to what do we owe this honor?

if you've ever had that moment when someone you know in real life goes up to you and blurts out the famous words "you have a blog!" you'd know what this post is all about. You fell like keeling over, or like everything stops. People aren't supposed to know that you blog. It's your journal, for goodness' sake. It's a SECRET, you think, so how come this person is privy to it?

But then again, if it were a secret, whatever possessed you to put it on the net? This is the internet where nothing is sacred. Students steal stuff of the net and pass if off as their own. This is where you find that oh-so-elusive butt-naked Alicia Silverstone picture. Nothing is private, everything is free, nothing is yours.

And so that’s what blogs are all about. Inasmuch as we’d all like to think that we own our blogs and whatever we say there, in the end, the fact that we posted it on the net means that some part of us wants to be heard, wants to be read. I mean, if we didn’t really care at all, then why do we care about grammar? Why do we follow the three c’s of writing? Why do we even put that site meter? Admit it or not, we WANT people to read.

Moreover, we want people to tell us what they think. If it weren’t true, I’d remove the comments box altogether. But no, I admit to the fact that at the end of the day, before I rush off to somewhere, I check whether people have commented on what I wrote.

* * *

one of the greatest people I know made an album called “things I admit to myself in the car with the radio on.” According to him, “ there’s something about being in the car alone that just drives you to start thinking about whatever circumstances might be present in your life … you think, you wonder, and suddenly you find yourself realizing any number of things that you would not have owned up to in any other situation. The car is not just a means of transportation, it’s also a means for reflection.”

For me, that was what my blog was like. I could basically write whatever it is that I wanted. I could own up to anything – the fact that I cheated on an accounting exam in fourth year high school, or that I probably didn’t really love a couple of guys I said “I love you” to in the past. But what I had forgotten was that unlike the car where I was really all alone, no one is really all alone on the net.

* * *

recently I posted “shallow stuff” thinking that it would be okay for me to diss a particular kind of person simply because it was my blog and I wasn’t accountable for what I write in here. It was too late when I realized that although this blog is my home on the net, I had opened the doors of my home to people and I owe it to them too think twice before posting something like that. It’s pretty much like the charles barkley situation where he refused to acknowledge that no matter how much he tried to deny it, he was a role model and people looked at how he talked, walked, and in my case, how he played basketball.

* * *

it was wrong for me to have thought that what he was was an editor because in reality, he could’ve actually been that voice in you that tells you what’s wrong from right. We say (or don’t say) stuff not because we’ve been edited. We opt not to because we know better. We’ve been taught better than to diss people to their faces. We also know better than to do it behind their backs.

* * *

the last couple of days, what I did was to look at myself carefully in the mirror and think. I may be able to pronounce “photograph” properly but there are things I couldn’t do: I walk funny. I’m a bad speller. I sing out loud even when I do know I’m tone deaf. I’m an awful driver. I stumble over my words.

* * *

so in the end, I was wrong. You were right.