Five years on…

March 2006 was when I first officially tried to make a mark of chronicling my thoughts online. This was when Friendster used to be a bustling online hang out of friends. Lynette was the one who introduced me to blogging after, if I remember it right, she distributed her poetry booklet(?) through email (yes she spammed me! LOL! Love you Lynette ;)).

I did enjoy blogging however, as I’ve learned along the way, a lot of insecurities bugged me. The ghosts of my past—from thoughts of not being able to express myself properly, misguided outline to glitches in grammars. I persevered somehow but writing became sporadic until last year.

I had a good reason to blog less because I was writing more. In case you’re confused, I am trying to finish my long overdue thesis. To give you a preview of how near I am to finishing, visit this blog (cue in sound of crickets in the night).

Despite the discouragements, heartaches and close to manic episodes, I am still positive that I will still be able finish writing. I have attended a lot of seminars on writing and recently joined a writer’s support group. Now, I just have to be consistent in writing. If you’re writing almost the same topic over and over, it seems like an endless interrogation that you agree to every suggestion that anyone gives. It feels like people are poking arguments at me that I did it wrong, you’ve got to do this again and, as I am a “friendly” writer, I give in to almost every suggestion thrown at me. So, I suppose you can imagine what I had to go through just squeezing in all those ideas that sometimes didn’t fit.

In the end, I blame myself for putting myself in this quagmire. But on second thought, I might be too harsh. If I think hard, I do still enjoy research especially if I go back to the reason I let myself into this. The feeling was similar to what I had when I started to study DevCom at a state university back home. I had a noble goal, i.e., the grassroots stakeholders in the Greater Mekong Subregion stand to benefit from my study.

OK, I’m aware that I am already off track. So going back to the topic, yes, it’s been five years since I first blogged. I moved to wordpress on August 2006. I’ve lost a lot of online friends along the way because of my intermittent blogging although Massa P. and Doc Jun are some of my most loyal online friends I’ve ever had. Five years on I’m still enjoying blogging albeit at another platform—microblogging on Plurk and Twitter. I have made some good online friends but missing my good old ones (misteryosa, Ezraulo, Spilling my own thunder and Milking the cash cow among others).

Now cheers to another five years. I leave you with a music video, the message of the song might not be related to my topic but I just love the song and it might probably fit still… Blogbastic is five years!