It's already past midnight and I'm fairly certain to have caught the flu bug from someone somewhere, having been sniffing until I got that wonderful headache that comes from overdoing it. And to be honest, I should probably have gone to sleep earlier, to let the body rest up and all that. But in the spirit of the digital connectedness we've all grown so accustomed to, I decided to keep surfing for just a little while more.
My mind turned to one of the things that I used to put a fair amount of time in: my blog. I guess you know when something's going the way of the dinosaurs when you feel uncomfortable just mentioning it. Like Friendster. See, that left a nice, bitter taste in your mouth already, didn't it? :P
I kinda thought that my blog has become irrelevant. Jon was right, there was simply much more going on in real life that blogging has become inconsequential. I'm too busy living life to want to write it down for other people to see. Rudi was right, I was well on my way along his predicted 'steps-to-blog-abandonment'. Justin's right, no one ever reads my blog anymore, so why bother?
I was right, I shouldn't have bothered starting up this blog in the first place.
But (but of course) just an hour ago, I decided to revisit some of my friends' blogs and in one of them, I discovered that I had duly forgotten what I truly enjoyed out of blogging. I enjoyed the writing.
Reading my friends' musings, thoughts and the typical rants was for some reasons a strangely surprising experience. Having plowed through more academic journals in the course of my undergraduate studies than all the comic books I had ever bought (a lot), I developed a similar academic thinking style that lacked any form of emotional projections, even when squeezed to dry. Reading was for the purpose of finding important points, engaging in mental summarizing on the fly even as I could hardly understand what was being read. Thus it was a real joy to read my friend's posts and be able to glean so much more than just what was written. The way in which my friend wrote carried so many undertones and overtones of feelings, hopes, desires and dreams that I found it so wonderful to be engaged in this...this, form of communication.
Don't you think it's nothing short of astounding that the written word can embody abstract components such as feelings? The mind can work so efficiently to decode information and figure out what is being implied behind what is written, that when we are reading we actually read in our hearts with the proper intonations? Isn't it incredible that we can read text messages and say to others 'I think he sounded quite angry'? I'd like to think that many of us are simply not bothered to acknowledge the breadth of our what is really at our fingertips.
People can always go on about the superiority of a particular language and argue until their faces turn blue. If you belong to the group of people who believes that bananas like me are a shame to the Chinese people and culture, then please feel free to take a number and join the long line of others who want to stone me for it. But at the end of the day, language is for the purpose of communicating. For you to tell me how you feel. For me to tell you whether I care. Realizing again what it feels like to be able to understand a person's thoughts through the simple use of writing made me appreciate anew my ability to do the same.
If you are reading this, then I hope you caught at least a glimpse of what I was trying to get at. In terms of language competency, I have only the world ahead of me. But I relish the idea of being blessed enough to use language as a means to express myself and understand others. And at the end of it, be it English, Chinese, French, Swahili or any other language that man can articulate, the very fact that I am writing this is proof enough of just how amazing we really are as beings deemed to have risen from just accidental cosmic explosions.
