Talking to myself

When I started this blog a great objective was talking to myself. I talked to myself all the time anyway, but I felt that the written form would provide more structure and clarity to my conversations with myself. The reasoning was, and to this day I believe it to be true, that just by the virtue of writing writing something versus uttering it under my breath, I am able to identify things I knew but never knew I knew. And, of course, record it for future reference. In essence, I aimed to learn more about myself and how I think about other things. This was the objective, anyway. I daresay I came anywhere close to achieving it. Because soon after I started writing here, some people started telling me I wrote well or that I was funny or something. Then I forgot all about my objective and started trying to write in a way that would be considered well-written, or hilarious, or some such thing. It wasn't just the way of writing I altered but also the content. Because, of course, it was hard to write funnily about something inherently uninteresting to any audience wider than myself. So out went the window the idea of talking to myself, and I was writing mainly for applause. In striving to do so, I started working on my use of the language, tried to strengthen my grasp of the English language grammar, spent time reading books as well as just the dictionary and thesaurus to improve my vocabulary. Even read a couple of books on style and usage - "Mind the Gaffe" and "The Elements of Style" come to mind. All this, from what I recall, was around 2007, although it continued into much of the first half of 2008. It is 2015 now, I am 29 years old, and my preoccupations have changed so remarkably that I find it not merely surprising but mind-blowing that I had spent so much time and energy on something like that, especially since now it seems like the last thing I would bother about. I'm glad I put that time, though, because if I hadn't then I wouldn't ever.


While until this time, I compromised the objective of this blog for reasons related to the unexpected positive reception that some of my earlier posts received, beginning in 2008 I further compromised the objective for reasons a tad bit more convoluted. I fell for a girl who was into poetry, and started writing, yes, poems, or whatever half-assed cousins of poems that they actually ended up being. Soon, I found myself writing not for general appreciation, but a focused admiration, from the girl I wanted. Funny thing is, it continued well into after I actually was with her. I think it is fair to say that I had got so far away from the aforementioned "objective" that it is not fair to refer to it as the "objective" anymore. The objective now was just to have her see me as a clever, deep, writer. I wasn't even going for being funny anymore, and it's safe to say that I had lost most of my natural, unrehearsed funniness as well.


Lately, and that means for the last one year or two, I have felt really free to use my blog for its original objective. I haven't had any audience now for quite some time, so it has become easy for me to not fall for the temptation of writing for an audience. On the flip side, since writing well is not nearly high on my agenda, I end up writing short, rather to-the-point snippets. This one today is probably the longest post I have written in a very long time, I think.


I went skydiving the day before yesterday, with a couple of colleagues from work. They were not really friends, not even people I work regularly with, but just a couple of guys who, by some accident of common interest, got ready to take the plunge from 15000 ft. The skydiving experience itself was something I will not write much about, because the more I write about it the more I will be understating the magnificence of the true experience. I will post a video though to record the experience for the future:

I wish I knew how to change the thumbnail image on youtube.  Anyway, can only do so much ass-saving with a face like mine.