Life
Thoughts
9 Years of Blogging - March 6, 2016
I started my first blog back in 2008 when my friend who was using Blogger to blog about his daily lives and his football craziness. He persuaded me to start blogging a lot of times by saying how fun blogging is and he always ask me to read his football entries, so out of curiousness I tried out my first blog, I had no idea what I was doing back then, I did not even know what is a "blog" exactly back then. But nonetheless, I started a blog. I don't remember the URL of that blog moreover whether I have ever posted a single blog entry.
I started to make blog entries when I entered secondary school, back in 2009. Back then I had two blogs that I maintained, one of them is this blog that has had numerous facelifts and another one written all in Japanese called "Chocolate Memories" (as far as I can remember), don't ask me why I named it "Chocolate Memories", I had no idea, because I am not a chocolate fan, to begin with. All and all I have been blogging for about 9 years now if I have to count the time when I do not have the slightest idea what blogging is.
I have maintained about half a dozen blogs to date, I did not keep track of it but I guess that is the number of blogs that I owned/contributed to. This blog lasted the longest from 2010, and it has a lot of records of me as a person for all these years. There are numerous occasions where I wanted to close this blog down and delete it forever. But then I always remember what I told myself when I first started maintaining this blog, that I am going to keep this blog no matter what, no matter how embarrassing my entries used to be. Indeed, when I look back at those entries that I wrote years ago, sometimes I laugh uncontrollably thinking how stupid I was, and sometimes I feel like punching myself in the face/gut because of the stupid things that I have done.
The year when I posted the most entries and had the most traffic to my blog was on 2012 when many of my friends were doing blogs too. I am still subscribing to their blogs to this day (partly because I am too lazy to remove them from my subscription list). Fast-forward to 5 years later to this year, most of the blogs that I am subscribing to is literally dead. In fact, most of them haven't been updated once since more than 3 years ago. On my subscription list, there are only about 3 blogs that are still occasionally active.
Many of the entries that I have posted has been reverted into drafts by me when I gave this blog a facelift again a few weeks back, those entries shall remain my own memories and I intend to make it that way for now. Entries about me having a crush on someone and got sad because of that is a considerably large percentage of all my entries, guess what's all on my mind was love, love and love back then.
One thing about writing a blog is when I look back on all the entries I have written, I can notice how much as a person I have changed/grown into in all these years. For example, the way I write entries. I have this entry back in 2012. I used to write my entries with one line per sentence so that a very short entry looks long enough. After I gave my blog a facelift, I decided to change the way I write too because this way it looks better and more mature. I guess this is the direct influence after I read Joyce's blog. I mean after I met Joyce, I think I have changed a lot, for one thing, it felt like I got more mature in thinking, I started reading books and started thinking more critically. Maybe it's an illusion but that's what I felt. But from all the reading of my old entries and comparing it to the entries I wrote back a few weeks ago, I have definitely become a more mature person and the way I think has definitely changed.
Another thing I noticed is how drastically my linguistic ability has improved. I dare not say about my Mandarin proficiency because I have not noticed any improvements in it, although definitely, the way I express myself using words has become better. My English has definitely got much better compared to, say, a few years back. My English is definitely not very good still, but I am surprised how much better I am right now compared to before. Definitely, too, my Japanese ability has improved much, I guess I have to thank my Japanese teacher, Yamada sensei that helped me so much with my Japanese when I started attending to her class back in 2014.
It's funny how people tend to think that everything in this world is static, things don't change with the flow of time. The fact is, every day, things are changing, for better or for worst. Through all these years when I am blogging, every time I post something, I don't feel like I am a better person compared to the previous time I posted an entry. But over the years, the change is so drastic that I almost couldn't recognise myself, it felt like two totally different people. I guess blogging is a good way to realise and to remind myself how dynamic this world is.
