Killer Cars has been on hiatus for 6 months
September 18th, 2006 by Sarin
For many readers, Killer Cars has been on hiatus for the past 6 months. Until now, all you have been reading is 5 weeks of Cambodia travelogues that took about 35 hours or 16 weeks to complete. With the exception of the link posts, the blog itself almost faded into obscutiy, almost seeing the way of the livejournal.
Up until now, nobody seemed to care that I had dropped the ball on my blog. I had come home from Cambodia, and half a year in the Peace Corps, yet there are only so many ways you can say the same stories. Some people might accept that the blog would be closed, knowing sure well that Sarin’s days abroad are over. However, some friends don’t let you fall and a certain fan insisted I get back into the game. Well you can thank her personally on her site but for the record RPCV Danielle kept bugging me to post ‘fo real’ and get me out of my current slump of living the ‘real world’.
In thinking of the top reasons why I had failed in posting regularly in the past 6 months, consider this.
That excuse in which I just I stopped caring
I guess in today’s day, blogging isn’t neat or cool anymore. If I tell a dozen people to come check out my blog today, it would be the equivalent of giving out my MySpace URL. Not cool. I had started to associate bloggers as “journalism geeks who didn’t have enough friends in high school”. Ask a couple of bloggers and they might agree. I no longer wanted to be associated as that guy who spends 8 hours a day on the internet and has a blog to show for it. And aside from the higher geekdom of bloggers, it has become cake for anybody can write a blog nowadays, and they are just as easily trashed as they are created. Essentially the idea of having a blog became both embarrassing, and to the point of “I have a blog but I hope my friends don’t read it and just think it is just like all the other blog trash out there”. As a false sense of disappointment, I also started to believe that nobody cared too deeply about my stories in Cape Verde and Cambodia, and was just happy that I was home. I didn’t want to blog as if I was living in my own worldand I had felt like I lost my core audience. People have moved on, and sadly, some might just damn forgotten that I had lived a second life for 8 months. I no longer belonged in college, I was more and more out of touch with home, and now it felt there is no group of friends that I talk to on a daily basis. I had really felt like I had nobody to blog for.
That one excuse where I had nothing interesting to write about
Life slowed down to a crawl after coming back from Cambodia and the Peace Corps. I had decided to not try another hand at abroad and went looking for work close (or somewhat close) to home. I was throwing in the towel to the real world, and was slowly succumbing to its grip. I knew NOTHING I was going to write was going to top anything I had done in Cape Verde and Cambodia, and didn’t want to write posts that I knew were only half exciting. One of rules of writing for Killer Cars is that the best entries to post are the ones that are already drafted in your head, and it takes you 4 minutes to type and finalize on the computer. Sadly, nothing that good to post came up in 6 months.
In addition, there really wasn’t much else to take photos of for that matter. Plus in a way I had exhausted my urge to snap pictures when I took over 1700 in 8 months.
I told you before, Cambodia was a story I had to tell
A rule I told myself when I was writing the Cambodia travelogues was that I should continue the task and not post anything else in between. It seemed like a good way to lure in readers and keep them on their toes. Turns out, it had kept me from writing anything else in this period. Why? I had become really obsessive with the presentation and the writing on the entries. My stay in Cambodia was an amazing time, and I wasn’t going to accept scratch for what was the 5 most life changing weeks in my life. When time came down to write the entries, it had basically become a research paper session. I armed myself with all the pages from the journal, 2 or 3 printed Cambodia books, WikiPedia and Google to help the readability of my entries to visitors. An entry took about 6 or 7 hours of drafting and revisions to write, and then I spent another hour on Flickr to make sure I had the right photos to tell my story.
Writing the entries become both labor demanding and frankly, too emotional on my part to continue. I kept putting off writing for weeks at a time. In the meantime, I was enjoying life in other ways. I had felt I had reflected long enough and the more I was going to reflect on these entries would maybe lessen their sensitivity in the future. However, in the end I did get to wrap up and close out the entries in the way I wanted them. I hope I had sounded as enthusiastic towards the end as I did in the beginning.
I will go back through the travelogues to include more links for navigation. If you enjoyed the Cambodia travelogue, please comment on them.
Oh yeah, I told Movable Type to shove it
A problem that was prevalent during my time abroad was how quickly Movable Type, the software that was running my weblog, was getting outdated. It was depressing paying money for an internet café and spending a lot of time cleaning up comment and trackback spam. In many ways, this lessened my motivation to post new entries even when I was back home. It was getting frustrating to the point that I didn’t want to think about what I was going to do to fix it. Many bloggers have switched to WordPress, and while I was waiting for updates to help with the spam, it was inching me closer to throw in the towel.
