Remarks on reaching One Hundred Posts

Well, who'd have thought that I'd ever get this far? 100 posts. Some frivolous, some serious, and most of them retaining the original purpose of this blog, to reflect on new knowledge, and the acts of writing and reading. Professor Steve, hats off to you -- you're the one who started this great adventure and here I am, still going strong.

I had the interesting (and let us not forget somewhat harrowing) experience of eating dinner with my sister's French Club at a little frenchstyle bistro several miles away from school. (I had to drive there, hence the harrowing part.)If you're ever in the neighborhood and you feel like spending a bit much for dinner, Mon Ami Gabi. Very good food, especially the steak frites.

Anyway, little did I know that a seemingly inncuous conversation starter (Who among the six freshmen liked the Twilight books?) would lead me to use my linguistics research in context! I had brought up the now famous Steven King interview and asked the girls if they agreed with him, if they thought that JK Rowling is a better writer than Stephanie Meyer. One of the girls disagreed with King, supporting my second answer option, that both are good for different reasons. (I don't agree with this option, but I put it out there anyway for the purposes of coversation. I'm not a total dunce when it comes to teenage girls) She pointed out that both are books about relationships, and she reads Twilight for the fluffy romance. "Besides," she said, "I stopped reading Harry Potter after the fifth book becuase I didn't like what she was doing with it. And the end of Seven...See, I think Harry and Hermione should have ended up together," she explained.

"Ah, an H/H shipper!" I exclaimed. She nodded.

Wait. I just used the word shipper and she understood me! We then got to talking about fanfiction, I shared a little bit of my 'language as an identity marker' research, and I subsequently found out that she writes fanfiction, has been writing for two years now. But unlike me, who tells the whole world what I write, and frequently, she seemed rather ashamed of her work. She didn't want to share her address with me and she didn't even want to say what genre she wrote for. Perhaps this was because I intimidated her, (I had been talking the whole evening about anything and everything I could think of, including the history of Alsace after it appeared on a wine-menu) but I think it was something more than that -- I think she was genuinely ashamed of her fanfiction. She doesn't tell her friends about it, doesn't tell anyone!

So my question is this -- why keep doing something you're ashamed of? Why continue producing product that you don't want other people to read and posting it on the online community? I always write to entertain or make the people I know, as well as people I don't know, think and reflect on something. If you're going to create, why keep it anonymous? It's why artists sign paintings, isn't it?