The will to blog

The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.
From Exposed by Emily Gould New York Times

My life has become a big blog post that never ends and never gets written. After all I have been my own audience all my life. My diatribes only mattered to me, or so I thought. Then I discovered blogs. I commented on them for months. After finding myself re-inventing my self once again I decided to document my life in Canada as a Guatemalan. Toronto somewhat in the backdrop. My incorrect English and my stumbling Spanish helped me weave the thread of a well-intentioned search for identity. I have found the opposite reality of phrases like Homo homini lupus est and L'enfer, c'est les autres because diametrically opposed to this existential catch phrases (or should I say slogans) I have found the kindness in strangers. And thus I have borrowed, translated, stolen, re-crafted, re-cycled whatever I can find and whatever I have encountered throughout my life to write my postings.

When life became personal I failed to narrate it. And now, with a red-wine headache and my big YorkU mug full of freshed brew coffee on this sunny Saturday morning, sitting at my computer on my relatively dark and fresh basement apartment, I am thinking about pulling the plug on this quest of mine. Today I might go and buy a new camera. My cellphone not being appropriate for indoor or night pictures. That could become a transformation of elToronteco into something similar to LAGPD (the mother of all blogs if you ask me), although not as consistent or as well crafted as my friend Rudy does. I really cannot tell. It's not the same anymore. Also, my free time, though I spend some of it in self-reflection, is now being willingly and delightfully offered to Love.

So I must confess, I will keep blogging to myself, just not to you guys (the half a dozen or so of my readers). I have not switched to facebook, in which I still keep a profile as a fifth e-mail address and to do some of my student organization duties and some of my activism. I will keep smiling at the fact that some of the titles in my postings have captured unsuspected google searches into this fly trap. For now is a see you later. Google reader will keep me in touch with the blogs that I frequent and I will still make my sporadic comment.

For now, this has been Manolo Romero Escobar, for elToronteco, Toronto.