Why blog?

Today at lunch, I mentioned that I had a blog but a limited readership (to my knowledge anyway - maybe I should get a hits counter). So one of the people I was eating with asked why I bothered to blog at all if I didn't know if people would read it.

I've been writing since 2nd grade. I still have my first journal that consisted mainly of what I found out in college were technically called "Mary Sue" fanfiction. ST:TNG, TMNT... it's all very embarassing. So, fanfics were first. Poetry came around third grade. Short fiction came in late elementary school and attempts at novels started in middle school. I created an entire universe of characters and even my own language. Finally, in college, I gave up on thinking of plots and just started writing little rants, observations, and parodies and storing them in a folder on my computer. These things rarely made it to ink and paper.

Other people rarely saw what I wrote. In high school, people would come up to my desk and start reading my notebook when we were waiting for class to start (incidentally, I also developed codes so that the few things I really didn't what others to see could remain private). So people knew I was a writer. But I wrote for me, not an audience.

So why blog? Writing is something I've done to entertain myself and vent frustration for a long time. Having a blog, like having any kind of journal, motivates me to write. Otherwise, these thoughts would just stick in my head and annoy me for days on end. And maybe somewhere along the way, I'll provoke a few thoughts or a few laughs in the people who wander by and pick up my notebook.