[This is an important post. If I know you in "real life" and you read Electrolicious regularly, it affects you.]

Since returning to my hometown, I’ve realized that more Seattleites than I realized have been regularly reading my blog. Acquaintances I haven’t talked to in years know all about what I’ve been up to. Friends of friends have turned into daily visitors. And yet strangely, many of you have been lurkers: reading, but not emailing; following my life, but not sharing anything about yours.

That’s a very strange sensation.

A story: after I moved to Los Angeles last year, I lost touch with my father. Without our regular Seattle dinner outings, I found that weeks would go by with not a peep from him. It was very strange and sad-making until I realized that my blog was to blame. You see, my father felt like he had been keeping in touch with me — why, he heard from me every day! The only problem was that I didn’t hear from him every day, and so while he had the impression of staying in contact with me, I was left feeling lonely and out of touch.

After I pointed the situation out to him, he became much better at reciprocating: he still reads my blog every day (hi, dad!), but he makes a concerted point to step up to his end of the communication bargain, and it made all the difference. A phone call, an email, a comment — he lets me know he’s reading and that he cares.

The joy of this here blog is that it helps me keep in touch with friends far and wide. I’m increasingly realizing, however, that the vast majority of those friends don’t return the favor.

I know, I know: get out the little electric violin and play me a sad song, right? But I’m serious.

It’s something I say in the “what IS this?” page linked over there in the sidebar, but clearly I need to repeat it: If I know you in real life, and you read this blog, you really need to make the effort to communicate with me. For some strange reason I’m fine with people I don’t know lurking in the sidelines, reading about this strange woman on the interweb. I don’t know them, they don’t know me. But if I know you in real life, your right to lurk is unequivocally revoked.

People I know lurking on Electrolicious contributes to this strange feeling that there are a lot of people in my “real life” who know me, but don’t give me the opportunity to know them. It’s sort of a strange lonely feeling, so I’m bringing it out into the open and staring it straight in the face.

There’s a lot of my life that doesn’t appear on this blog, so if you know me in real life and think you’re getting the full story, you’re not. You definitely should get in touch because there is all sorts of lewd, scandalous, fantastic-ness that will never make it on the blog.

Note: just because you read Electrolicious doesn’t mean you know me, and it certainly doesn’t mean I know you…unless you make an effort to let me. A comment, an email, whatever. If I know you, you read Electrolicious, and you don’t communicate with me, you’re committing a strange sort of emotional vampirism. It’s almost enough to make me consider making the site password protected, not because I don’t want people reading, but simply so that I can know you better.

I don’t want to do that, so how about from here on out, you all make efforts to be better, more communicative readers? It would help me feel less weird about all this.

Thanks.

Clarification
Thanks for all the comments, but I guess I need to restate that this post isn’t intended as a request for more general feedback from blog readers. I’m talking here to people I have “real life” relationships with, people who I want to encourage to keep me up to date on THEIR lives, while they read about mine. For all of you bloggers out there, thanks for your comments and concern, but it’s easy for me to keep tabs on y’all since, well, you have blogs. It’s my non-blogging real-life friends people who I’m losing touch with.