Fresh Beginning

I have had a blog for years, I think eight or nine years by now, and my blogging has gone through phases. At first I had an updating journal I explicitly called not-a-blog, back when I thought webcomics were the best thing in the world. But as my interest in comics waned, I embraced blogging with less and less self-consciousness until it became and addictive habit fueled by two things. Firstly, I had a need for an internet persona, a cool (if self-deprecating) and snarky kind that justified my point of view. I didn’t use names but I used everyday occurrences and random opinions to build a polished vision of my life. Of course, it was still pretty nerdy, something that, particularly then, went without saying if you had a blog at all. The other powerful motivator was feedback, both from real life friends and ones I only met online, a wonder in itself. Unlike on most other occasions I got to write thinking about readers and it energized me.

I designed my blog myself, coded it and wrote new posts in notepad sprinkled with rudimentary styling, proud of not using any provider (those were the days of Livejournal, which I hated like a plague and thought myself pleasantly above those who used it). It went through a few rather ugly phases until I settled on a minimalistic look my brother helped me code. It worked fine for a long while, even if the updating process required knowing what didn’t work and going around it, I did just fine. Until I stopped updating.

By then I had a design blog together with my partner and the blog is going strong. Even though it takes much more time to update than scribbling a few paragraphs about a movie or the weather, we keep at it regularly and with gusto. But I started finding all the other kinds of posts for my original blog too much of an effort.

I blamed technical difficulties and told myself I would write more, had I an easier way to post. So here’s testing that theory: will I indeed post more again, now that I’m using the familiar WordPress interface? Will I come up with new excuses? Or will I actually own up to the truth: Both the need for an internet persona and a sense of audience are gone now. What’s left are random opinions on books, TV shows, music and, sometimes, other things as well, together with the fact that I still like the idea of having a blog, a place to vent your views even without anyone reading. What’s also left is a sense of a piece missing, where my ease of writing used to be. Once I felt language was my tool to be explored and used for whatever I needed it. Now the tool has gone rusty and I would really want to have it shiny and polished again. What you should also know is that I suck at metaphors.

This blog is, for all intents and purposes, just a continuation of the old one but, I think, I’m going to focus more on reviews and such. I will miss my original design but at least all the apostrophes will stop changing to quotation marks. Nothing stupider or more cliche than the first post in which you wonder whether the blog idea will work out at all. But hey, at least it’s honest, and it’s only a first post in one sense.