THIS IS A NO SPOILER ZONE!

Yesterday I saw the movie, Julie & Julia. I liked it, a lot in fact. Although I will be up front and say that I loved it because I adore Meryl Streep. She was a phenomenal Julia Child. Watching her was just amazing. The chick who played the blogger, eh. She was fine, that story line was fine. However, I so easily could have watched two hours of Meryl Streep playing Julia Child. I also love the guy who played her husband. They had great chemistry.

It’s weird to watch a movie  about blogging though, when you have been blogging for years. Its not that they did a bad job of it, not did it seem far off from reality, but it was weird to me. I’ll tell you quite honestly it made me wonder how it will change blogging. If more people will do it now? If more people will be irritated when they start a blog and don’t find that it’s what they think it should be. You know, will people think that starting a blog will suddenly bring them readers and offers of professional writing? That makes me laugh. I don’t know, it just made me think about this blogging thing. Why I do it. Why it matters to me as much as it does.

I have no answers, I’ve just been thinking about it since I saw the movie. I’m an over thinker, what can I say?

I’ll tell you the best thing in the movie for me. I swear this doesn’t ruin it at all. There is a part where Julia Child comes to America and meets a friend, who she’d never met. They’d been pen pals for eight years and had never laid eyes on each other. I adored that part. For some reason that moment where they see each other, made me cry, because it was like reliving that moment when I got to hug certain people at BlogHer on the first day.

When the movie ended and we (Logan, our two friends and I) were all talking about it over a late lunch, Logan asked me what in that moment made me cry. I tried to explain it to him. Blogging is like pen pals was back in the day, in some ways. We all share certain portions of our lives with each other. Only what we want obviously, but generally it’s easier to share when you aren’t looking at people. We write emails, we chat, we tweet and it’s the same thing as writing letters. Just faster. It almost makes some of us closer than the people we know in real life. We know deeper parts of each other than we possible would, even if we saw each other once a week.

I care about you all, just as much as my friends in real life. I worry about you if I don’t see you around for a few days. I notice if I don’t see you around in a few days. If I never met any of you face to face, this wouldn’t change how I feel about you. But it was amazing to put faces to names. To hug people. To laugh and joke and share stories for a few days, without needing to try and remember what we were discussing five hours later, because one or both of us got busy.

It was interesting, because for the first time ever, I think Logan got it. It reminded him of his grandparents. My husbands grandparents were pen pals in a way. They met the summer after high school, on vacation with their families.  However, that was in the early 40′s and he ended up drafted. She wrote to him for two years before he came home. When he could he sent letters back to her. Some of the letters got lost, some he got after he’d already gotten the letter she sent after it; but they wrote to each other for two years. When the war was over, he came home and married her.

Seeing blogging in a movie and then that scene with the pen-pals, made my husband finally understand what and why I blog. I’m just talking to my friends. To you.

This doesn’t change anything really. What it did do, is possibly make it where I don’t have to keep explaining why I do this over and over again to him. He doesn’t get it, even now, but at least he gets why I get it. For that, Julie & Julia was one of the best movies I’ve seen all year.