What is with the crazy blog sensation? It seems to me that everybody's doing it, and the only thing I hate more than everybody doing something is somebody so anti-something that they refuse to do it all. That's silly, and pretentious, and was me until about five minutes ago. I set this page up nearly two years ago before I embarked on a few short tea journeys through India and Africa. Although I had stories to tell, and friends and family to tell them to, I couldn't bring myself to publish anything for potentially public eyes, so I mass emailed massive amounts of words to a selected few. Shortly after, even that made me panic when I found out they were forwarding on to others, reading them out loud at work, or printing them and reading them on their subway rides home. I of course love to write, but like every writer, hate to write sometimes, especially when the most terrifically terrifying thing awaits me- somebody else's eager eyes that might read what I've written (and possibly even be entertained.) So now, and even then, blogs are this crazy phenomenon that I'd like to think I didn't have to get myself involved with the same way I didn't want to get involved with facebook (which I officially joined a few short weeks ago after years of deliberation.)
It has taken me a long time to convince myself to bear this online medium for two reasons 1) because everyone is already doing it 2) what exactly do I think I'm going to write that would intrigue anyone else enough to read it? But here I am "blogging." Rambling on to myself because no one wants to listen to someone ramble unless that person is Ellen DeGeneres. It seems like selling out, and yet it's just the opposite, it's selling up~ Industry would call it platform, building influence, creating buzz. It is a perception~ any nitwit can do it, and many are, yet somehow this modern marketing phenomenon seems the best way to build a fan base, and inspire others with some witty creativity. I know this, and yet for some reason still can't bring myself to do it, yet here I am, doing it. So since the idea of a blog makes my heart palpitate I here-by pronounce this a Flog: a fake web log. And since I have no platform, I declare this online real-estate the grounds where I will resurrect my F-latform, from the ground up.
When I first thought of calling this a Flog instead of a blog, I remembered that that word might sound even more dangerous than the word Blog and that it could be misperceived because the only association I conjure up when hearing it are the meanings to whip, or to beat, which in case you were confused, is not my intention. I double checked myself in the dictionary just to make sure I wasn't saying anything that could be misconstrued as overly offensive and as it turns out my chosen terminology is ironically just as relevant because beneath the the very last entry listed I found the meanings: to promote or build hype.
So here I am writing on my flog, documenting in some small way, stories and ideas that revolve around tea, travel, and life. Maybe you're a friend, maybe you're a family, but maybe just maybe you are tea drinking, travel-go-lucky, blog reading fan.
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