How I Started Blogging In The First Place
The year is 2008 and I am crushing over this girl. On a random phone call, she casually mentions that this cool senior has a blog. Cue me the next 10 min google searching what a blog is on my 2G Nokia phone with a superfast download speed of …128 kbps. Google tells me I can use its blogging platform called blogger.com. I rack my brains intensely thinking of a supercool name for my blog. After what seems like an eternity, I lean on to Rantings of a Blogger (rantingsofablogger.blogspot.com). Also most of the other “cool names” are already taken. Irrespective, I am so happy that I have my own little cool thing called a blog.
Except I have nothing to write about…
I am stumped. In my mind, blogging isn’t like a dear diary scene. So for “inspiration”, I look at the other guy’s blog and see if I can one up on his blog posts. 10 min in, I realise I can’t figure out what the hell he is writing about. Either he is the next Kant or he is smoking some quality stuff. And since I couldn’t make any sense of it, I quickly stop comparing my blog with his because that is an exercise in futility. I push in 4 posts in 4 months. An intro post and..another intro post(I was grasping at straws)?, a remarkably lame post about swearing and the fourth one was about a tech website. The blog lays dormant for a year because writing a blog is definitely not like writing a diary so I really don’t know what to do with it. In other words, the reason I started blogging was because I wanted to impress a girl. Not a bad reason as far as reasons go but nevertheless a very lame one.
I started blogging because I wanted to impress a girl..
The year is 2010 and I realise I don’t have a diary. And I am very much having a Dear Diary moment. The girl in question is no longer in the picture and like every other heartbroken teenager I am hurtin’. The blog turned out to be the best place for me to conduct my verbal diarrhea. I claimed in that blog post(in 2010) that I was over her. I clearly wasn’t back then. (In retrospective, when you are truly over someone, you don’t rant about it and definitely not in the internet.)
After finishing college, I gain some perspective on the whole rat race of completing engineering courses and jobs (me having entered an IT corporate job with a measly pay scale helps put things in perspective) and I push in two blog posts as a Part I & Part II series. I was mighty proud of that for quite a bit of time and a couple of friends said that was some good writing. Looking back my friends were really nice to not tell me it was absolutely shoddy writing.
Fast forward 4 years later, a cursory read of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged makes me enlightened enough in Philosophy. I then cobble up a post which i think is impressive. To be honest, I don’t think it’s a bad read. Just not quite coherent in fleshing out the ideas and way too confusing.
The last blog post I put in some effort was my travel blog on my solo trip to malaysia. Had some good times there and by this time my blog evolved to where it was supposed to be in my mind. My ruminations / Travel / rants kinda blog.
To give context, when I was in school, during summer vacation, I would think of how I want to be better and what I wanted to do during the vacation. Be this, do that. And surprisingly after 2 months of vacation, I would be back in school and incorporate at least some of these resolutions. Then I grew up and I realise adults don’t get summer vacation for me to reflect deeply about life.
For me this spot on the web helps me unravel these constant thoughts and reflections I have of life. It’s a space where I can think deeply and figure out what I really want to do with the little time I have on this planet and more importantly why I want to do those things. It helps me dissect all those thoughts and crystallize them into something cohesive & coherent that I can read and reflect on. All to strive for a better version of myself. In a way I am my own shrink!
I recently decided I needed my own domain name (no more blogger.com sub domains!) and transferred all my posts & content here.
As to the new name of my blog. Yeah I needed a cool name. Old habits die hard. This blog gives me a moment to catch my breath in that incessant rat race which is life. And so I write this blog “while life awaits”.
This blog gives me a moment to catch my breath in that incessant rat race which is life.
N.B – In the spirit of the idea of the glorious internet and all the bells and whistles attached to it, I have decided not to remove any of my old very embarassing blog posts because
- The Internet is forever and should be and
- It’s fun to see how I have changed over the years. Not unlike a Diary actually!
TLDR; My name is Danny and I was a drama queen a few years back. I am not anymore.
..I think
While Life Awaits 