It was supposed to be "Ramblings of a Madman"
Preramble: A Clever Play on Words, A Summation of What Happened the Last Time I Engaged in Blogging, and A Defiant Show of Rebellion
When I started this blog, more than - what, two years ago? - in my inaugural post I said that I wanted to name my blog "Ramblings of a Madman" because it fit me all to well, but I didn't because I had discovered other, numerous Madman Rambling blogs out there in the wild. Thus I dubbed my blog "The Observer Affection" and sallied forth into the blogosphere.
Eight posts later, my blogging got swallowed up by chronic procrastination ("yeah, I'll get to writing that... later") and I promptly fell off the face of the blogosphere for two whole years.
(For those who care, in the interim I got a baby and finished my Masters, which is evidence for an interesting negative correlation between blogging and real-world productivity - but I'll leave that aside for the nonce)
And now I'm back. And you know what? The first thing I'm doing is changing the name of the blog. I was never comfortable with "The Observer Affection". It was like one of those brand-new shoes that you buy that your feet don't feel entirely comfortable in, but you think, I'll get used to them eventually after they've been worn in, and they'll feel just like the old shoes I'm wearing right now, but they never do and you shamefully leave them to gather dust in the shoe cabinet while you resume wearing your old worn-out shoes. Well, I wore the title of this blog for about half a year (yes, I'm well aware this speaks ill of my blog stamina) and it never felt quite right.
But "Ramblings of a Madman" still fits. It fits, dammit, I don't care that other people have been using it and are using it still! I want it, it fits me, it fits me, I'm using it, and nobody can stop me! Do you hear that, Blogspot?
You. Can't. Stop. Me!
Just Write: Justifications for a Most Malign Malady
You might be wondering what I'm doing back. I mean, clearly, the blog experiment was a failure. There are a couple stuff I wrote in there that I'm actually kind of proud of writing, but ultimately my blog stamina ran out and the writing screeched to a halt. So why come back to it?
The simple reason is that I miss writing. It's been far too long since I've sat down and purposely wrote something that wasn't for work or study purposes. It's been far too long since I've dedicated myself to writing something just for the fun of writing, and I miss that.
Looking back at my blog posts, I notice now that towards the end, before I lost interest completely, I was writing blog posts simply for the sake of writing blog posts. I now realize that was my mistake, that this was the real reason why I stopped writing. The blog had ceased being a means to an end, it had become the goal itself. And this is just wrong. The reason to write should be so that I can have written. Writing should be its own end. The blog should simply be the (perhaps unfortunate) byproduct of the process of writing.
And the fundamental truth is... I can't stop writing. I don't think I could stop if I tried. I've been writing since I've known how to write, and before that, I was writing stuff in my head. When I was four or five, I wrote a "novel" involving Autobots and Decepticons and a heart-wrenching tale of loyalty and betrayal, all told in four pulse-pounding pages. In primary school, I was inventing superheroes in my head and writing about them (accompanied by horrifically amateurish pictures) in the classroom until one of my stricter teachers found the notebook, shamed me in front of the class, then threw it out. In high school I wrote and "published" (as in, printed out at home and then sent for binding at the mamak shop across the road) a series of sci-fi/fantasy "novels" for subsequent distribution among my friends (that stuff is still lying around the house somewhere, I know I should burn them but I just don't have the heart). I wrote during Matriculation, during university lectures, and in the office when I was supposed to be doing work.
Now do you understand? Writing is a need, an itch, an addiction, an unstoppable inevitability.
I. Can't. Stop. Writing.
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