Wide Load

So I found this in one of my Site Meter visit logs...

That, is an unbelievably wide screen, but running 16bit colour would be a letdown.

Metaphorical Dishes

I logged into google reader after quite a long time today. As I expected, there were more than 3000+ unread items, a predictable consequence after I went on a spree of adding lots of blogs and news sites in the days when reading stuff written by strangers about themselves was about my only human contact. My own version of Das Leben der Anderen, if you will.

Reading all that was an impossible task, so all the news feeds were dealt with by a Shift+A (mark all as read), but for some reason, I just scrolled through the 'Personal Blogs' category that I had made, pausing to catch a sentence or two as they flew past.

Out of those, something about this post made me pause and read it in its entirety. I won't say that I identify with it, but in a way that is hard to explain, I sort of do. But one of the few times I turned emotions into actions, something went very wrong. Perhaps, in a way, it was my fault because the dishes were a metaphor for everything else and the emotions were misplaced. They needed an audience, but an audience that understood.

Block

While some people were complaining of suffering from engineer's block two days back, I think I too have a case of genuine writer's block. This is the third time I am visiting this 'Create Post' page - and once I am here I realize I have nothing to say. Rather, I have a lot to say but no way to say it.

A change of heart

Over the years, the only significant bit of writing I had done was in the mandatory essays one has to regurgitate in the Xth and XIIth exams. But even so, writing Science: Blessing or Curse? in three languages over the course of three years is not really taxing the 'creative' in the creative writing stakes. Especially when Navneet Digest is where you draw inspiration from.

Then there were times when a few friends tried to get me to blog. Resignedly, I signed up to blogger, filled in the profile, even contributed to a team post... but much like certain small car projects in certain hinterlands, the effort was abandoned leaving behind a profile whose password I no longer remember. And that was that, I thought.

Then a few months ago, tending to my newfound hobby of playing with Photoshop, I uploaded a sunset to flickr and added a few lines as a description. Apparently, that was quite profound and moving and I got the Panday! Start writing a blog!! line again. 'Hmmm' thought I, 'what the hell. Its free anyways.' So I did a hatchet copy-paste job, hit 'Publish Post' and felt a strange sense of satisfaction. Gradually, I thought of making a sort of photoblog, where I would publish a few photos now and then and write poignant, moving prose that was stuffed with more meaning than my laundry bag and tinged with wit and sarcasm and what not. But while Passion and Ambition may work (or not) as motorcycle names, they didn't really work between me and poignant, moving prose.

But today I realised that the problem was that I had envisioned it as a photoblog. I don't always have a photo that I can wax eloquent over and nor do I lug around the camera as much as I would like to. But bigger than that is the fact that I discovered I actually like this thing. I like writing about random things even though I may not have a picture for those thousand words.

So this will just be a regular blog from now on, but not in the regular gasoline sense. Will try to write about this and that and more importantly, shift the focus away from me and my melancholy and the general negativity that seems to surround me.


PS: I frequently use a lot of commas and ever since I saw that scene in Shattered Glass, I have become very conscious. Do I really use a lot?