Behind the scenes of my favorite blog, Humans of New York

Recently I took a How to Blog class with Gotham Writer’s Workshop. I have taken a number of great classes with Gotham and enjoyed them all. The teacher of this class, Kim Brittingham, is involved with around 30 blogs and has written a memoir, Read My Hips. Each of her lectures mentioned even more blogs, over a hundred in all. I couldn’t figure out how she found time to read them all.

I took the online version of Gotham’s How to Blog class, which lasts four weeks. The class had 24 participants, of whom 22 posted a biography and of whom 9 took part in discussions. There was a writer’s lounge at which I met 2 other students. One of the students confided in me that she was a horny old broad, but didn’t take me up on the idea of creating a blog around that topic. She later invited me to join her for a dinner of buckwheat noodles with spinach, pine nuts and wine, but I couldn’t get to CA in time.

Images from another favorite blog, Never Seconds

By the end of the class, nine students had posted working blogs. We had a xenofiction writer, a world traveler, a kitchen sink philosopher, a few moms, notably one who blogged from her kids’ point of view, a chef and a sports enthusiast. If you put us all together we could form a soccer-playing Supercult in another galaxy with plenty of kids, and have philosophical dinner conversations over our home grown vegetarian creations. But on the interwebz people come and go at the speed of a click, and we may never cross paths again. I have, however, scheduled a Simply Healed session with one of the bloggers and I hope to have an update on that soon.

Iron Man: "The universe is too vast for aliens not to exist." Clark Kent: "Absolutely."

My first blog was simply pictures of people with their answers to questions like “Do you believe in true love?” or “Do you believe in aliens?” (According to my survey, people's level of faith was slightly in favor of aliens over true love.)

Then I was advised that my blog should be about me. So I started writing about my search for love and meaning. I created situations specifically for the purpose of blogging. Then stuff happened that was a lot more interesting than the stuff I set up. But that was private. So I tried to set up other stuff to write about.

I asked a speed dating acquaintance, for an interview about her speed dating experiences. She agreed but had to reschedule our chat due to overbooking. Looking for more inspiration, I arranged a morning meeting with my Law of Attraction friend, Cash. He wanted a tall iced decaf. While in line, I forgot what he asked for and got him a venti non-decaf.

“It was meant to be,” he said, when I offered to replace it.

When I first met Cash two years ago, I felt sure that he was a man who got what he wanted.

"How are things going?" I asked.

“I’m getting by," he said. "But sometimes I just want to kill myself.”

I wished I could think of something encouraging to say, but nothing seemed right.

“Why do you think the Law of Attraction isn’t working for you?” I asked.

“Because I’m not getting what I want,” he said.

Cash says he wants to win the lottery but perhaps what he really wants is to feel rich.

Oscar Wilde said, “There are two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.”

Many people say the anticipation of getting what you want is sweeter than actually getting it. Once you know it’s coming, that might be true. I guess it’s like true love or aliens. Believing in it is almost as exciting as experiencing it. But I think getting it is always better, because then one can allow oneself to want so much more.