Blog in ICU

I’ve been asked why I bother to keep this blog. It’s obviously worth less than the time and effort it takes to maintain it. I am more likely to attract flies than rabid hordes of fans with it, although I think flies are a better option than contracting rabies.

My stubborn loyalty to my first ever crib online can probably be attributed to a flaw in my character. I can never let go of something I’ve begun even when my creation and I have become mutual parasites. But of course, being human, I prefer to paint my character in a better light so I have to create a nicer excuse for keeping this dead weight of a blog. I can always adopt the usual excuse and say that it is all for the sake of therapeutic self-expression, but I’d like to be original so I’ve deluded myself (like a virgin bride on her wedding night) into believing there’s something more.

My excuse has its roots in college. I used to be able to write in a way that would give my readers nosebleeds. Friends and teachers told me I had the potential to become one of those non-bathing, obsessive compulsive magnets of priceless (because they have no value in a pawnshop) literary distinctions, and then I graduated and reality took over.

True enough, all the jobs offered to me involved writing in some form but I was told not to write in a nosebleed-inducing kind of way because tissue paper prices were at an all time high and clients tended to balk at the idea of having to stock piles of tissue paper just to read my work.

If I insisted on writing my way, I had to become a literary writer instead. I was told though that in the Philippines, a literary writer can only hope for a comfortable life if she learned to write not just to induce nosebleeds but to induce hemorrhages, if she took more brain-killing higher studies and if she taught classes of fresh rebels who will make fun of her diction, her stone age fashion and her nose hairs for the rest of her monotonous life.

So I HAD to learn to write in a way that would not cause bloodshed of any kind, otherwise, I’d be the one shedding all sorts of body parts including my sanity for lack of financial resources. The end result is that I’ve forgotten to write in my materially unrewarding style.

This blog is an attempt to keep in touch with a small fraction of who I was as a writer before. But hell were they ever right. If crime does not pay, this pays even less.