Ennui Eyes

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.