Today's ramblings

May 02 in Japan time

Being online in an interactive fashion means, in most cases, I write something, anytime, anywhere. It seems that before the advent of the Internet, people used to have much fewer opportunities to write casually than they have now. Thanks to the optical cables across the oceans, these days it is even possible to write and post in foreign languages. As more and more Japanese are getting started on blogging in English, more and more people around the world who seem as committed to learning Japanese as we are to English seem to be starting blogging in Japanese, and so on, all made possible by the Internet and search engines that provide a seemingly infinite corpus of each and every language. There are also a whole lot of people out there who put the novels of their own online, some of them fairly lengthy ones. While it’s true that writing takes time and some getting used to, I sometimes find myself more engrossed in reading blogs or any other kind of writing on the net, created mostly by nonprofessionals, than I do in reading novels that I pay for. Seems like times have changed. I wonder if my time would be better spent entirely reading those finer works (so it seems to me) online than paying for the boring fictions out there and thus contributing to the depletion of forest resources.

It occurred to me that romanticizing what you’re going to narrate a little bit or putting a twist on it may not be something every writer or speaker, whether they be amateurs or semi-pros like experienced bloggers, should stay away from, but something they should spend their energy on. The point I want to make is, it seems to me that not only writing but every kind of language activity done casually on an everyday basis, like speaking with friends on the phone, writing email, chatting just for fun, can sometimes take on the feel of a novel. While it’s true that life is anything but novels, being able to handle language as well as some good novelists do seems to be something worth pursuing. This idea came to me while I was listening to my sister talking on the phone in her usual voluble and lively way of describing things, which by the way always leaves me with the impression that women generally are a little more adept at manipulating language than men. I know the part that sounds like a speech on feminism has little to do with the thing I meant to address.

For me to keep blogging is a huge challenge given my poor English, not to mention that it takes a tremendous amount of time that could otherwise be spent doing other more frivolous things. I'm not really sure which is more frivolous, though.