Monday, May 12, 2008

First Entry

I decided to try my hand at this "blogging" phenomenon. When I was in middle school and high school, weblogs such as Xanga were really popular, and I tried very hard to stay away from what I thought was nonsense. I just thought it was a fad, and in a way, it was me trying to be a sort of non-conformist.

However when I think about it, ever since I was a little boy, my father suggested that I keep a daily journal to write in everyday. He insisted and encouraged me to write about anything, even if the journal entry would last only a couple sentences. He said that it would improve my writing skills. He would buy my little brother and me expensive journals for us to write in, but we usually wouldn't last a month before the books would start to gather dust. He'd buy us a new journal every now and then in the hopes that we would pick up writing again, but somehow we could never commit ourselves to it. We were always well-intentioned, but I guess for some reason we could never get into the habit of writing journal entries. Our house is probably filled with barely written expensive journals just lying around somewhere.

Well, now with the popularity of weblogs and wonderful blogging environments like this Blogger, I thought I'd give journal writing a try again. I guess I've realized that these weblogs, which I once thought were silly fads, are actually a wonderful venue for journal writing (as well as, of course, a wonderful venue for the many other different types of blogs that the internet has brought to us). Perhaps it'll be easier for me to keep up a journal now because I'm a little bit older. Perhaps it'll be easier because like most people my generation, I spend all my time in front of the computer, and writing this blog is just another activity to do on the web.

I've always wanted to somehow keep a record of my thoughts; jot them down so that I can see how I evolve and grow over time. I know I'm not the most articulate person in the world. I probably can't express my thoughts and feelings as eloquently or accurately as I'd like to, but perhaps five, ten, maybe twenty years from now, reading a paragraph of what I wrote will serve me much better than trying to conjure up the memories in my brain.