Wednesday 1 August 2012

used to be



I read from a blog (whose author is fast becoming one of my favorite persons in the world) how much a cliché it is for anybody with fingers, access to a computer and half of an idea to start a blog and unleash verbal diarrhea on anybody who cares enough to listen.  What I find, though, is a lot of “bloggers”’ main focus is creating interesting content with the intent of increasing followers,  resulting to amassed traffic,  and thus giving them leverage to sell ad space.  It’s all about business, isn’t it? Nothing wrong with that, really.  But that is not my intention here.

I used to be a moderately good writer.  In highschool, my bestfriend Goo and I were very much into new wave and punk music, while everyone else had Wham and Rick Springfield on their Walkman.  How we thought of ourselves as cool non-conformists! We created this imaginary awesome band where I was the lead singer and she played the keyboards.  The main heart of this highschool fantasy was a fictitious magazine with brilliant articles we both wrote, about our band’s music, our personal fabulous lives and relationships.  We had no intention of having it published let alone be read by anybody but ourselves. It was a unique  and comical form of artistic expression which we are both still very proud of to this day. (We did successfully put up our band in our Senior year, wrote original songs, performed in school and then branded as Satanists by the nuns.)

Goo and I at Fred's Revolucion
Manila, March 2012
This writing exercise turned into amusing letter exchanges when we took different paths after highschool and went to different universities.  Communication was so much different back then.  Each snail mail was carefully handwritten, beautifully composed sans syntax and spelling errors, detailing our adventures and misadventures of what we regarded as real adult life.

As we went through different phases of our lives, meeting more interesting people, our letters got fewer and farther in between, until it eventually came to an end.  My writing since then was limited to essays as academic requirements, corporate reports & correspondences and journal entries when I had time and the occasional inspiration.

My mother has always told me that I am a talented writer. That I am a gifted storyteller.  This is not true.  It is her God-given responsibility as a mother to encourage me and magnify a tiny piece of my skill she may have chanced upon in the past.  I love her for it, but at the same time it annoys me to death.

This blog is my attempt to bring back my lost love for writing.  It is a self imposed exercise to improve what I thought years ago I was fairly good at.  Just like the magazine I co-produced in highschool, I have no intention of anybody reading this blog and therefore nothing I write here will be for the purpose of feeding my ego nor impressing anyone I know or detest.  I ‘d be lucky if somebody stumbles upon this and understands my objective.

~~~

I just saw David Letterman telling Justin Bieber how he should not go crazy with his tattoos by putting a mural on his chest like the Sistine Chapel.  He responds, “I’m not going for the Sixteenth Chapel.”  What the fuck.