oh how far we've fallen...or have we?

For years I have avoided this moment.

When everyone else updated their LiveJournals and Xangas, I resisted. In my mind, making yet another place where people could openly peruse my personal life was only asking for trouble. No, no. I would not be partaking.

And then Facebook happened. Before I knew it, news feeds were reporting my whereabouts and updates to hundreds of people without second thought. I seriously considered deleting my account, but then an event of unthinkable genius happened – a friend I hadn't seen or been in contact with in over a decade, who moved half-world away when we were 8, who I had searched for numerous times since we last spoke but to no avail, found me via the World Wide Web.

I was in awe. We were able to pick up where we left off as if 12 years of adolescence, growing up in different worlds, hadn't separated us.

It was then that I realized the benefit of online communities.

Even still, I remained adamant in my Facebooking principles: I refused to write a "note." I also refused for some time to indulge in the endless amounts of applications added for seemingly aimless entertainment (although I've slowly been slipping and making rather ridiculous exceptions such as my stint with the Oregon Trail application that I have since deleted out of hints of embarrassment).

I guess my fears were immature and unfounded. I worried that if I were to submit to the online journal world, I would become a blogging addict (and what's worse, one that wrote nothing of substance, but only narcissistic, self-centered and irrelevant nonsense).

It always seemed to me that being a writer, and better yet a published writer was not only a mark of success but also an indication of personal worth and professional significance – you had to be at least halfway descent in order to get published...right?

The idea of the "citizen journalist," although I appreciated it for all the romance of it's socio-political possibilities, always left the slight tang of fear, like a knot deep in my chest. If anyone could write, both good and bad, but no one was getting paid, it certainly marginalized the generation of aspiring writers who hoped to live off their work, a group of which I am a part of, and whose aspirations are increasingly appearing to be dauntingly unattainable. If this trend became commonplace before I even earned my degree, where would I fit – a girl with plenty to say but hesitation in the means to say it – in a world of new online "authors" who have the means whether or not they have anything real to write about.

Fear overtook me. I refused to succumb to the trend, adamantly to the point of daft inflexibility, I'm afraid.

It was only slowly that I regained hope and saw the light at the end of the tunnel, to which so many others had rushed towards forthright while I had remained stubbornly stagnant.

I realized, simply, that rubbish (a recent addition to my vocabulary that is an unavoidable and admittedly savored product of my time in London thus far) is published every day. Having your work mass produced, or equally, readily available via the Internet is not synonymous to intellectual prowess.

It was this realization that soothed my nerves in self-publishing – whether or not what follows is rubbish really doesn't matter. All that matters at this juncture, I came to realize, is that I'm doing it (and hopefully learning something along the way). I have my entire life to be my own worst critic, forcibly exhausting myself into publishing nothing less than some ridiculously high standard I will have set for myself. For now I should be content to just be.

So, to make a very long and meandering path short and direct, this blog will serve not as a day-to-day journal of the on-goings of my life. There's nothing more paralyzingly boring than a log of mundane daily events strung together to appear to be exceptionally entertaining and of the utmost importance of the lives of its readers.

Instead I will write sometimes consistently, sometimes scarcely, including anecdotes of moments – short conversations, things I witnessed or saw or felt – those of which developed particular significant at that moment.

My hope is that in writing about them, I will capture the essence of these moments, and only fully understand their importance much later on, so that they may continue to rework themselves for me and anyone else who should so choose to read them. I'm sure, many times, they will mean nothing at all, and this is also perfectly sought after.

Some will be constructed entirely of fact, others works of fiction, the rest lost somewhere in the stitches between the two. The entire point is that they are, without fixed designation.