Beyond the status update.

Blogger.com tells me I wrote my first blog in October 2004, a good 11 years ago. But my last was in 2009, a good 6.

Sure I keep a written diary. But lets face it, with my handwriting, I personally prefer the online scribbles. Rereading myself is a pleasure, if I do say so myself, and I am getting splashed with a myriad of memories, and am traveling back to 18, 20, 24 via my own words. What a journey.

I checked my old blogs and saw my old blog friends. Some pages do not exist anymore. I feel a sense of loss. Where did they go, when once I used to follow their daily lives and they mine, constructive criticism always on hand.

I have always been a writer but life got in the way even of that. Anyone who has been my friend especially back in the day will remember my hastily published material on my blogs, the musings of a Filo chick growing up in Brunei, Malaysia and Australia. Or perhaps I readily gave my voice away as adulthood took over and it became convenient to post quick bursts and no thoughts.

I feel like I lost my knack for long mundane paragraphs and stories that I used to share in livejournal, vox, wordpress, forums and blogspot when I evolved(or one can argue devolved) to choosing to move from the hard to get attention blogsphere to "publishing" to the quick attention span, 140 characters or less crowd on twitter, the photos tell the story world of Instagram and the very accessible facebook status update.

Shock. I have become my facebook status update.

My constant fb activity is enough to show you that. Pull back, self. Let me explain. The Internet is something my generation has lived with. I grew up in the mid 90s, early 2000s, and it is quite a shock to fathom that the 90s were 15 years and half my lifetime ago.

I am old enough to remember when we had to dial up to connect to the World Wide Web, recall MSN Messenger, used an .edu account to make my facebook account (because back then you could only make an account if you were a student) and slowly but surely leaving the testimonial begging world of Friendster and emo music world of myspace for this new space on the World Wide Web that seemed fresh and new at the time. Little did I realise years on, it would become such a global phenomenon that a movie would come out, people use it for daily communication and my country, my Philippines, even offers free facebook on data. Which upsets me as of all the things that could be given free in the country, did it really have to be facebook? Wikipedia? News.google.com even?

 I cannot control the world. I can control me. And perhaps its high time I pull back from updating my facebook status and going back to the raw blog update.

 So this is it. I started properly bloggimg way back in 2000s, and apparently I was quite a funny writer. Reading my old blog entries, the internet has become my diary of sorts, an inside look at what made me tick back then.

Strangely, or perhaps assuredly, I have not changed all that much. Huh.  But I do know I want to leap back into blogging, if even just for me.

 What will I blog about? I don't know quite yet but whatever stories I am about to tell, I am quite excited to begin.

Again.