The Fine Art of Blogging (Blogging Woohoos)

Whenever I am asked what I like to read, I am hard pressed to put across the diversity -- call it mishmash -- of my reading fare. So I say simply: "From comics to classics."

A like predicament confronts me now that I have been asked by Diogenes of http://www.quasifictionalviews.blogspot.com what blogging is to me. I feel a similar sense of being stumped, a familiar sense of boundlessness. Unfortunately, unlike the first question, I haven't worked out a cute-smug answer to the second.

Let me see ...

Three months into blogging, I find it to be the freest, most generous, and most flexible form of self expression there is on line.

There is no limit to blog content, subject, language, tenor. I think it can only be bound by one's imagination.

The art of blogging can be as fine as Picasso's art or Shelley's poetry or as crass as a bedtime story or an anthology of toilet humor. But by and large, it is somewhere in between. Mine is.

In the short spell I have been a blogger, I have published two short stories, a poem, and a daughter's award-winning piece. I have found myself sharing a piece of my mind, writing my heart out, reminiscing about my lost youth, paying tribute to someone I love or admire from one day to the next. Soon, I just might blog my bile out -- hoping to expectorate some overstaying toxins.

What I have not done (yet) is to blog a daily journal of events. Much less an hourly one which seems to be the fad among bloggers these days -- I think they call it twittering?

By and large, I prefer to blog about action that takes place within (my mind) rather than without (my external, material world).

What I like most about the blogworld is it has become an open marketplace of ideas through posts and counter-posts. (Fortunately or unfortunately, Philippine bloggers are way too courteous to argue openly and fiercely on issues, no matter how controversial. I haven't seen too much disagreements and the little I find rarely ignite into full-scale conflagrations or debates.)

When I strayed into this cool, kewl blog-a-day world, I thought I'd do it peripherally, given my superwoman roles of mother, wife, worker -- not to mention less reputable roles of mediocre online scrabbler and badminton pulot girl.

I couldn't have known I would be hooked-lined-sunk.

Nowadays, it's the first thing I do when I wake and the last thing I do before bed. It has infused a get-up-and-go into my morning, given "rise and shine" a new meaning. Beats cafe cappucino!

At work it has led me to the wonders of multi-tasking. I key in one paragraph of open-faced manual or book-writing, then two paragraphs of stealthy blogging. Between the legitimate and the illegitimate, my days fly like a song.

Nighttime is quiet, guilt-free time to indulge it. I begin 10-ish and before I know it, its -- omg -- past 1:00 of the unwelcome new morning. Blogging crunches time better than a Spielberg movie or a Steinbeck or Bob Ong book. Doesn't it sometimes make you wonder why people hafta sleep?

It has (re)connected me with friends, old and new. An old office colleague -- who turned out to be in the local blogging "who's who" -- welcomed me with band music and ticker tape parade (Exag!). A high school friend popped up like a sweet meteor from the blue (No exag!).

I got to meet middling mom bloggers who like me felt OP at first. Together, we agreed to try to crack the youth-dominated blogsphere as denizens every bit as entitled (I think we're getting there). Later, I was recruited into Philippine Moms Network where I got to meet more mothers -- hot babes and cool bloggers all.

A blogging berks -- 20-ish, 30-ish all -- made me forget I had joints about to get unhinged. How musical their posts sound, with the ma'am, tita, po and opo deleted. Those who insisted on paying respect were asked to use nanamanila instead. Some of them swear I write so coolly and so hiply they couldn't tell my demographics from theirs and admirably hid their shock when they met ole Mrs. Grundy in four dimensions.

I have all these problems with techie stuff, given that my personal "hard disk" has a built-in firewall against them. And you know what?! -- I got to meet IT-savvy bloggers who'd listen to my "Help!" yelps and has designed (awesome) graphic headers for me, helped me link and put up blogrolls, taught me to cut and paste, and otherwise offered to spoon-feed and hand-hold by remote control.

And I nearly forgot -- I went into blogging as a hedge against fear of retirement. And now, I feel I can't wait to retire.

Isn't this better than it gets? Woohoo!

(Will try to write about bloggging boo-hoos/boo-boos later.)

(This piece is also published at quasifictionalviews.)