Talk to me

My last post, like many of my other posts, got me some bouquets and some brickbats from readers. Some liked the post and identified with it, while others shook their heads and walked away (I do admit it was a bit abstract though).

When you write something, it's amazing how the same written word can have so many different interpretations by different readers, and all that depends on a number of factors:

- Their relationship with you (e.g. your adoring grandmother, if she reads your blog, is rather unlikely to dismiss a post written by you as crappy, especially if she thinks that you're the best thing that happened to the world since the discovery of electricity.)

- Their state of mind when they are reading it (e.g. they have just gone through something and there is something in your post they can completely identify with, as if what you wrote just "spoke to them")

- Their attitude towards you (e.g. some bloke who does not quite like you but reads your blog to find more reasons to dislike you, will find or make up reasons to hate the post you wrote)

- Their history with you (an absolute 'freshie' on your blog is more likely to be very objective about a particular post than someone who knows how you function)

Like me, there are zillions of people blogging and reading blogs every single day. Different reasons, different writing styles and different topics are being picked to write blog posts. Zillions of posts are being loved, hated, admired, and killed every second. Once in a while, I come across a post someone wrote and say, "Wow, that's a perfect blog post." And then I wonder -- what really is a perfect blog post? Isn't a perfect blog post as much a reflection of me, the reader, as much as you, the writer? You write them, I read them, and together we make some posts perfect.

There is really no absolute perfect post, is there?

My perfect post is different from your perfect post. To me, the perfect blog post would be the one that is imperfect. For the simple reasons that it came straight from the heart. The imperfect perfect post, just like the perfect ad, would be the one that although describing the writer's own thoughts, appears to have been written for everyone. Everyone identifies with at least some aspect of it, irrespective of whether they know the writer or not. And each person who reads it, looks at it slightly differently, and feels as if it was written for him/her. As if even though it is out there for everyone to see, it has a special meaning for him/her, something hidden that was to be discovered only by him/her, a meaning others are blissfully unaware of. In other words, it "speaks to them".

Perhaps, that truly is the 'imperfect perfect post'.

This reminds me of the time when I was talking to a very dear friend over MSN. Now he's the kind of friend I can't live with, and I can't live without. We have a squabble almost every single day, but if we stop talking to each other, we're both miserable the entire day. I guess it's the kind of the connection we have. He has a videocam but I don't. Most of the time, he turns on his videocam during our conversations, and I can see (and make fun of) his expressions, but when I get angry during a conversation, I guess it frustrates him because I go all silent on him, and he can't even see the expression on my face. So he keeps asking me to get a videocam. And I keep saying "Yeah right."

So we were conversing once, and we had a tiff and both of us kinda got pissed off, and fell silent. And suddenly, out of nowhere, there it was, the little prompt at the bottom of the conversation window.

"Connection established." it said.

It was just a standard prompt written by a random programmer neither of us knew, for everyone who's ever had an MSN conversation to see. But to us, at that moment, it held a very special meaning. A secret meaning encoded in words that were visible to everyone, but it felt like only we knew the actual significance of those words. It made us smile. It got us talking again.

Connection established.

And if that was not enough, seconds later, a pop-up window with one of those annoying ads, appeared on my screen. Usually, I hate pop-ups, but this one actually made me smile. It said something my friend had been telling me for ages.

"Get a webcam!" said the irritating green cartoon character in the pop-up ad.

I burst out laughing.

Have you ever read anything that seemed like it was out there for everyone to see, but only for you to get?

Something that "spoke to you"?

(And no, I'm not talking about things like the pic below. )