Maintaining a site is one hell of a job. Well, not
technically a site. But they’re basically the same thing, so, there you go.
Especially for a site which is mainly about written blogs with fancy pictures
(sometimes, with videos) that talk about almost everything. Not
everything-everything, of course. When I say, everything, I mean everything
that interests me. Why would I bother writing a blog that I don’t give a damn
to? Isn’t that just plain waste of time? Who in their right mind would do
something they don’t wanna do? Ooops. I think I hit a nerve there. I apologize
for my lack of empathy to people who ACTUALLY do something they DON’T like
doing. And when I say people, I mean, 97.3% of the total population of the
world! Who am I talking about? I’m talking about those people who do something
they don’t like, of course. Oh, wait, I just said that. Let me just state an
example for you to get what I am trying to convey here. Let’s ask Annie. Annie
is the first name that came out of my mind when I thought of using a person to
set an example to. Annie also happens to be a little girl who’s gonna make her
way to fifth grade this coming school year (let us all pretend that today is
May 28, and next week would be the first Monday of June). Annie is also a
daughter to Mr. and Mrs. Cadburry (same thing, first to pop out… I may be
thinking of chocolates, right now) who are struggling with their finances. Mr.
Cadburry is a janitor in a public school and Mrs. Cadburry is a full-time mom.
Annie has three more younger sibs. One is 5, another is 3, and the last is 3
months old. Well, you get the picture. If I may be harsh, they are extremely poor.
Annie doesn’t want to go back to school anymore because,
according to her, they don’t have the money to sustain the financial demands of
her school. Yes, she’s going to a public school which is supposedly free. But
out of the blue, they require students to pay for a lot of
what-is-this-for-and-why-am-I-paying-for-this-my-parents-are-poor-we-can’t-afford-to-pay-this
kind of fees. Which, by the way, goes on and on all throughout the school year.
Bunch of fees the students don’t even know what for. So Annie wants to just
walk out of school and somehow find a job and help her family feed their
stomachs. Especially her three little sibs.
She doesn’t know. She’s just a child, after all. But she has to do
something to help her family. Maybe she can sit in a corner outside a huge
church which a lot of people go to attend the mass and beg for passers-by to
drop some coins in a cup beside her that she took from a bin outside a huge
mall. She’s thinking that maybe these people coming in and out of the church
doing the sign of the cross are actually people with good hearts that would
actually take pity on her. She’s thinking that maybe these people are kind
enough to actually drop, even a peso, in her cup. There are like, hundreds of
people walking down that road. If every single one of them would drop a penny,
that’d be instant wealth for her and her family. And then she can bring
something home. Maybe she’ll buy one piece of that roasted chicken she always
sees on her way home that makes her mouth water. Or maybe, with a little bit of
luck, she may actually treat her parents to see a movie. Poor little Annie. She
has no idea how rough the world can be. She doesn’t know that even spending one
whole day sitting in a corner outside an always-crowded church under the
scorching heat of the summer sun can’t possibly give her enough money to buy that
roasted chicken. Much more movie tickets. She has no idea that people may
actually take her for granted and may actually NOT put anything in her cup. She
has no idea that even if her intentions were clear and everything she’s doing
is for her family, people may think a lot of bad things about her. Oh, Annie.
I hope you get the picture. Annie is doing something she
doesn’t want to do but kinda has to because if she doesn’t, they’ll gonna die!
Oh, all right. Dying seems little bit exaj, but, you know, it can happen.
Especially when Mr. Cadburry loses his job because the school has to cut budget
so they’ll just gonna have to let go of some employees. The Cadburry family,
everyone. Two words. Life sucks.
And it’s not an isolated case. It’s happening not just to the
Cadburry’s but to a big chunk of the world’s populace. Picture a pie graph in
your head. And there are two colors: red and blue. If you could slice that pie
to a hundred pieces and take 1/100 from that pie, do it. Then color that 1/100
red and the remaining 99/100 blue. Then put a legend below the pie graph
saying, red – ‘rich people who don’t have to do literally anything but to
breath and just live’, and ‘blue – poor people who have to do literally
anything just to breath in order to live’.
