Sometimes, I think I'm more of a pompous dickwad than anything else.

Ah, teenage insecurity.

My, such a cynic.

Zilong says I must blog here, and so I shall.

But what shall I blog about? Shall I talk about my day?

I woke up today. I lived, I breathed, I ate and shat and went on World of Warcraft. Perhaps I could bore you with details, every incident recorded in excruciating detail.

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The last thing I heard before I drifted off was the television, to be precise, a re-run of "Mad Labs" on National Geographic. With snarky British commentary echoing in my ears, I sunk down, down, down, into the sweet embrace of a dreamless sleep.

No more than two hours later, my mother woke me up. She pulled aside the curtains with reckless aplomb and grey daylight pierced my retinas, blinding me for a second. While my irises adjusted to the sudden change in light intensity, my mother talked about how we were going out to lunch. My stomach rumbled in assent, reminding me that I had not eaten in the past eleven hours. So encouraged by this organ of mine, I put on my glasses, swung out of my comfortable bed, tottered over the carpet and parquet floor into the bathroom. Its stone floor was cold against my bare feet, and I quickly stepped on one of the two mats in the room. Blinking at myself in the mirror, I picked up the toothbrush, squirted some Colgate toothpaste onto the bristles and started brushing my teeth in circular motions like the scary dentists in primary school told me to do.
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Agh. So purple. Painful. Agh.

The thing about blogging is that, if you don't have anything to say, it becomes banal and, well, flat. If it's all about how your day was and what X said to Z about Q and OHMIGOD she is such a BIATCH then to be honest, you're better off not posting it at all. Not to mention it's really rather stupid to air your dirty linen in a public domain.

All those quizzes, and copy+pasted song lyrics by a random band? The easy way out. You're relying on another person's (sometimes sub-par) creations to express your thoughts and feelings instead of trying to put it in your own words. There's certainly nothing inherently wrong about it, it's just that you're not building your own identity with your own constructs, your own rules. That is what is important.

Finding out who you are beneath the bag of flesh, bone and chemical reactions is gaining more and more significance in our time, especially for our and any subsequent generations. With the advent of the internet and mass media, boundaries are fluid. In areas that have access to this technology, one will notice many similarities between them. Jeans have replaced the sarong and 50cent has superseded folklore. Culture has not evolved, it has been destroyed, mashed into an amorphous lump. Only remnants survive on the runways, draped on models as the new flavour of the month or to make an ironic statement.

And somewhere, within this whirlwind of superficiality is you, your identity, the essence of your being. Find it, or be trampled by the relentless march of change.

Where would a writer be without words?

Probably somewhere off the deep end.

Imagine, 26 different letters that are arranged according to rules that nobody but English majors know about give rise to works of art; poetry that sears the soul and literature that opens your eyes to the dark, secret world frothing below our consciousness. Without them we would not be able to distinguish melancholy from despair, love from lust and all the other human passions that lurk within.

How can someone know loneliness if they can't even identify and put a name to it? Out of the chaos, words make meaning for us, and they shape the world and the way we see it.

It's Over!