who i am and why i’m here

Before we begin: I’m currently taking part in Blogging 101. All my posts related to that course will be tagged blogging101. For those of you who are also into blogging, I encourage you to join me and the rest of the community of bloggers!

The topic of our assignment today was to write a “who I am and why I’m here” post. I figured that since this blog is only the latest of many I’ve taken a stab at, that I would start by explaining my relationship with blogging instead.

I started blogging in elementary school. I was really into creative writing back then, and started a website where I wanted to showcase my writing and other people’s writing as well. For some reason, I thought that if I created a webpage, people would find it, submit their stories to me and I could publish it on my website, and thereby build a community. I had no recognition of how hard it was to even have people find your blog back then. After a few weeks of very few views, I gave up on that venture. (I tried to find a link for you guys, but I forget the name of the site so… sorry).

I then started my first real blog. I posted in this one throughout most of high school. Since I was also writing book reviews for an online company during that time, I also wrote reviews of other books I read on my blog. My teenage self also constantly swivelled between dry sarcasm and major angst, so I also had wrote some “opinion” pieces. Reading them now makes me laugh and cringe simultaneously.

I switched to this blog mostly because I disliked Blogger. My poor blog underwent several major renovations (these were usually done during one of my moody fits and were reflective of those moods – I’ve had a pink blog with fluffy clouds and I ended with a theme reminiscent of a geeky tech blog from the 90s), but they never met my satisfaction for more than a few days. I would look at other blogs for inspiration, and the ones I enjoyed the most were almost always WordPress. One of my favourite bloggers at the time was Singaporean Xiaxue (I even wrote a post about her), and she had talked about wanting to switch over to WordPress (something she never ended up doing for some reason).

So now I’m here. Compared to my other blogs, this one lacks focus, which kind of parallels my life these days. I haven’t had time to read as many books as I used to (< one per term even), so I can’t possibly write any book reviews, and without the inspiration of other writers to draw from, I felt like writing anything was pointless because my technique would stagnate in a pool without flowing influences. Once I stopped for a little while, it was easy to stop entirely.

Why am I trying to revive this stuttering blog? Well, I’ve been reading more blogs lately, and it’s inspired me to give this thing another shot. Whenever I find one of my diaries from back when I was a child, I always get a good laugh.

How is this different from a diary? I don’t keep a diary anymore. In case you haven’t gleaned from some of my entries on this blog or my old one, I can become quite emo given the right conditions. When I’m writing entries just for me, my thoughts turn dark very quickly, whereas when I’m writing on the Internet, the caution of a stranger / someone I know reading this helps keep me in check. It’s my own twisted way of self-protection, I guess.

What topics will I write about? Probably pop culture, university life, and possibly coop? I also want to write more short stories.

What will I hope to accomplish within the next year? I won’t be optimistic in thinking I’ll be able to dedicate to this blog the time that it needs. Hopefully I will at least be able to maintain my goal of one post a month.