Revolutionary Moderation

Calgary Blogmeet



*WARNING* Journal-like entry ahead - little or no politics.



Last night, I attended the first meet of the cowtownbloggers.org group. And while I was only able to stay for a couple of hours (and it sounds very much from the descriptions that it went on for more like five?), I found the people there to be every bit as interesting and smart as their blogs would indicate.



But I'm not sure how I fit there. Most of the blogs they operate reveal a lot about the individuals who write them. Mine does too, I suppose, but very different kinds of things. Am I married or single, am I old or young, am I gay or straight, Agnostic, Atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim; ethnically African, Asian, European, North or South American? The people who read here and know me in person know the answers to those questions, but the person who stumbles by with a strange google search? If they hang around and get to know me, great... I suspect all of those answers are in here, or in the archives, or are somewhere or another or will be eventually.



My fellow Calgary bloggers, don't let my leaving early (two hours in a coffee shoppe! Who calls that "early"?) fool you. I'd love to sit down with any one of you and answer any of those questions, and ask you several myself. But a social situation, with that many people, who are this extroverted? I asked a couple of times if people had met one another before, and while there were some connections between them beyond the blogs, there also seemed to be a really easy rapport between until-that-moment-strangers that intimidated the heck out of me.



I thought I was pretty comfortable in a pretty wide variety of social situations. I ran for election, for goodness sakes! I knocked on the doors of farmers I never met, and asked them to cast a ballot for a party that was going to take all their property, collectivise their farms, and make them spend the rest of their lives growing un-genetically-modified soybeans to produce mass quantities of tofurkies to eat on Non-denominational Gift-Granting Day(or so some of them seemed to believe). I stood in front of three hundred people and the television cameras from the local news, and told them that the Minister of Education was appealing to their fears and their prejudices, and that even he knows that the solutions to problem x, y, z do not involve treating Section 33 of the Charter like a club to hit the federal government with, and isn't that right, Dr. Oberg?



I'll look forward to meeting with you again, bloggers... I genuinely like you. What I do here is different from what you do at your sites, but frankly, that's a big part of what makes you interesting.