In conversation the other day Alec told me his idea for starting his own website. It would be called Your Blog Is Shite, and he would write rants about how completely pathetic the blogging community is, with featured links to illustrate his points. He assured me he’d get to mine as soon as he could.
Continuing in this romantic and sensitive tradition, we’re going cottaging (dumb sleazy joke intended) for our first anniversary. Our cosy getaway of love is called The Hole.
Here is the problem: I have settled the problem of web-hosting for at least the next year, and have significantly more space in my postgraduate computer account in which to frolic. Unfortunately, as I type this I have the distinct feeling of standing on a stage in an empty auditorium because I haven’t managed to post anything on my standby blog at Blogspot directing traffic here. Also, I don’t seem to be able to find myself here in Google searches, which I’ll try to remedy by discreetly including some keywords (Michelle Michelle Michelle ineffable ineffable ineffable blog blog blog) in this post.
But hopefully, the problem will get solved at some point, and I suppose those of you who do manage to find me are the ones who really, really want to (yup, all three of you). So this is where I will continue to brew my word stews of boring day descriptions, struggling music writing, occasional links, and inscrutable Michelleness. Keep coming here if it floats your boat and thanks for bearing with me this far.
[Oh yes: it would be nice if you could let me know you’ve found me again. I confess I do sometimes like keeping track of all you. :) ]
Oh, goodness. In the midst of trying to make passionate love to my textbooks, I almost forgot: university IT-powers-that-be insist on me getting a new computer account, which will affect the URL of this site. If this site suddenly disappears, please keep in touch with me at theineffable.blogspot.com, where I’ll be posting until I sort out the new webspace.
I suppose this would all be easier if I went and did the domain name thingy like all the grown-up bloggers do.
According to Google I am the number three resource on the Internet for indieness. Right on. I is well cool.
It appears that September is the quietest month, at least where this blog is concerned. Last year I spent most of September in Greece and Turkey, this year I’ve been in Ireland and Spain, and in general both Septembers have been exceptionally weak in terms of entry quality and quantity here. It’s not a situation I pride myself on, but what’s done is done, and from now on I should be well able to resume the regular programme of solipsist musings and unnecessarily detailed breakdowns of my time and money management, or lack thereof, that readers of this blog have no doubt become used to.
Phew. I was fairly worried I’d lost whatever legal mind I’d ever had over the summer, but by God this is proof I can still write the long convoluted sentences.
One thing I wonder about every summer is how my relocation affects my blog content (and yes, I won’t deny it, how it affects your interest in my blog content, O reader).
First and most simply, there’s the change of country – what I don’t realize while I’m in London and writing about London and the people I know there, is how much more difficult it can be sometimes to be writing about a place where I have a history. Every entry in Singapore comes with scores of invisible footnotes. No name is just a name, or a place just a place, but I feel torn between explaining everything (which, knowing me, would be overly lengthy and ultimately woefully inadequate) and just coasting through it all (which means the entries could end up feeling empty).
The other simple difference is language – we speak a colourful and fairly charming mutation of English over here which I fall comfortably back into once I’m home (unlike other Singaporeans who suddenly acquire other people’s accents after a few years somewhere else, and speak like foreigners at home forevermore), but which can be pretty damn incomprehensible to the rest of the world. And then there’s all our names for food. I don’t presume to be an Inuit trying to explain snow to a Bedouin but it can get a bit tough trying to figure out what a ang moh/gwai-lo/gringo, call them what you will, reader makes of all this.
Lest this become too Joy Luck Club, let me just say that I’ll try and find a happy compromise to everything above, but will probably fail quite regularly. So be it. I don’t write this exclusively for me or you, but wander fitfully along the spectrum, which is how I quite like it.
A fairly important notice: if, in the near future, you come here and are told this page doesn’t exist, you’ll find me living out of my metaphorical Internet suitcase at theineffable.blogspot.com.
I explain this a little more at the blogspot site, but since both blogs will continue to be updated with exactly the same content, you don’t actually have to go there unless this site ceases to exist at its current host. For now though, please do bookmark that site if anything I have ever written has brought the tiniest shred of joy to your life. Or if you detest me, but just keep reading this out of sheer masochism because you’re kinky that way. Or if you’re friends of mine who’ve resigned themselves to reading this site because I’m so bloody awful at keeping in touch.
I was never one for subtlety. And I ain’t too proud to beg.
