1 year, 100 posts, 10,000 experiences

In retrospect, I'm glad I started this journal. Looking over the previous 99 posts, I have the same feeling I havhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gife when review the notebook from my first China trip where I can re-read inane and insightful observations long since forgotten. I'm not a diary person; business organiser maybe, but personal diary no. Yet it is often suggested by diverse pundits from personal effectiveness, personal growth and even happiness experts that even just a one line note about your day made before going to bed is a valuable, long-term habit.

I digress though as this journal is not that much about me and a lot more about the people around me. I've learned a lot in the last year; there are certainly more known-knowns, but there are also more known-unknowns so there is plenty of adventure ahead.

It is appropriate at this time of year to reflect and I thought I'd pick out a few notable, even favourite posts from 2007:

• Pasar Patois
• Nancy, New-York, November
• Moan, Moan, Moan
  
• Driving
  
• Kiasu or what Lah
• Singapore is Middle Earth
• MerLionKing
  
• Die-Hard in Singapore
• Hokkien is Chinese for Yiddish
• God's Birthday

Here's to the next 100. Happy Holidays.

Taxonomy of Blogs

It was only a matter of time before this blog started talking about blogs, and hence itself. All publishing becomes self-referencial eventually so I'm on a well worn path of journalistic introspection.

I started writing because I wanted to see what I would say. Creativity requires practise, although you may be glad to know that not everything I write gets published [Ed - yup]. I exercise self-censorship to reduce the dross. Online writers are often encouraged to amplify, to be provocative or controversial, to be iconoclastic as a route to notoriety. I don't find myself drawn in this direction at all and in thinking & reading about the process of writing, this quote said the most to me:

In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself.-- Alfred Kazin

I write in bursts when I have time and when the ideas just flow. But I have to be meticulous about writing ideas down otherwise I forget. [It's amazing how much of what we think up we then throw away by just forgetting it]. I don't lack subject matter, only the opportunity to stop and think about them in a non-superficial way.

The note-taking is becoming a habit and I think I need to find a small notpad that will fit in my wallet. Most ideas are triggered from other reading combined with events. And I do read a lot, at least 1000 : 1 versus writing, maybe 10 times that.

Looking back over the first 30-odd posts, it's mostly observational nuggets. I find just being here such a stimulus to ask questions and compare with my experiences that this could go on a long time. It's not all original, but it's definitely personal. A recent discussion on blog types caught my interest and using this nomenclature, I write Conversationally with few aspirations for other motives.

As they say in the Truman Show, "It isn't always Shakespear, but it's genuine. It's a life."