The need to share, a very basic need. The first inventor of social media probably foresaw this need very earlier. When an incident happens in my life, that is amusing, or that makes me stop and think or that throws a big surprise for me, I get an intense desire to share. Generally through one-one communication. Individually with few people, even if the content of communication is broadly the same. At other times, I would email, suitably customizing the content for each individual audience. Off late, I realized that the process is quite exhausting. Moreover, phone communication with people takes out the exuberance exponentially with every new call if the conversation is about the same subject – like how I like my new work or how lovely is my new apartment. And I am a man of words, so sharing with sea of humanity in few words is generally not my thing, forget about 140 characters of twitter!
Since I started this journey into this City of Angels – LA, I wrote to couple of people, spoke with another bunch of friends about the surprisingly wonderful apartment I secured in the heart of city, city events I attended. But I found myself not enjoying those conversation after a while. For each audience, it was new, but for me, it was repetition, nth time. So I decided to hang out with myself. Spend time with myself and let those ideas come out and document them for myself, without customization. Having that those thought pieces stitched together and sharing them to a broad audience, will release me from my self-imposed obligation to do individual communication. After that, I can read the responses, if any, at my own convenience. With this alternate arrangement, while I offload my stress, I also loose the spark of live individual responses on phone or customized responses on email. That’s a tradeoff I chose. For some time now.
PS:
I call myself a blogger. Last blog I posted was ages back. I call myself a writer. I haven’t been able to outline the three acts of my film yet, and have been thinking of this script ever since I started falling in love in Bloomington. With lot of introspection and with my brain’s favorite pastime of pattern recognition, I have figured out the reasons for this gap in my writing. First, I think of multiple tings when I am trying to write. For instance, while writing about problem about writing, when I typed the word “First” above, I started thinking about why have I started writing in this structure form of “First, .. Second,… Finally..” as if I am writing a response to a GMAT essay question. No wonder in the first two paragraphs of a blog I had set out to write as LA Diaries, not even a word was about Los Angeles. I started getting caught up by so many other distracting thoughts with every word I hammered out of my key board. A co-writer yesterday refered to this as the devil editor in a writer's brain. Second, I think of the audience. I place even myself in the audience and begin criticizing the half-baked sentences most mercilessly and all my energy starts eroding. I myself don’t find them interesting and I wonder why anyone would want to know how I think about a Mexican woman selling pancakes on 5th and Broadway. Then I stop writing about that Mexican woman. But next day when I see that Mexican woman again, I still feel the rush of propensity to write about her. It’s like sex - after doing it, I feel guilty and decide not to do it again. But then few hours later, when I walks down the street for a coffee, I can’t help notice the attractive people on streets.
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