Buddhafied

Blogger stalker #1: LSL

I love reading blogs as much as I love writing them. Not that I am a knowsy person (if I do, I'll just be a paparazzi and stalk the living hell out of people night and day), but I do enjoy reading others' encounters and experiencing lives that are different than mine. Often enough, I find myself chuckle/shed tears/worry along with the blogger because I can relate to them. That being said, I am somewhat of a picky blog/twitter follower, as I don't follow someone if they don't have anything better to say. It's bloggers with true emotions, brutal honesty and sense of humour that makes me want to go back and read their blog/tweet on a regular basis.

I do always want to meet up with some of these people whom I've been passively stalking, but since Vancouver is not the ultimate vacation destination with great monuments and exotic fruits and half naked leather people walking on the street, I never have a chance to meet with anyone in real life from the blogger/twitter world. So when LSL from Long Story Longer emailed me a few weeks back and said she is coming up for a concert, I wrote her back immediately and said I would love to stalk her in real life, she just needs to sit down on a bench somewhere and I'll bring my binoculars.

Despite the twists and turns that almost stopped her from visiting Vancouver (I'm sure she will have fun typing what happened), we finally met yesterday at a Starbucks around where she stayed and had 2.5 hours of wonderful conversations.

It's amazing how after you read about someone's blog for over 2 years, you actually know the person quite well. I was like meeting up with a long lost friend and just chat non-stop. She was exactly how I imagined her to be and have such great appreciation of life. We talked about things that are deeper than the blog level and share things that was a bit harder to explain in our blogs. It was also fun to "gossip" about other common blogger friends we have, like we laughed at how funny and silly Durban Bud is, we plotted out a scam and will trick Wits' End into visit us from the UK, and we tried to figure out why Blogography gets to travel so much and meet with cats and monkeys all over the world. I honestly had such a great time that it was sad I didn't get to spend more time and show her around Vancouver.

Now that I have LSL as a proof that it is possible for humans to survive after spending two hours with me (well, I haven't got a text back from her yet, so I will say that she did survive me until I left her, can't promise about the side-effects), maybe I will have more visitors from now on? My binoculars are ready.

Raw and transparent

People lose interests in blogging for many reasons. They don't find it fun anymore to exhibit their lives to others; they don't have anything interesting in life that deserves to type about; they ventured into something more interested and just abandon their blogs. Many reasons. I have to say, however, none of these reasons applied to me. I have honestly been missing this blog for the past half a year, every single day.

I guess for the past 2 years, this blog has been a very important outlet for me to express my thoughts in my own pace. Despite that I like to talk a lot and make silly comments all the time, I actually have a tough time to convey my feelings or thoughts to others. May be it's the language barrier or maybe I find communicating with human is complicated. In a way, I am somewhat of an artist and can only express my true ideas indirectly through another channel. That being said, with my lack of talents in art, the only thing I really have is my broken language, which takes time to manifest. And this blog serves this purpose.

Not having this the past 6 months, I realized I get angry easier, I get frustrated more often and I get depressed faster. Maybe a personal blog is really not for exhibitionists after all; maybe it can also allow a closeted introvert to communicate with himself and try to organize his thoughts so he, himself, can understand his own feelings.

I wanted to make more changes to the blog before relaunching it, but it takes time. I know myself too well that if I don't have this begin again, it will be another half a year when I start typing again. I don't think I can handle missing this for another half a year.

So here I am. Raw and transparent, once more.