Welcome to the blogosphere.

Blogging for pay is one of the weirdest things you'll ever do, I'm learning. Writing for pay is something I'm used to now, there's a standard of journalistic integrity you have to uphold and you are praised if you know your grammar rules and can sound like you've read a lot of Jane Austen (and I have). But blogging -- you're given this fantastic opportunity to entertain people (because isn't that the style of blogging? no matter what your topic, you're sort of funny or cynical or sarcastic about it?), but you're not trained as an entertainer, right, you're just armed with an English degree and an AP style guide. The level of writing with which I used to feel comfortable now feels uptight and bookish. I feel like a dull 60-year-old trying to crack jokes with teenagers: I'm just not cool enough for this.

Last week one of the managers tells me it would be great if I went to this blogger mixer thing next week. So I went, because that's what you do.

I don't feel I have much in common with the sorts of people who attend these things. It's not the chubby, young, "we met on the Internet and now we're engaged!" crowd who get together downtown for beers. This is the conservative political bloggers who go on and on about how light rail is single-handedly going to bring down the city. Oh, and property taxes, they loooove talking about property taxes.

Turns out nobody talks about property taxes in person. And you get to drink BEER, the grease that makes awkward meetings smoother. I liked everyone, but I don't think I made any fans. Meeting new people you'd never meet otherwise is sort of, I dunno, awesome.