Requiem for a blog lost

I’m almost relieved that a previous blogging platform I used to regurgitate thoughts masquerading as intellectual discourse has closed shop. If anyone where to find out such a record of my juvenile musings existed, whatever sliver of honor I have would have been reduced to zero.

Almost relieved. But still I mourn.

From 2003 to 2006, I just posted some 100-odd journal entries, a very small handful of which I was able to re-post in my current main blog. The rest are now mere bits and bytes billowing in the winds of cyberspace: the site’s permanently closure happened a few months back, which I only learned this weekend when I thought of re-posting something I wrote in med school from that site. Unfortunately, I was too late. There’s no way of retrieving those files again. The MS Word originals I wrote prior to online posting were stored in a computer that crashed a while back.

I say the disappearance of the said site is actually a boon to my existence. That site carried words that can only be put on paper by a stressed out medical student, trying to juggle family life, school, and the occasional love stories on the side. Those blog entries were replete with mundane musings, as random as how the Christmas season for a particular year officially started in September when I heard my first Christmas song blasted from a store as I walked to school. Or how stuffed myself with a tub of ice cream after a crap-filled hospital duty. Or how “Hope is just a cigarette brand” – the unforgettable title of an entry whose contents escape me now.

In total, they were juvenile, immature, whiny, verbose, verbal diarrhea that made me cringe when I used to go read them every now and then. But that is precisely why I feel a dull but discernible ache somewhere: regardless of it childishness, that blog was mine and me.

Those entries were verbal postcards from a journey that was not at all easy to make and survive.

Those blog posts were affirmations of my character’s growth, no matter how infinitesimal and subtle.

Those words were mine, written under the cloak of anonymity, which is the best truth serum.

That blog, while out *there* in cyberspace, is my small private nook, where my thoughts ran freely without fear of judgment and reprimand. That blogging platform apparently was home to fellow stragglers, with whom I enjoyed friendly banter and occasional verbal jousts. Nameless, faceless commenters enriched that blog. They, too, are lost. Perhaps forever.

I tried to get in touch with the owners of the site, begging for the opportunity to download my online journal in toto . They still not have gotten back to me yet. Life goes on.

So what have I learned through all this:

1- Live (and write) in the moment but do think about what happens in the next 5, 10 minutes/months/years, about the impermanence of things.

2- Whether you’re dealing with kingdoms and empires with succession issues or you’re in a once-in-a-lifetime trip or you’re just blogging your life away- it’s prudent to have a backup- backup king/queen, backup camera/memory stick, backup copies of your online work.

3- Some secrets DO get to be kept *wicked evil grin*

And so, with a relieved but still heavy heart, I bid farewell to those words written down in my old blog. Thank you for being a ready platform to rant on, lending a sympathetic blank slate on which I poured my heart out, in moments of glee and garrulousness.

Good night and thank you.

(Above: PINTADO by JUNYEE, 2005, photographed by me in the BenCab Musuem, off Baguio City.)