Purpose of this Blog

Picture: Myself along the Fjord of Norway

Hi there! For whatever reason that has caused you to chance upon this space, I welcome you to my blog space! I have previously started out on this blog at the end of 2008 but it fell into disuse due to my laziness and lack of commitment to update the posts. Well, after 2 years, in the end of 2010, I decided to restart my blog partly because I have some free time to spare before I return to Singapore from my exchange programme in Denmark.

I have been deliberating on the exact purpose of me doing blogging. One problem I face has been thinking what exactly I should include in each of the post. How personal should I go? Am I doing blog for a public audience and not so much for myself? I needed a resolution so that I can blog in the future with some boundaries. It will be great if you could read through what I have to say, so that you can see all my posts in perspective. 

FOR WHOM: First and foremost, this blog is for my personal development. Since resuming my blogging activity, there have been instances when what I typed in one post could stir up other thoughts or cause me to examine/scrutinise my own trend of thoughts, often leading to some deeper reflection which has been personally satisfying. I can say that the main audience I am interested in is – myself. I’m not being narcissistic here, I just see this space as a place where I can develop my ideas/thoughts. Of course, if you come to my blog, there is no way I can stop you from viewing, and inevitably my private/personal space is also somehow public. Now this leads me to WHAT I think I will usually post about.

WHAT: With the freedom of access in the internet, there is a high chance that someone who is reading through my posts may have completely opposing views from myself. I am not someone who likes confrontations, but I welcome conversations if you wish to discuss what I post. However, I think that sometimes differences can be irreconcilable, and my stand is that if that is the case, conversations don’t have to degrade to something nasty. Once again, I have to stress that this space is first and foremost a place for personal development of ideas, so it is impossible for everyone to agree on everything I have written.

I would emphasise so much on the above because in my posts are doses of religion, society and (popular) culture mixed together, issues which could be sensitive to some, if not all of us. I’m in a process where I am trying to make sense of the world around me, and I do so as a human like anyone of us, but also as a Christian. I very much enjoy Japanese popular culture and can go at lengths to describing certain phenomena, but I do not hold back from talking about these issues from a Christian perspective. May I hope the posts, while not fully agreed by any of you, will nevertheless enrich you by offering different perspectives.

As such, I doubt this blog is a ‘I ate sandwich in the afternoon for my lunch’ blog. That is not to say I will not talk about my daily dealings of life, but I think these are of secondary importance.

That’s all I have to say just to frame my blog in certain boundaries. As I said, I like Japanese popular culture very much, and I try to include videos of songs I’m currently listening to, so here is one, with an interesting title of Toilet’s God (I think it is something like that =/). Its a song about a grandmother and I guess the simplicity of her love for her grand daughter. The song seems to be a big hit in Japan, with more than 5.1 million hits!