Tag: Blogging

Trip to Memory Lane

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I have been doing a little housekeeping on my blog. I cannot believe I have been writing here on and off for over six years. I should have amassed more readership if I had more stamina, or if I kept at it consistently.

One of the problems I have is that I am a person with many interests, that change over time, depending on my current work or environment. I am a little shy of being controversial, because I believe I put here a lot of personal things, and people may very well recognize me from my writing.  At some point I kept a few separate blogs, an official personal blog, an anonymous personal blog, a knitting blog, and a professional blog. People who maintain one blog on a regular basis would immediately see the folly of this approach. It is hard enough to keep one vehicle of thought going, let alone two. And it is not possible at all to keep four of them going, not by one person at least. So I come back here, to take stock of what I have, and migrate more of my blogs into this Loskop site. I will work on categories to separate the personal from the professional and I will keep going. I should also try to get over this anxiety about who will, or will not read my blog. I will have to assume that those who keep up with me here will be kindred spirits. Those who do not like what I write will walk away. To me, writing is a completely pointless exercise if I cannot do it honestly. So you might learn that I am an Arabic translator, who loves the English language more than she loves her mother tongue. You will also know that I am a completely secular and non-practicing Muslim, who thinks that religion serves no useful purpose in building societies and nations. Neither piece of information is newsworthy, but you may also find worse revelations here.

About a year ago, my ex asked me to delete any mention of his name on my blog. At the time he was courting his third wife, who apparently looked things like that up. I was peeved at the request, but I still obliged and deleted the names. However, a Google search will still point to the pages, regardless of their content. This has to do with the way web crawlers work and index the web. I did not see the point of his request until today when I was browsing through my old posts in order to organize them. Some of what I wrote during the time of divorce is extremely raw. Many posts are striking for what is left unsaid, or for the pathetic voice of the female trying to make every possible excuse for why the male in her life is treating her like rubbish, and considering their baby a mere inconvenience to his rest and exercise routine. When I later imported my anonymous platform, the truth sometimes outed glaringly, exposing him for the selfish brute he always was. I was forced to re-live some of my personal indignities in detail, it was not a pleasant memory.

There is an upside too. I can look back at the hardships of those fateful months in 2008/2009 and see how transient and insignificant my current troubles are. They are like small weather patterns in the course a transatlantic flight, the jet flies right through them, and they are smaller to warrant a change in the flight path.  I will therefore carry on, taking pleasure in the fact that I now have a continuing contract as a Translator in my international NGO. My job is as secure as any here, and I just need to find my way within the myriads of bureaucracy and inefficiency. I will make the best of my stay in New York, work hard, enjoy good food and grow in spirit with my growing son. I will no longer dwell on things that have been lost, or at least I will try to truly move on. The history, of all my joys, tribulations and mistakes is there, for anyone who cares to read it. I mostly write with my son in mind, and therefore I want to stay open and honest.

I apologize in advance to the people who know me personally and find themselves misrepresented in any way. You are welcome to write and comment if you want. The things I wrote are firmly anchored in their time and place, and the views I held in 2008, for example, are not cast in stone, but they have to stand in their context. From now on I will try to keep a veil on identities, but I cannot help the obvious ones, for example in the case of my Ex husband, and my son. I have only one of each, and this is unlikely to change. I may also need to do some more work in the area of ex boyfriends, there are also pathetically few of them.

So here again, you will get to know all the facets of this Arab South-African Translator Single-Mom Lover-of-Music-Reading-and-Knitting LOSKOP.

The Perils of Instant Online Posting

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

There is a special thrilling moment in the blogging. After you tie off the final thoughts together and put the full stop to the last paragraph or sentence, you give your post the final review and then you hit the publish button and relish the excitement of setting your words free to the world. It often happens that you discover one stray typo after the post goes live, or an awkward phrasing. Most of the time, however,  the integrity of your post survives and it is unlikely that the slip will cause major embarrassment.  This is because a blog post normally follows a certain structure. It is a piece of writing that evolves from an idea, into an outline, then a coherent piece. Each blogger is different, but I find that I have to start from a central theme, that I might develop as I write, but it is still a slow-brewing process. The most important part for me is to find the idea or theme of a post. I sift through dozens of online articles, or blog posts. I mine my own daily experiences or observations, in a hunt for one suitable subject. So regardless of how effortless posts look, they normally are a product of a relatively lengthy process. Of course, there are the odd exceptions like the Hello World page, or the re-posts from You-tube.