I likes me some good links
A good alternative that I had to blogging personally became the heavily used practice of having a linkblog. It became very satisfying to post a link, write a short snippet about it, and fulfill the small itch to write. Linking, sometimes can take up most of my time on a computer, reading links, sharing links, and following links of the ones I posted. It was like having a good blog fix without really keeping a blog.
That excuse I told the FBI that I’m afraid of stalkers
I had a somewhat scary incident involving a reader who took me too seriously without ever meeting me. We had corresponded for weeks and the reader had felt he/she had known all about me, because my blog reads like a book. In the end, the undisclosed fan became too involved in my life even when e-mail exchange was the only source of communication. I had to force the reader to back off. It was something I had took into consideration considering the number of lengthy personal posts that anybody with a computer could see. Another slightly discouraging reason to blog, but I won’t change my blogging ways just yet. Only when I am blogging personally is when I feel I do my best work. However, this incident will always stay in my mind.
Do you still need this?
I could give you not-good excuses over and over, but the simplest ones are the best. Truthfully, I had become too busy for my blog. Writing the Cambodia travelogues had felt like a chore, and soon after settling at home, my free time was getting sucked away from me. First, several weeks I had used to help catch myself up with the States after 8 months abroad. Then, I had forced myself to spend 9 or 10 hours a day applying and learning about jobs and opportunities in New York City which led nowhere. Then came the refocused job search, applying to jobs in the Boston area. Then came the actual interviews and proposals from employers, and now we are in the middle of April. A month of commuting to the new job in Boston while looking for a summer sublet, and then I am back to busy, moving and settling into Boston. Summer took precedence over being indoors and I was going away every weekend and running and biking during the week. Middle of summer came and I was looking into moving into a real place this time, and not until now, middle of September, am I finding time with the other things in life to finally write an entry. Everybody else was arguably busy around this time, and it was not like I have the option to blog during downtime at work unlike my last 2 jobs. Since working full time, it also became hard to squeeze in enough internet time and TV during the day.
So in the end, the excuses are simple, I felt like I had nothing to update and became too busy to fill you in on how my normal American life was doing. I am very sorry for this. We now continue regularly scheduled blogging. But I’m not quite done apologizing yet.
Before I delve into 6 months of updates, I am admitting that I feel bad that this happened. Let me explain. I started Killer Cars as a joke, simply because I had grown tired of having a website with over a thousand pictures and zero stories. Back then, I was directing traffic from visitors wishing to view drunken college pictures to a weblog apologizing for being such a drunk male and as a personal way to inflate my ego and remind readers that deep down, I am fairly smart and have a slight passion for writing. I had named it Killer Cars in the wake up of the fear of crashing (metaphorically speaking) but more fitting, fear of the fast paced ‘real world’.
Blogging continued pretty humorously, and people would start talking about ‘funny thing you posted on Killer Cars’. Well something happened during 2005. Some point during senior year of college, I decided to grow up. When I decided to pursue the Peace Corps, I knew my life would be getting a huge makeover, weblog included. What was originally a blog about drinking, college, music and anything pop culture become a very centered blog on my personal life and The Peace Corps. I had originally tried to hide my obsession about the Peace Corps for months while I was still in the application process, but when once word got out, I knew Killer Cars would never be the same.
To help with dealing with the Peace Corps, I had switched up my style to post very lengthy entries, in which I pour my heart out, on issues connecting my personal life with the Peace Corps. While I had great support along the way, the writing in my blog was very therapeutic and helped me manage many hurdles I had along the way. Even when the time came to leave for Cambodia, the reflections I wrote afterward helped in the healing process and coming to gripes of ‘what the heck did I just live through’.
So in listing the reasons above of why I had failed to update on my life during the past 6 months, remember that in some way, I still hold Killer Cars close at heart. Who knew that writing just a little bit everyday would in turn cause me to want to be a better person, to grow up, and reflect back on those I met and the life that I lead. I had an amazing time during college, the Peace Corps, and Cambodia in which I had written for you all. In continuing to write in Killer Cars, I am reminded of why I enjoy writing and why I will never give this up.
Killer Cars is a blog about change. Sometimes it is a blog about reflection, being lost, but most of all, finding hope and joy in this small crazy world of ours. It is when we write when we find out how fragile our lives and actions can be. Everything we do matters, it is thus how we do them can we find what we want the rest of our lives to be. Hold on, because Killer Cars is turning a new chapter as of this reaffirmation, and only the future can be predicted in these words of dream. Other than that, you came here for the past and present, and that is what you will get. But don’t forgot, the hidden goal of Killer Cars is moving forward.
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