Please update your bookmarks & RSS readers. My blog can now be found at:
The good news is that means I am blogging again.
My blog has moved to vivikare.com
Reply
Category Archives: Blogging
My life in bullet points
♥ I can’t believe it has been a month again since my last post!
♥ Last weekend, I gave my blog a little makeover, so do click on through to my blog if you are reading this through Google Reader.
♥ Since my last post I took my first week off work since I started my job. I spent a few days in Heidelberg & in Munich.
♥ A couple of weeks ago, I attended the wedding of a friend of mine.
♥ On Friday, the CEO of the company I work at gave away tickets to a concert by German singer Herbert Grönemeyer in Munich. Three co-workers of mine and I got them. We’ll be driving down to Munich tomorrow after work to see him live at the Olympic Stadium. This is pretty awesome if you ask me.
♥ It’s my 28th birthday on Thursday and I have Friday and Monday off work making for an extra long weekend in Munich. I am leaving on Wednesday after work and won’t be getting back here until Tuesday morning.
♥ I went on a sort-of date last weekend and it mostly left me wondering what exactly it is I want because I sure seem to have a hard time finding it. This seems to be a bad place to be in at nearly 28. Or maybe I am just not compatible with German/Bavarian guys. I have seriously considered this.
♥ I went to my nephew’s first communion. This experience made me very glad not to be Catholic. No offense to any Catholics reading this, but it is just not for me. Between that and my friend’s wedding, I probably spent more time in a church that week than in the entire five years before that.
♥ I have gained roughly 35 pounds since Christmas. It sucks. And for some reason I need to say it, because it hasn’t quite hit home yet that something needs to change. Right now. And by right now I mean as soon as I have eaten my birthday cake. No, seriously, I do need to do something about this.
♥ I cannot believe how little I have blogged in the past few months. (I mean, this is only my 10th post in 2011!) I plan on changing that this upcoming weekend. I mean, I do have five days off work. I always plan on blogging more and then never do. I miss it but at the same time clearly prefer to do other things right now. Does anyone have a solution for this problem?
Reverb10: Writing
This post is part of the online initiative Reverb10. You can find all of my Reverb10 posts here.
December 2 – Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
This prompt really made me think. I don’t really consider myself a writer. I’m a blogger but not a writer. But I guess blogging is just one form of writing. Being that I have had a hard time blogging about anything lately, I think this is actually a really good prompt for me personally. I think what keeps me from writing the most are expectations. My expectations and what I believe your expectations to be as my readers.
It seems that in the blogging world there are so many unofficial rules. You may tell me that there are no rules. That I should write about what I want how I want when I want. But that’s not really it. It seems that if you want your blog to be popular, you need to more or less abide by these rules. And I don’t know if I want to. Or can. I want to have readers, but I don’t want to imitate other bloggers to get them. I want people to want to read my blog because it is me, not because it is a bad copy of someone else.
And this is when I wonder whether I can ever be that person. The one who receives 15+ comments on every post. Maybe I am just mediocre. Maybe this is the best I can do. I am not as introspective, as funny, as creative, as eloquent, or quite frankly, as interesting as some of you are.
I am having a hard time finding my niche in the blogging world. I’m a 20something blogger, but we all are. Who am I within that group? Where do I belong? I’d like to blame some of this on my not being a native English speaker, on my not living in the US, but I don’t really know if that’s it. I have always had a hard time answering the question, “Fill in the blank: ‘People who like _________ will love my blog!’” I don’t blog about anything specific. My blog is really just a collection of posts reflecting myself at a specific moment in time. You can’t easily label my blog. And people like labels.
I expect myself to be able to be the blogger I’d like to be. I would love to be more involved in the blogosphere. I just don’t know how to do that and still be myself at the same time. The truth is I have never been popular. Not in high school. Not in college. So why do I expect it to be different online?
Don’t get me wrong. I have always had friends. And I appreciate the readers I have. I am thankful for you. But sometimes I expect myself to be better. And it is when I want to be something different that I lose the ability to be what I am. Maybe I need to start seeing the extraordinary – the blogworthy – in my life, instead of trying to re-create what works for others. It will be different but it will be me.
The meetup that finally happened
Once upon a time, a girl loved a band very much. The band’s name was Lifehouse. She started posting on the official message board and quickly got to know some people there. She met some Germans and she also met other fans from all over the world. One of them is Aly. When Aly posted how she and her fiancé met, she forgot to mention that forum is also how she met me. Haha. I am not sure when exactly we first met online but it must have been in 2001 or 2002. That is a really long time ago! After the forum’s demise, we stayed in touch through LiveJournal and instant messenger. In early 2006, we nearly got to meet in person. Aly was traveling through Europe with her then-boyfriend Jason (not to be confused with Jason from Lifehouse), and they were in Munich a few days before I came home for the semester break. I had finals when they were in Munich so I couldn’t come home earlier to meet them.
It would be four and a half years before we’d finally get the chance to meet again. Aly was doing another tour of Europe with her best friend Kirby (who was also a member of the Lifehouse forum) and she was going to come to Munich for one day. And I was living in Munich at the time. That day was Monday.
We finally got to meet in person after 8 or 9 years of knowing each other online. And it was epic! We only spent a few short hours together but we had such a good time. It honestly didn’t feel like we were meeting each other for the first time. We know so much about each other from chatting and reading each other’s blogs, so while we had never met in person until three days ago, we knew each other.
Aly, Kirby and I met up for dinner at a Bavarian restaurant followed by hot chocolate and cupcakes at the McCafé (Starbucks was closed already, dangit!), and I had a blast spending time with them. We talked, and laughed, and giggled and took self-portraits selfies.
As always with bloggy meetups, I was a little nervous before meeting them, but my nervousness was completely unfounded and it went away as soon as Aly and Kirby spotted me in the darkness of downtown Munich on that November evening. It felt like meeting a good friend, and the evening left me happy for knowing these two girls through such random circumstances when they live on the other end of the world, even happier that we got to meet in person, and a little wistful that it will probably be a while before we will get to meet again. The internet has made the world so much smaller and it is what made our knowing of each other’s existence and becoming friends possible in the first place, but it is still a big, big world (oooh remember that song by Emilia, anyone?) and Australia and Germany are on nearly opposite ends of that big world.
It was a fabulous evening, with great food …
… yummy treats …
… but the best part of it all was the company.
I am really grateful that after so many years, we finally got to meet, and I hope that we’ll get the chance to meet again. I mean I’ve always wanted to visit Australia.