Life happened

I know. I don’t post here as often as I should. When I do, I hardly write anything at all. I post fillers: random photos of my daily grind; quotations from books and articles I like to commit to memory; summaries of my meditations; epiphanies and random links to miscellaneous items I hope to return to but don’t. When I scroll through my blog history, I’m surprised that I’d posted about a film I would have otherwise forgotten if I hadn’t written about it in the recent past.

In the early days of this blog I wrote many entries each month. There were years when I’d post something daily. It was fun. Updating blogger.com was enmeshed in my routine as toothbrushing; my day wouldn’t be complete without it. And then I gradually skipped it. The short of it is: life happened. And the internet became a dangerous place. I became more mature and private, relishing the absence of web footprint, while the world—including my circle of family, friends, and acquaintances—was only discovering the joys of sharing their lives. I joined the counterflow to the prevailing emergence of social media, which initially showed people around my private space in the web. Later, Facebook would essentially render my blog dead. I’m not around Facebook myself. My account is deactivated, except for the moments when I feel the need to poke around the Palengke to buy a cheap bottle of fountain pen ink.

But I still love my blog. That does not preclude my intermittent questioning about its existence. I’m surprised that some people still ask about if I’m still at it—blogging—a tell-tale sign that they haven’t visited in a long time. I don’t mind. I should at least post something substantial—meaning, an article longer than two paragraphs and a photo—once a month. I realize that this act of writing builds muscle. On ordinary days I write scientific articles, edit my students’ and residents’ research proposals, but I should write about other things, using my other writing muscle.





I also still like blogs and read them. I visit Dooce.com, many months after Heather Armstrong’s death. I learned about her death while I was on my way to the airport. It affected me, having known her and her family. By “known” means “having followed, tagged along, read about her life”—but that was, and is, the closest thing one can get to understanding a life shared online. I do log on to The Old Reader, my free RSS reader, which points me to, among other blogs, Paradox Uganda, about a doctor-couple in African who have chosen to share Jesus to part of the world. Their posts lead me to prayer. I manually type in LaVie Graphite in Safari; I appreciate the writer’s meditations, plus the fact that he uses pencils, typewriters, and notebooks. I visit Kottke.org; Jason points me to interesting parts of the web. His curated interests are far better than AI-generated algorithms. I visit The Homebound Symphony because Alan Jacobs reminds me what blogs can be; I also get teaching tips from him. I visit JosephPascual’s Livejournal; it has’t been updated in a long time. Life, for him, probably also happened, but his photographs remain beautiful and timeless, even if they feature people who smoke and look weary of this world. As a doctor, I’m obligated to tell you that smoking is dangerous to your health.

I’m blogging about blogging because I recently just renewed my dot-com domain name. My older brother Manong Ralph gave it to me as a gift many years ago. He just turned 40 yesterday; I’m 38; Sean, my other brother is 35. Bottled Brain is 24.

But we don’t feel old at all.