Ennui Eyes

258.

That's how many blog posts I've pushed out since I got serious on this platform at the end of August 2005.

The sound the Most Prolific Blogger award makes is "whoosh-thik", as it clips me on the shoulder and soars past towards others worthier on my google reader.

Genesis

It was our Honours year. 2004.

Razina (now a perspicacious Fourth-Estater with the Financial Mail) and I (Jane-of-all-trades who does a bit of wordswork) skipped out of our Journalism Theory class, our heads full of Anton Harber-isms and this Blogging thing. 

Off to the post-grad computer labs to get in on the action and become the cyber-bastions of Truth, the wwwatchdogs of the State, the free voices giving voice to the voiceless, wadda wadda, all that stuff you write for the entrance applications.

The first blog I ever really got into was written by Reza in Canada. "Musing Over The Ontological Status of a Boiled Egg". With a title like that, sure, it's gonna grab me by my metaphorical cajones. It's defunct now, but you can still go through his archives. Brilliant stuff.

While setting up my blogger account, I stared at the hulking grey servers making fresh pasta of the data cables, and I thought, "Hmm...you know what, that looks a lot like electric spaghetti..."

I'm now a blogger!! k3wl!!

My first few posts were hardly the stuff of killer citizen journalism we were creaming ourselves over in class. A kitschy poem that rhymed (yeah, I used to do those) and a list of words I found interesting (I recall flocculent, being one of them). You could tell I was farting fairy dust at the time.

And blogging bored me. Mostly because no one read me (what did I know of link-baiting and comment-whoring then. I thought that if I built it, Google would make them come). So I left it to die a slow, stinky death.

The becoming.

Then this guy decided to turn his weekly Randeree-roundup email into a series of  blogposts. Suddenly, my blog was up on his link list, it was being read. I should've been elated right? Instead, I was horrified that friends and strangers would be reading the twaddle. I deleted everything, and put up a little spring-clean notice. It was time to decide what the blog should become. 

A space for me to write to keep the rust away.

And you know the rest

Personal observations. Me, without too much me. Rare bits of social commentary. Travel stories. Ad-jamming. Obscurities. Little things I do in Photoshop and InDesign. Fun with 419-ers. Monologues. Trying to be a bit clever and fancy with the words. Amusements. A real salmagundi, the phenotype of what it's like in my head sometimes.

Ennui eyes?

It could be due to my current frustrations career-wise, that I find this blogging thing iffy and blehsome of late. I'm easily annoyed at people who poo-poo ponitificate all over the place (and I've used that term in conversation with at least two friends so far). I'm irritated by the judgements I see cast, the idiocy that gets the approved sticker from quality control and an undiscerning audience. I can't stand the sheer amount of inane convoluted verbiage (and I use that word ironically) that's out there. 

I don't want to feed into this.

I wasn't always like this. This critical, this angsty.

So I guess, I'm saying I'm just tired and a little jaded.

And maybe I need to eat more soya beans.

Day 2 and 3

There is a stillness in Ramadaan; a special type of quiet that wraps around us. A stillness that renders us malleable; a warm and pliable soul, ready to receive all of Good.

Those things that rub against our grain; loaded words that bring on brain-hives and the desire to strew expletives over the offender -- for no well-reasoned argument will dumb the donkey’s bray that offends -- we find those things have no place in this soft soul.

It is from the stillness that patience is to be born, with a certain measure of tolerance and the will to let things go. Water off of a sheet of glass.

But I must acknowledge how fortunate we are to have within our midst, those who abide in domiciles built from a certain amorphous solid, and who are only too keen to hurl projectiles at those who pass by. Well-meaning missiles, of course; targeting our ill-placed sentiments into something that loosely resembles one person’s notion of what constitutes a Mu’min.

Why, you need not scar your forehead asking of The One to guide you onto the path of Truth and Light, when you’re being herded onto a trail predetermined by one who simply knows better.

And everyone knows better. Except you, of course.

My patience is not complete. It has yet to be tempered into something better than glass.

(Coffee at Sehri, keeps you Merry. Salma will agree, that rhymes somewhat)

Do those who are that shade of moral-grey, also scare you more than barefaced thieves and murderers?

I don't have a map and I can't find the GPS co-ordinates for her brain

It has to be all that Vaseline they put on their teeth to make them smile easier.

Miss South Carolina honey, I believe, we don't need your education, such as.

first sighting

I didn't break it!

<----

I'm annoyed.
At Facebook.
No, its not the random poking. I quite like getting poked. Sometimes, I even poke back.
But that's a whole other blog.
I'm annoyed at Facebook for passing a groundless diagnosis about the state of my ticker.
If you're Facebooked - here's an exercise. Fiddle around with your relationship status on the edit profile page. Switch from 'single' to 'in a relationship' and back.
Pay careful attention to the little icon that appears next to your profile news-feed item.
If you're listed as single, the little heart goes achey-breaky.
Remove your single status for whatever reason, and suddenly, miraculously, Facebook channels the power of whatever Holy Spirit to 'heal' your shattered vital organ.
WTF is that? This warped normative construct of emotional balance, that if you're not with someone, you're obviously damaged.

An exercise in Vanity

Bloggers are a narcissistic bunch.

Yes, according to moi (that’s the flag for ‘hey watch for it, you’re about to swatted by OPINION, which incidentally all good blogs have: unbridled and unadulterated ‘moi-thinking’ whose sole purpose is to rub someone the wrong way, just so we can have fun reading all the comments left by outraged reprobates) what we do here, is an exercise in vanity.

It’s a lot like scratching your name in the wood of a school desk. Call it legitimised graffiti, us bloggers want to be heard. We want to feel that our opinions matter. That somewhere out there, someone with more brain cells than an amoeba is reading this and concurring with our worldviews or at the least, intelligently dissecting our arguments and employing educated disagreement.

And yeah, we want to feel like we own a piece of the net, that we’re part of something bigger, you know; the sum of the parts being greater than the whole and all that.

And no, blogging isn’t for geeks. It’s the coolest thing since Phillip Morris told us cigarettes were. And since smokers seem to be a dying breed anyway (just watch them being forced to smoke in those little office glass mausoleums) how else is any self-respecting iconoclast meant to release the pressure of all that pent up angst?

And anyway, won’t we all develop ulcers if we keep our well-intentioned and noble outrage to ourselves?

But I think more painful than any hole in the lining of my stomach, is the knowledge that not a single conscious sentient being has even read this.

It’s blog oblivion, baby.

Event horizon.

You are cordially invited to a pity party…

Don’t you just love a good epiphany?

There’s nothing quite like sitting at your PC…glassy-eyed from Spider Solitaire game #41234…carpal tunnel syndrome a mouse click away…when it hits you.

THE TRUTH

That sucker-punching (insert expletive)

For the last 22 years you’ve been getting it wrong.

Disgustingly delusional, hopelessly hopeful and yeah, shamefully shammy. That’s been your life sister.

You’ll never wear a size 28 or get the guy or buy Jenni Button suits with toilet-paper-like regularity ‘coz you’ll never get paid enough at a job you love to do and you’ll have to get used to life being the schlep it is for trillions of other schlepers the world over.

It’s called Mediocrity darling…embrace it, for it is your calling.