Do I care what you think?

One of the blogs I visit on a near-daily basis is Ask and Ye Shall Receive. My friend Pink Piddy Paws was reviewed there and sent me the link.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive seems on the surface to be a somewhat mean-spirited review blog (check out the URL), but once you get past some of the language, these people really do a good job of pointing out what's right and what's wrong with the blogs they review. They love well-written, well-thought out blogs and bemoan drivel, pointlessness, and plagarism.

I have become hooked on this website. I even dared to submit my own blog for review, though it hasn't happened yet. I have a feeling these folks may be a bit swamped because everyone wants to know how they're doing.

But do I really CARE what other people think?

I do like it when I have visitors and comments, but even if no one ever read this blog, I would still write it. Just like I write novels people may never read, I write this blog for myself and for my son who will one day perhaps need a way to connect with his mother.

I've found a few blogs through Ask and Ye Shall Receive that have become daily reads for me - and I dared comment on The Meanest Mom's blog review today. I mentioned that I was a lurker and started out that way waiting for my own blog to be reviewed. And some person named "Bobby" told me to stop lurking because he's seen my blog and it sucked.

Whoa! It was a bit of a shock, actually. Perhaps because the Christmas spirit was finally settling in or because since Fun Monday's post, I'd been spending a lot of time thinking about kindness and strangers and how cool random kindnesses are - and then out of the blue there's this person being a bit rude and nasty in response to a positive comment I made about a blog being reviewed.

I was a little taken aback.

I guess I've been lucky so far. I've been doing this for three years and have never run into a mean or rude person in my blog visits. When my husband tried blogging, he gave it up because he was continually running into people like that.

But all this got me thinking - do I really care what other people think about my blog? People I don't know?

No. I don't.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion and I don't have to agree with it. Or care about it for that matter. Not every blog will be everyone's cup of tea. There are lots of blogs I don't read because I lost interest, didn't care about or for the content, or the thing was riddled with so many spelling errors and grammatical faux pauxs that reading it was a chore. And I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't read mine because they don't care about kids, dogs, fixing houses or any of the other things I write about.

And that's okay.