I need to blog + Project: Rant Less

I'd say with the proliferation of social media and microblogging platforms, I have lost the will to blog. Obviously. Can you count the years since I last posted here?

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Blogging takes so much from you. Every entry is such an investment, requiring significant effort -- the text is longer, hence there are more chances for grammar or spelling errors; there's the cohesiveness of ideas that you need to worry about, that won't even cross your mind if you're just writing a two-sentence status update on Facebook or a 140-character tweet. Blogging, like many things before it, seems like it has met its doom: it has become too cumbersome for our tech-savvy time-strapped perpetually distracted society.

And yet, I miss it more than sometimes. I miss having the luxury of pouring my thoughts onto a text box without an ominous automatic character count bidding me to be careful not to use long words. So I can't really use antidisestablishmentarianism or pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis - not that I would want to under normal circumstances, but still, I'd like to have the option.

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What can one say after almost two years of not blogging? Where do I start?

I've wanted to start writing more for pleasure again for the longest time, and on numerous occasions I had wanted to resurrect this blog. The final straw was when 'chwistine.blogspot.com' my original URL from years back -- which I had accidentally deleted in a moment of utter stupidity -- became available again. So here I am. First few attempts at resurrection.

I believe another reason why I seemed to have given up on blogging is because for the past 6 years I have been a communications manager -- this means I write for a living. Doing so -- writing with deadlines, with an incomplete brief, writing about things you don't like and multiple other 'forced' writing tasks has, for me, taken the fun out of the activity. Add to that the fact that I had gone into graduate school, with its endless papers, researches and assignments, you can imagine just how Microsoft Word became my best friend and worst enemy at the same time.

With all these, what used to be a passion has turned into a chore, and after having to write endlessly during the day, I started to avoid it at all costs outside of the workplace or school.

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Oh, ranting. The sheer joy of letting it all out. Just a small notch below cursing, ranting usually rids us of the things that frustrate, annoy or irritate us by verbally lambasting it, so we are left feeling a little bit comfortable or relatively happier with life. Of course, until the next rant-worthy thing happens to us.

I believe everyone wants to lead a positive life. Who wants to be branded nega (i.e. negative) anyway? But (and here's the but, case in point of the constant negation in our lives) often the small things get to us, and we let them do so. I know this to be true of myself. I simply cannot let go even if all logic points to that being the best solution.

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So, I'll leave it at that, and with hope fervently burning that I can indeed resurrect this long-missed hobby. Wish me luck.