Blogging for the memories

It's been over a year since I've last blogged. Time flies by very fast, and my mother told me that time will only go by faster as you get older.

Part of the reason why I want to blog is so that later in life I will remember the various events in my personal history much better. For example, when I think back on my college experience, I have a hard time remembering which events happened during which year. That is very sad to me.

I'm even having a hard time when certain significant events happened since my move to the Bay Area. Alas, I'm thinking about trying to sit down and sort it out so that I can at least try to remember the things that have happened since my move to the Bay Area.

To start off, I went to the American River (Upper/Lower Sunrise Recreational Area) for my friend's birthday this past Saturday. We went tubing down the river, which was very relaxing and very fun. Although there was one very scary part where we hit some rapids and my girlfriend went under. She was down there for a while, but she eventually emerged and was ok. But for a brief moment, it was definitely a very scary experience. The rest of the river was much more relaxing though.

It's actually the most fun I had all summer. Last year, we went to the American River also, and went white water rafting (the location was further up river where the rapids are stronger). I'm liking these once a year trips where we do a outdoor activity with my group of MIT friends.

Ok, I should probably go to sleep now. Until next time!

Epic Fail

Wow, talk about epic failures. I couldn't keep my promise of writing a little bit everyday in this blog/journal. I guess old habits die hard, and I have a very old habit of not writing blogs/journals. The supremely weird thing though is that this blog has always been in the back of my head. As I live through my life and encounter various events, I think to myself, "This would make a wonderful blog entry!" I understand that this feeling is actually a very common phenomenon as expressed in this famous xkcd comic:

http://xkcd.com/77/

I've even thought about how my failure to keep this blog up to date would make a wonderful blog entry. But the thing is, I never write anything, ever.

I do hope to change my ways though, and I hope that this entry is going to be the first of many. Actually, one of the reasons why I decided to write this entry is because I was inspired by my friend, Bobby. He's visiting California for vacation (and also for a taekwondo tournament as a member of the US National Collegiate Poomsae team), and he's staying at my place for a couple nights. He was documenting his trip in his awesome blog, and it inspired me to write this one.

So much has happened since I wrote my first entry over a year ago, and I hope to write about it soon.

But alas, this is it for tonight. It's already 1:36 AM here in the West Coast, and I must go to sleep in order to get up for work tomorrow.

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.