On Brick Walls and Back Fences

Speaking of brick walls, there are entirely other ways to apply the same metaphor to communities besides gender roles. It can also be used to describe how people share their lives:

I came across a great metaphor for relationships awhile ago - bricks and mortar. Bricks are the "big things" - the events of life that you share with friends. Mortar is the little, everyday stuff, that the people you are closest to just know about, often whether they want to or not. -- Darusha

Bricks would be things like weddings, funerals, births, deaths, new jobs, new cars, new pets, travel to distant lands, etc. Mortar would be announcements of "my mushrooms are frozen! O.o" while I'm making beef barley soup. Mortar bits of info are what make other people real and lifelike, and give a community its depth.

For the most part, people tend to blog bricks rather than mortar. Mortar just doesn't seem important enough to mention via such weighty methods as "publishing," immortalized for all the world to see for all eternity. But mortar is really easy in a realtime chat situation, or over an instant messenger, where it'll all just flow past and eventually disappear.

In the case of UCFers, we get into mortarlike things through blog post comments. Those aren't as weighty as actual articles, because they get lost in a big mishmash of other comments. But oftentimes they don't seem appropriate to say if they aren't on topic, and there have been quite a few times now where I wanted to say something mortarlike to people, but don't, because there's no real place to do it.

Enter Tom's Back Fence. Come say hi already, people!