Saturday, April 16, 2005
Of Bitching and Benzes
In the past, I've always maintained a negative stance against keeping diaries. I never did see the point of pouring your thoughts into a book which probably nobody else but you would ever have a chance to read. In comparison to other means of 'emotional release' (so sue me for making up a phrase), diary-keeping seemed to me relatively fruitless.Imagine this situation; "I just lost my job, girlfriend and pet Schnauzer to my boss and his Mercedes! I'm so mad, I'll write it in my diary."
Yeah, like that will solve anything. Most people, I believe, would have gotten even with the exacerbating executive by way of a pair of fists allowed to fly freely, and the Benz, on the other hand, may receive several well-placed blows on the windshield. Granted, that is a lot more dramatic than writing in a book, but people need to spice up their lives in some way, right?
Anyway, as I was saying, I was never a fan of keeping a diary. A journal, yes; there will come (I'm not sure if I sound grammatically correct here) a time in the future when you will one to know the details of your unfortunate or uneventful past. I have one myself, one which have not been updated for about 10 days, and a typical line in it goes "I went back and slept". Yup, that's a journal. The method which I employ to distinguish diaries and journals are by comparing language use and the amount of bitching in each; you can easily tell that you have stumbled upon a diary when you see pages and pages of entries going "*Expletive* that *expletive*, who the *expletive* does she think she is?!"
However, we can't really make that distinction with the phenomenon we have come to know as blogs. When blogging first started, people simply shifted their diaries from one medium to another. The essence of their blogs, as a result, remained the same; bitching. Others diligently chronicle every single event of (perceived) importance in their lives. The technology have also allowed groups of people to get together to start a multiple poster blog, taking turns posting ideas, comments, achievements and pictures, each new post attempting to outdo the last. Some journalistically-inclined people have even turned their blogs into some sort of online newspaper column.
More industrious people have even used their blogs as an efficient means of interpersonal communication. In the past, people who actually want their diaries to be read by others had to hide the books in the most obvious of places, complete with a conspicuous, elaborately decorated front cover with the words 'DIARY' emblazoned across it to catch the attention of potential snoopers. Now, all you have to do is type, tag, and hope for the best. This has led many to utilise their blogs to 'subtly' convey their resentment of certain other parties just by bitching about said other parties followed by publishing and publicising their blogs so that eventually, that other party will stumble upon the blog and receive the message. Moreover, if anything goes wrong, one can always edit and delete, or accuse hackers for any screw-ups. Now is that cool or what?
As you can see, I've ran out of ideas for jokes. I hope that sometime in the future, I may be able to fill this space with a witty comment or one-liner. As for now...
With that being said, I hope that my insensitive categorisation and labelling of the various species of bloggers and blogs will prove useful to you, although I highly doubt so. I just felt like saying something, but I lack the time and the flair to make this a nice and proper post. Like the description of my blog says at the top of this page, this is only a half-assed attempt at blogging, so it is only appropriate that I make a half-assed first post. Until you return, I apologise for wasting your time. Now go away and get back to surfing the net.
PS: Now that I come to think of it, how the heck do you surf a net?
PPS: Crap, it took me an hour and forty minutes to type this thing... Time to get back to sleep...
PPPS: This is a reminder to anybody using blogspot, please type your posts in MS Word or something first before publishing... That is to prevent irretrievable damage should you hold down Shift+Arrow Keys or Shift+PgUp/Dn to highlight words; all the words you type suddenly go missing! This page friggin made me waste thirty minutes retyping the second half because I typed something by accident instead of pressing "Recover post". Sheesh... More than two hours spent on this thing.