“If I’m really bored, I read Red Meat. And then if I’m really, really desperate, then I go read your site.” – My boyfriend, ever-affirming and supportive.
Ineffable [2008 annotation: that’s the name of my old blog] is a year old today. Fancy that. :)
This probably calls for some attempt at taking stock, a State Of The Blog address of sorts, except that I have nothing particularly profound to say.
Reading over a year’s worth of posts, I do actually like most of what I’ve written here, and how I’ve written it. I don’t think my writing has changed very much, either in style or subject matter. I write about how I’ve spent my days, partly to give friends who read it an idea of how I’m doing, but more to remind myself what the hell I do with my time. I write about where I’ve been, what I’m reading, listening to, watching.
I write almost nothing about the things that affect me most deeply, or that evoke the strongest feelings: rage, hurt, infatuation. (None of these happen to me very often at all, actually, so you’re not missing much.) I prefer dealing with these privately, because rage and hurt are always at someone, and I feel a bit nasty airing dirty linen like that on a public site. Infatuation (probably the rarest of the three) gets only very carefully calculated and massively understated references because I am generally far too romantically clueless and shy to let the relevant person know about it, let alone the world. Depression gets only occasional mention, because my problems are infinitesimal in the wider scheme of things, and whinging is boring.
So what of me are you left with, gentle reader (assuming you don’t already know me in real life)? Perhaps very little. You don’t hear the Michellisms that pepper my speech, the accent that I don’t believe can be anything other than refined Singaporean but which people keep insisting is Caribbean; you don’t see me dolled up in girly pink, or attitudinal in leather and gelled hair, or slouching around the house in baggy indie-rock T-shirt and drawstring trousers; you don’t really have a sense of what sets me off giggling quietly to myself, or collapses me with hysterical laughter while people look on bemused; you haven’t looked me in the eye, or hugged me, or even handed me the salt.
You do, however, have a glimpse through a chink (no pun intended, ha ha) in the armour that not everyone who actually knows me gets. You read what I write about friendships I treasure that I’m sometimes too shy to say to the people involved in real life. You have the benefit of reading me edited for coherence and comprehension, rather than having to deal with my tendencies towards convoluted sentences, tangents, and habit of speaking in disclaimers. You get the expert tour of what I think is good and reasonably interesting about me, without having to wade through the rest of the mulch.
And what if you know me in real life as well as read this blog? Well hey, lucky you. :P
I don’t exactly have any big celebratory plans for this anniversary, but I thought it would be good to refer you to a smattering of posts I particularly like for one reason or another. (I’m going to Amsterdam from tomorrow till Saturday, so I also thought this might make up for not posting in the next few days.)
An essay weekend
A bookstore stole my day
The Lazarus glove
Generation surrenderist
Linkage jitters, reality bites, and the nonpersistence of memory
Don’t read Douglas Coupland on Valentine’s Day
The weekend my spring began
Birthday wishes
Commonwealth cynicism
Fire drill epiphany
Feeling low (and tangential)
Yo La Tengo!
Girl Narrowly Escapes Exam Disaster, Contemplates Bestiality
How not to make it in health advertising
Xtreme X-Files dissatisfaction
Giggling in church
Musings on conversational self-censorship
The first belly laugh of the summer
Michelle down. Michelle back up.
I’ve probably found out about this blog-twinning thing a bit late, but was intrigued to find out that my blog (which got in there somehow, I didn’t submit it) is apparently similar to saranwarp, amplified to rock, entropy and josh blog.
I have mixed feelings about this.
A little bit of self-deprecating yeah, rightness, given that my usual reaction to reading long-time favourite Josh is “Shit, I obviously know nothing about music”, and have long envied Jared’s (Entropy) uncanny knack of writing about a lot of what I’ve been thinking about, only more eloquently, meticulously and passionately.
Some bewilderment. I see many areas in all the above blogs with which I’d like to claim similarity, but I don’t actually see very much real similarity, substantively speaking. We all kinda like music, but express that very differently through our sites, contextually and structurally. We write about our personal lives, ideas and belief systems to considerably varying extents.
Smidgens of glee. Someone actually thought of submitting my blog to this project, which is nice. (Thanks, Mum.) Someone actually committed some seconds of thought to comparing my blog to others and clicking the necessary buttons. Someone actually thinks (albeit misguidedly!) that my blog inhabits the same expository landscape as blogs I really, really admire. Well, yay. :)