was a genuinely, wonderful feeling.

B.A.D. Blogger Quote

We can almost transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Blogging is almost compu-telepathy. —Steven Streight

Stop by Steven’s Blog, Vaspers the Grate, and say hi!

Thanks, Terry, you B.A.D. Blogger!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to be a B.A.D. Blogger see the. . . a B.A.D. Blogger? page in the sidebar.