It begins.
Finally. I'm opening this up, brushing off the cobwebs and decorating it with words so that I don't feel lazy. I like to write. I write things on paper, toilet paper, post-it notes, receipts, old bandaids, labels, powerpoint slides, excel spreadsheets, in emails, on Facebook, on my phone, in resumes, in books, on desks. I also draw things on all of the above. My mind wanders. My hand itches. I stick a pen in it and suddenly I'm sitting in a lecture thinking about random shit while I draw. I don't write in lectures, but I think about writing in lectures and when my mind finally catches up with me and drags me back into the present, into reality - the history of modernisation in the Archipelago or Dutch colonialisation in Indonesia or some shit - it's like I've awoken from a deep sleep. Ten seconds later I'm back in dreamland. I spend so much time there that I might as well stay there. It's March 13th. My birthday. My thread of life has had another year hacked off it so now is as good a time as any to start blogging. And maybe, juusssttt mmaaaybbeee, I'll pick up a kind of rhythm and this will become a habit to satisfy my addiction whose symptoms are outlined above.
A history of me and blogging: This is my second blog. The first was for university (Melbourne). Every now and then you take a subject whose coordinators think it's sooo hip to have a blog assignment. Because blogs are so in right now and lecturers don't want to look as stuck in the past as they probably feel, what with all these computers with little apple silhouettes on them and digital light switches, it's too much for their seasoned, thesis-writing minds. So they decide to look hip-to-the-hop by setting up a blogging site and an account for all the students so that they can share what they've learned that way. What you end up with is a surprisingly efficient way for the student body to share ideas. So don't get me wrong because I think university blogging is a neat idea. The only problem is that they expect you to post regularly, which translates as "write me an essay every week". For Culture, Media and Everyday Life they wanted us to start early and spread our posts out over the semester, rather than starting in, say, week 11 and shitting out as many posts as possible until exam period. So I started as soon as I knew it was up and running and customised it with pictures and humour and cleverness.
A week later I was sick of it and stopped.
But then, gripped by a sudden surge of inspiration, I managed to chunder up two posts in a week, both long. Both insightful.
Two weeks later I realised I'd forgotten the blog existed.
But then, realising I was nearly out of time, I threw together something about Jean Claude Van Damme and Americanisation and Glocalisation and the Panoptic Gaze and how films extol the cultural values and beliefs of their target audience and how digital manipulation plays a vital role in the intended message and aesthetic value of a photograph and how stardom has come to heavily influence the film industry because we watch movies based on who's in them and how the phenomenon of fandom has emerged in recent years and how that fits in with culture and I guess also media and everyday life because everything we read about and everything they crapped on about in the lectures was supposed to link back to one or more of those three things and here I was cramming it all into a single post (or maybe two or three) like one of those clown cars. I forgot to mention semiotics - iconic, symbolic, indexical and all that crap - because it seemed too boring to put in a post. In the end what I ended up with was a semester's worth of learning mapped out on the page before me as if saying "see, uni's not a waste of time after all." I was proud of that blog. But I wasn't sure whether I was proud enough to keep blogging elsewhere or whether I was proud of it because it proved I'd learned something. It's taken me soooo long just to put up this post because I'm always wondering whether or not it's a waste of time. Does anyone care what I have to say?
Well fuck 'em, it's my birthday.
The End
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