Now, believe me when I say that most of us, including me,
have to do something we don’t want to do but have to because if we don’t, we’ll
die! I haven’t even mentioned Jonas and his story yet (again… first name I
could think of).
Jonas is an average type of guy who has a job in a small
company doing paper works. He managed to graduate in college and got his
degree. But he ended up stacking forms and shredding used papers. He thinks he
doesn’t deserve this job because he is a degree holder, for Gollum’s sake. But
all the other companies he applied in require experience. Which he doesn’t have
because he is a fresh graduate! The problem is just actually in Jonas’ head.
What he thinks of life and what is life in reality are worlds apart. He firmly
believes that we were born in this life to do the things that make us happy.
Not the other way around. But alas, life, really, is not like that, he realized.
Life will ask you to strive hard to reach whatever the highest goal you may
have. And along that striving-hard-to-reach-your-goal part of life comes the
striving-hard-to-reach-your-goal-but-not-really-happy-doing-it part. It's so
rare (amazingly rare) in this world to find something to do that you'll enjoy
and at the same time earn money from doing it. It's either one of these three:
you have a job but you hate it; or you have something you love doing but no time
for it because of your job; or you have time to do something you love but
you’re earning nothing because you don't have a job. Thus comes the priorities.
What to choose?
Most people would choose looking for a job they don't
actually want to do but has to. As much as he hates to admit it, but we are
currently living in a world that forces us to do services in exchange for
currency. In short, you get paid for doing something. And most of the times,
that something is something you don't enjoy doing. You just have to because,
how the hell will you pay for the kind of life you're living? How will you even
continue living without sustaining your physiological needs? And how will you
get these needs if you don't have a job? And as if it's not depressing yet,
life still asks for even more! The amount of currency you receive depends on
the services you can actually do. And even most of the times, it’s not even
fair! Sorry to say this, but if you're not willing to fight and does not
possess what it takes to win in this survival game for the fittest, you'll end
up the same person as you were when you started. In short, money, as sad as he
is to say this, is equivalent to life.
AGAIN, believe me when I say that most of us, including me
and Annie and Jonas, have to do something we don’t want to do but have to
because if we don’t, we’ll die!
I’m kinda pissed with my keyboard right now. Other than
being noisier than a normal keyboard would, its ‘space’ button is sometimes
unresponsive. Everytime I type a lot of words without looking in the screen,
and when I do, I see one loooooooooooooooooong word that doesn’t make sense. I
have to go back to that looooooooooooooooooong word and put spaces in between
the ‘real’ words to make it, uhm, with sense. That’s one thing I need to deal
with everytime I think of something to write in this site.
That’s right, we’re
still talking about this site. We were just sidetracked a little bit with
Annie’s story and my opinion of people who actually goes to church but fail to
help all the little Annie’s in their undeserved endeavor to help their families
eat something for that day. And with Jonas’ story and my opinion about jobs and
how they are generally sucking all your time to actually do something fun. So, about this site. Yeah, right. Aside from
my noisy keyboard and its unresponsive ‘space’ button, I also have to deal with
my writing mood. Yeah, it’s not all the time that I feel, like, writing. Even
when there is a good story to write, when I’m not in the mood, forget it! Like
this one time, when I treated some of my friend’s and my sister to see Marvel’s
Guardians of the Galaxy, during the whole movie time, I was like, “I’ll totally
write a blog about this movie and all its awesomeness!” When I got home, I was
not as thrilled as I was back in the movie theater, so forget it. And then there’s
this another time, when a dear friend of mine who just came from a place below
the Philippines treated me to two movies plus lunch and dinner, during the
whole time, I was like, “I’ll totally write a blog about this! How we spent two
freakin’ hours walking around the mall, and even going to two other nearby
malls just to look for a fancy resto worthy of our reunion lunch and how we ended
up at the mall we first roamed around in! How much we enjoyed eating ‘Lechon
Kawali Salad’, and ‘Chicken Teriyaki Boy’! How she managed to drink three, or
was it four, glasses of Iced tea even before our order was served (God, how did
she do that?)! How my mind was blown with Scarlet Johansson’s and Morgan
Freeman’s Lucy! How we took bunch of selfie’s to commemorate this ‘selfie and
twerk generation’! How we laughed so hard with Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles! How we comment about Megan Fox’s bad and emotionless acting! How
hard it was to open David Beckham’s perfume called ‘Intimately Beckham’! How
grateful I was for the two keychains she gave me that I couldn’t even
distinguish what kind of animals were they! How we met Mai-mai, the Razon’s of
Guagua’s cashier! How we argued about meeting or not meeting three more people
who happened to be in the same mall we were in! How we caught up with a common
friend and eventually, our common friend’s friend! And how much I appreciate
the kind of friendship we have!” When I got home, I was exhausted. I was not in
the mood. Even the following days. So, forget it.