Things are a little different in the world of social networking. Technology has made it so easy for us to connect to our social networks. Whether our portable device of choice is an iPhone, iPad, or any other Andoid tablet or photon, there are endless options to use them for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Flickr among many others. So I can connect at any place and time, to interact with my cyber-friends. I can read posts, re-post them and post photos at the flick of one finger. And while commenting or tweeting may take a little bit more effort, the platforms themselves do not encourage verbosity, or limit my thoughts to a few characters, which makes a touch screen keyboard sufficient. I feel that blogging -with the notable exception perhaps of photo-blogging- cannot benefit much from the technology of portable devices. Because although the applications for tablet and iPhone exist, the limitation of keyboard and display size require at least an investment into portable keyboards, or extra-ordinary manual dexterity that I do not possess. For me, blogging involves many stages of careful thought and reflection, while posting on my social network is much more impulsive. As the connection to social apps becomes so much easier, the act of thumbing up other people’s thoughts or pictures; re-posting jokes or articles; and writing that quick comment, turn into something like a nervous reflexes with little or no thought at all.

The danger of this instant reflex lurks closer than you think. A few times I gave thumbs up to a story, when I actually wanted to flip it off my screen, because I found it silly or distasteful.  At least once I wrote a comment or a whinge that I later thought will be misunderstood. Most of the time I caught these things within minutes, but since these actions are “out there” immediately after I click on them, there is always a chance that one of my friends would bear witness to them, maybe even the very same one who would get offended. It is a peril that one has to live with; a means of culling that friend perhaps.

Predictive text is particularly damning in this area, as I found out recently while posting on my tablet a message to Nelson Mandela for his birthday. My “Happy Birthday Tata Madiba” came out as Happy Birthday Tara Marina. I was horrified when I spotted this a few minutes later. I quickly discarded my tablet for my trusted laptop and typed it correctly. Barely a minute later a friend commented that I was a day early… mistakes are caught quickly in cyberspace.

Of course it is perfectly okay, people can make stupid mistakes on social networks as they do in the live social sphere. It is a bit more public, that’s all. So, the moral of the story: Treat your status update as a blog post. Respect it and give it some extra thought, it saves you unnecessary embarrassment.

I’m Posting Every Week in 2011

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

When the year started I was busy with a translation project but the blogging challenge of 2011 caught my attention and I loved the idea of participating, but as I mentioned in my previous post I was too timid and too cowardly to go through with it at the time.

My life is now on auto-pilot, a stretch of turbulent free weather ahead, and hopefully it will continue this way.  I have little heat, passion and anger to drive my blogging zeal; my best blogging days were when I moaned and whinged about work, my ex and the assortments of misadventure I seemed to be plagued with. For once though I want to blog for pleasure, for the exercise of writing and putting thoughts to paper. I tried to explain in a previous post my fears and what is blocking this venture, but I am determined to conquer them and going public with this challenge is the best way to “shame” myself into doing this.

A post a day, is a little to ambitious for me, so I am going with the challenge of posting once a week in 2011, I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, and wonderful. Therefore I’m promising to make use of The Daily Post, and the community of other bloggers with similar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.

If you already read my blog, I hope you’ll encourage me with comments, likes, and goodwill along the way.

Signed,

Robert’s Mother.

Blogophobia

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I have been away from you dear blog for a long time and it makes me feel terrible. I am beginning to feel an onset of a new condition that I will call blogophobia.

There are many aspects to this fear of blogging in my case. Firstly, as of today I find that I have already skipped many key events of the past year without comment. There are also many half-formed thoughts lurking about as drafts, suspended in their own temporal dimension, as the weight of passing days buries them further away from the here and now. Whenever I start to blog they seem to reproach me at my tardiness, so I just turn my head away from the blog sighing that perhaps it is too much work and effort to dig this far into the past. When I re-read the half-formed thoughts in some of these drafts, I fail even to remember what I was on about, and in this case it is easiest to hit discard draft, but  I still have seven half-finished ones waiting to see the light.

