One of the main deterrents to writing a blog for me is that my journalistic instinct is effectively nil. The Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of the matter (the last of which snuck into the wh-questions by a clever rearrangement of its letters) don't really excite me, or at best provide a very short thrill.
I can't even keep a personal journal to save my life. I have one, a nice hard-bound, black-covered book with the title "Journal" printed handsomely across it, given to me by my high-school history teacher upon my graduation with some warm-hearted advice written inside the front cover. I have four entries written in it during the month of August, 2007, my first semester in college. The next entry is from October of that same year, a short three-line entry wondering where September had gone. Then nothing until August, 2008, where I repeat the procedure with three entries in August, then an entry in October, again mystified about the disappearance of September. Entries after that become even more haphazard. I'm convinced the only thing I've written in there that I will remember is a one-line entry on the day of my first arrival in Beijing, so jet-lagged and disoriented that I wasn't even sure what date to put down:
"August 15/16
A behemoth carried me to China today, walking atop the clouds."
Who knows...
But of course things do happen in my daily life between those large gaps in journal entries, and some of them even bear recording. It's the kinds of things friends and relatives want to hear about when they ask you about China, and it's the kinds of things you figure you'll always remember, but you won't. So I'll write some of them down here: stories and experiences that don't necessarily fit into any of the other topics I write about on this blog, but that just happen in daily life. This is a new attempt at keeping a journal. We'll see if we can make it through September.
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