On Blogging

I've often wondered why I blog. I know for certain that I started this blog to put my poems up on. Silly me, I thought if I put 'em up publicly I'd be inspired to write more. But I haven't felt like writing poetry at all for a very long time now so instead, I just write.

I certainly won't commit the folly of saying I only blog for myself, that this is a private space where I reveal my innermost thoughts. I love reading comments on my blog, only laziness keeps me from posting more often, and nothing on it is in the least bit private. Hell, its a public blog. I post only when I feel I have to write something or burst, when I have a whole confusion of ideas inside my head, formless and shifting that I am desperately grabbing at before they get away... or of course like today, I write before a quiz since I had rather do anything but mug.

This blog could also be a chronicle, someplace where I can write my thoughts and experiences and watch them change as I grow. There are several stunted ideas in its few posts... snippets of things that might have been, had I only the persistence to continue. I've had ideas like posting reviews of the books I read, movies I watch, songs I sing, places I travel. Each resulted in one post and no more.

This blog has about three times as many unpublished posts as it does published ones. The drafts are ideas that didn't materialize when I tried to clothe them with clumsy words, or ideas that turned out too preciously private to be shared. So in a way this blog is also a grown up personal diary for me. I revisit all those drafts from time to time and see if I've sharpened my skills at all, if perhaps I can somehow find words less clumsy, for all those elusive thoughts. Some of them turn into posts months, even a year after they were first conceived.
Blogging sure is better than writing in a diary with a scratchy pen. Here I can embed photos, edit myself ruthlessly without untidy crosses; remove all the hundreds of unnecessary commas that always creep in and save it all for posterity.

But all in all, I don't really know why I blog. Its just another form of expression, I suppose, or another place to vent the thoughts that I can't immediately speak out for some reason. I think I'm going to glorify what I do though, by calling my blog a "delightful jumble of thoughts, the products of a random and abstract mind".