The other aspect of my fear is that I am, as I often find myself in life, straddling some fine dividing line. I do not think I have anything profound to say, yet I find myself too proud, and too old to post just every day drivel. And caught between what I can write and what I aspire to write I just stay silent. My blogophobia gets worse when I read a terrible piece – How awful, I never want to sound like THIS. It deepens again when I read something brilliant – There is no way I can ever write like THAT; it is a vicious, and never-ending circle.

Like anywhere else in life though, it is useless to stay afraid. A day comes when you have to face your fear. So what if I do not have anything important to say? So what if I never come up with a profound thought or never blog a life-changing adventure or experience? There is blessing in being ordinary, and there are pleasures in blogging about toilet-training mishaps or toddler language and logic.

Even in the middle of all this ordinariness there bound to be a light-bulb moment, and a brilliant thought, but if I do not put my fingers to the keyboard to capture mundane moments and thoughts, I will never have the courage to articulate occasional brilliance.

I am hoping this will be the year to get this blog going again. Maybe I will take this blogging challenge for 2011.

Reclaiming My Space

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

Robert’s mom has moved her virtual space. I decided to change the blog address and make it un-googleable. This is now my private space to curse, scream, laugh and cry. The only person who got hurt by leaving it open to my ex and his family was me, and therefore I decided to reclaim it.
Now I can say whatever I like about my ex, but mostly I can grieve in peace, without him eavesdropping or gloating over my sorrow. At times it is very difficult to keep my feelings apart: I am angry, then sad. I am driven by a powerful hatred, then I feel the awful pain of rejection. It is an emotional roller-coaster.

I am still hurting and will continue to hurt for a while. The long nights I spend in front of the computer are devoted to an obsessive search for my ex. I try to find his profile on social networks, so that I might get an inkling of what he is up to. Outwardly though I try to appear as if I couldn’t care less. I did make the decision to stop loving my ex, but sometimes I still miss him, or more accurately I miss the person I thought he was. I have to figure out the extent of my responsibility toward the disintegration of my marriage, and I am desperate for answers. Yesterday I discovered the online presence of the first ex-wife and I had to stop myself from typing her an innocuous email. I don’t know what I am trying to accomplish by contacting her, find answers, revenge or vindication? Maybe one day when my emotions cool down, I will be able to understand my motives. Until then, what I do with the information is irrelevant because the woman I found does not match the unfair portrait he has drawn at the beginning of our relationship.

Although I did reclaim my private virtual platform I do not want to remain a prisoner to the inner dialog of internet ranting. I want to get out and get a life. Towards this end I am going to get mobile and take my son wherever I want to go. Tomorrow will be the beginning of this plan.

Some Random happenings:
– Looks like I do not have sufficient credit rating to get a contract with my cellular provider. I am trying to get a new camera phone without success. Even the cell phone company does not believe that I am a good person. God knows what put me in the dog box this time: My divorce, my new ID number since my naturalization or my poor salary.
– Jackie is a great sport: She took Robert yesterday to get his immunization for the month, then drove me to the wool shop. I bought some delicious new yarns because I want to knit Robert another a sweater and a new jacket to replace the one that got lost on dad’s watch.
– Robert had two injections yesterday, and I expected him to have a rough night, but he handled them better than last time. His weight was 9.38 kg, height 74 cm, and his head circumference is 45cm. He has dropped to slightly below average in weight, but he is still taller than 90% of babies his age. I think I have to feed him more.

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Under the surface: Lists

~ marobbie ~ Leave a comment

I am writing lists, many lists; trying to keep my world organized. Some lists I am using to keep track of day-to-day preparations, others are for future plans contingencies and eventualities. I am not moving the address of this blog, I get my black thoughts aired out elsewhere, in a private anonymous space. This one will remain friendly and clean for the consumption of those I care about, and for whoever wants to check how Robert is doing. Perhaps this is a good exercise to keep me upbeat and focused on what really matters.