sure. wait. what?

I CAN no longer find the blog of this one professor I never had in college, an award-winning writer who’s also the daughter of a prominent Filipino novelist. Maybe the platform deleted it after decades of inactivity, or maybe she deleted it herself. I don’t know.

I suppose it’s never been uncommon to delete or hide one’s blog after a certain point. People outgrow their blogs all the time, especially now that blogging is no longer kewl. (Was it ever though?) But, or perhaps more importantly, people aren’t always comfortable leaving crumbs of their youth/past online.

Even I cringe at my own posts from just a few months ago. The farther I go in the timeline, the worse the cringe gets. I just chalk it up to growth, or to being my own worst critic, or to some other trite reason that I would for sure barf at when I re-read this post tomorrow.

But despite the cringe of it all, I have yet to outgrow this blog. The semi-anonymity helps for sure. I don’t mind my own grammar mistakes and my sophomoric attempts at critique, so long as they’re contained within my small circle of readers, all of which I barely know in real life.

Blogging is still genuinely one of my favorite past times. But even more fun than blogging is reading blogs. I especially enjoy reading blogs of people I know in real life, whether directly or by association.

To this day, whenever I am bored or sad or just in need of a small pick-me-up, I revisit my favorite blogs and read random posts, even ones that I’ve already read and re-read numerous times. There’s something about the casual and intimate tone of the prose that always gets me. Again and again, it makes my heart sing. It lightens me up.

My hope for this blog is to evoke in the reader the same feeling of familiarity, of longingness for older times, of missing the days when the Internet was still largely uncontaminated by, I don’t know — profit? The market?

Anyway, this is why I don’t do SEO and why I try to keep away from dropping specific details about myself, like where I live, for instance. I am not here to sell you anything. I am here to write and to hopefully get you to do the same — to share a small part of yourself with fellow Internet outcasts who couldn’t care less about the fanfare of social media, to leave evidence for future historians that even in an age when computers can model language, some of us are still here, plowing on, bad grammar and unpolished takes be damned.

If you read my blog in a browser, you will see a Random Post item on the menu, which will take you to, well, a random post. I put it there just in case you feel like touring around the messy existential cesspit that is my blog.

Happy blogging, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your week. 🙂