It kinda reminded of a movie called ‘Limitless’. It starred
one of my favorite Hollywood actors, Bradley Cooper. He was a struggling writer
in the movie. He’s a writer who, well, couldn’t write. Or, inspirationless to
write. Or just plain idealess what to write. Or was it a mental block? Hmmm.
Aside from the things I have to deal with which are already
mentioned, mental block is another. Let’s say, I can deal with the noise of the
keyboard. And I don’t mind the unresponsiveness of my keyboard’s ‘space’
button. And I have a solid foundation of what I am about to write. And for some
miraculous turn of events, I do have my writing mood. So what would I do next
is open my site, click ‘New Post’, and start writing. I would first think of a
good title and continue writing. Just write anything that comes out of my mind.
And then mental block comes in! Right in the middle of the blog I’m writing!
And even after hours of reading and rereading the sentences and paragraphs I
already wrote, nothing more comes in! The whole damn thing is f*cked up! I
couldn’t continue! So I had to stop and just forget everything! No matter how
beautiful the idea was! No matter how much effort I put in! I had to stop ‘coz
I couldn’t continue! I just can’t post something that’s unfinished! That would
tarnish the little reputation my site has! Nada!
When I started this site, it wasn’t really about sharing
anything to the inhabitants of the internet or about who’s gonna read it. Back
then, I was just using it as no-expiry, limitless storage of the things that I
love. Some sort of a diary. Or a journal. Something like that. A reminder of
the stuff that l love, ‘coz I’m afraid, I might forget about them and
eventually lead to a boring life. Though it’s public, I never really thought
people would give time opening the site and reading the things inside. No. it
was just for me and everything that defines me. That’s why I called it
dictionaryofme. Everything you’ll gonna find inside the site is about me. But
through the years of the site's existence, a few people actually recognized it
and commended me for creating it. That's when this site's purpose somehow
expanded that I actually think of the people who look forward for a new blog.
So from blogs about Pokemon, to blogs about my closest friends, to blogs about
my beloved YFC family, the site grew to including blogs about awards, to blogs
about new phones, to blogs about movies and why I hate or love them, to blogs
about a 100 day photo challenge, to blogs about awesome photos and memes, to
blogs about answering surveys, even to blogs about the National Toy Hall of
Fame! And maybe, I could even write about something that really matters, like,
nationally or internationally matters. A blog that will say something. So from
being a diary, it actually became a responsibility.
My point? Simple. It’s not an easy thing to do. Writing,
that is. But it all pays off when even just one opened the site and read the
latest blog. Just one. Heck, I’m not
even a good writer. I don’t think much of my sentence construction and the
vastness of my vocabulary which is not really, uhm, vast. I just write anything
I think about. But still, I’m writing. So that kind of make me a writer, right?
Just one more thing. So what does Annie’s and Jonas’s
stories have to do with my problems with writing? Simple again. But this, I’ll
let you think about it :D
Sorry for the long post. Here’s a potato.
