WHY I DON’T BLOG ANYMORE

1) Most of the personal events happened  in my workplace. I’ve literally spent years living and working within the same space. I’m afraid that if I blab too much about the involved culprits, I might be fired from my job.

2) Internet is scarce onboard. It costs me at least Euro 0.50 per minute. Despite my 200 Euros allowance per month, it’s still not enough to hang around long enough.

3) I have an attention span of a 5-year-old and a penchant for shiny new things like a troll. To write something insightful can be tedious (don’t tell anyone that I’m an aspiring writer) and this old blog no longer has that magnetic quality on me anymore. As I’m not connected to the Internet most of the time, I don’t have a support network to keep me going, thus succumbing easily to procrastination and laziness.

4) I like to fantasize and make things up. I don’t like to think and psychoanalyze myself and put them into words. Most of my best work are fiction while the non-fiction ones don’t talk about me. Perhaps I’m just not a very thoughtful person-haha!

5) Work is demoralizing, exhausting and continuously draining my creative literacy juices.

You could say that I’m one of those girls who lives a semi-charmed kind of life: one who has been blessed to have that sort of job where he or she is paid to wake up in a different country everyday actually-that’s only a fringe benefit), one who doesn’t have to make up tales or overdramatize situations just to make her life sound a little more interesting, whose life (in retrospect) looks incredibly interesting at a glance and where her reality is usually stranger than fiction yet despite of all that, I don’t feel the burning desire to update my blog on a more frequent basis.

Instead, I pen ranty and usually grammatically incorrect emails to my friends who have long become my virtual audience. They armchair travel through me while I seek catharsis virtually in return.

However, there are times when I feel that my continuous bombarding of emails sometimes turn them off hence…

I SHOULD REALLY CONTINUE TO BLOG…..

1) Whenever I do get a chance to surf and lurk around other people’s blogs especially those stellar ones that quenches my thirst for knowledge, gossip or wisdom, I feel the urge (purely egoistical) to do the same. To put myself out there, warts and all, to the world and be read. To write in order to share would probably give me the most pleasure but to be read is kinda nice too, don’t you think?

2) I’m an aspiring writer. I’m trying to finish up a novel. What sort of writer am I if I don’t write? Also, as a writer, I must have some sort of portfolio. A personal blog is a great testament to one’s discipline and capacity as a writer but I’ve been doing piss all about it. It’s time to put my foot down and get over myself.

3) I sit in my room

imagine the future

sunlight falls on Paris…

Trafalgar’s fountain splash

on noon-warmed pigeons…

Gold dolphins leaping

thru Mediterranean rainbow

White smoke and steam in Andes

Asia’s rivers glittering…

- Allen Ginsberg

I could really relate to the verse by the beat writer Ginsberg. Friends somehow have imagined my life to  be something like this: me sipping macchiato in some random war-torn country while I type away on my Macbook-which is not completely untrue except that, instead of updating my blog, I was surfing Facebook or doing something equally inane and non productive. Now, if only I could capture that soft wintry sunlight in Paris or that double Icelandic rainbow into words, my blog would have been rich with sounds, sights and smells. I may not have been that great of a writer but I could at least try.

THE CHALLENGE

At least a blog post a week. It’s a realistic and feasible goal and I don’t think I’d die trying. It’s a challenge for the lazy but it’s still a start. What do you think? Who’s reading me?

But alas, I was foolishly ignorant that big dreams are accomplished by working on small stuff. The most mundane and banal steps are necessary because it will eventually create the big picture in the future. No one could have completed a journey without taking the small steps towards their destination. The journey would then comprise of tiny daily triumphs and temporary obstacles.

And while I’m here, stuck on a floating hotel, with nothing much to do or to look forward to, I must perhaps remind myself that an exciting blog doesn’t consist of just inspiring long posts, but also the dull and boring short ones. Because if I keep waiting out for something big to happen, I might just miss out on writing anything at all.

It’s time.

Who knows when am I going to update this blog again? For the fact that I keep making promises about wanting to keep this virtual portal active has rendered me a liar as you can see, other than an occasional life snippet, there is nothing else. No extensive commentaries about life, no discourses about my current lifestyle or urgent headlines about people and places. It will be interesting if this serves as a column for a certain media publication, and I, the correspondent. That would mean, racking my brains and digging the slush juice from within just to stay within the periphery of deadlines. But the truth is, balancing online existence and living the real life can be a tad bit difficult. More often than not, I just want to live my life and not really, to write about it. It’s like a photographer who’s tired of looking at his surroundings through a lens and decided to put his camera away for a while. Without a black and grey gadget in between him and his present moment, he can breathe the fresh red, ochre, yellow autumn air and smile under the glowering orange sun. He’s now a participant of nature instead of an observer, an outsider.

Also, I rather dream and fantasize, let the thoughts and ideas marinate in my head instead of putting them into words. When those little, nitty, grubby nuts and bolts of my thoughts are put into words, they lose its magic. For me, anyway.

But does mean I’ll stop this blog? No. I guess this is more of a disclaimer. I will write and spin tales whenever my heart takes fancy but if I don’t, it just means that life’s been more than a handful and I’m facing it, head on. And for you blog addicts (bloggers and blog readers alike), don’t let your blog define who you are.

Choose life, live it well.

Inspiration for writing comes knocking whenever I’m at my busiest. Whenever I’m not pondering, reflecting, analyzing or thinking, it comes, like a torrential downpour, threatening to rain down ideas that I’ll never get to jot down because I goddamn busy doing other things! Like when I’m on a meditation retreat, or when I’m up to my neck, doing data entry work. Like now.

But I know better and this time, I’ve decided to take heed of this muse. Because it never comes twice. Not especially when I’m faced with a blank screen, waiting for something profound to come up.

Anyway, I’m trying to start writing again. A year has passed and my blog is in a rather forlorn state, neglected by its indisciplined owner who claimed to be a writer, despite the fact that saying that she’s a writer, and doing the actual writing itself, are two separate things completely. One’s a concept and the other’s reality.

I’ve got many stories to write about but I need time to sieve through my memory bank. Much has happened from the time I left this blog (to rot!) till present. Some good, some bad, some so-so. When I’m caught up in some sort of obstacle, time somehow crawls by, but now I’m able to look back in retrospect and see the journey that I was on, unfolding itself onto a map of life. It was an interesting year and I’d dearly love to write about it but not now. This post’s merely a teaser (it’s my way of telling Muse to stop bugging me but hey, at least I’m acknowledging its presence).

It took one sultry night, when I was sitting with a bunch of girls that I barely knew (some better than the others), that made me want to make use of this virtual portal as an outlet of expression again. There’s so much to share, on this blank online journal of mine. From time to time, people wanted to know how I did it, like travel without having to worry about money (trust me-it’s not easy being poor but I’ve got people to thank for helping me out of the financial rut) and how I got myself such a cool gig, working on an Italian cruise ship but not having to resort to scrubbing pots or running around on stilettos, trying to please old, fat but wealthy passengers.

Sit tight; stories coming right up.