The blasted heck of blogging

Statutory Warning: Angst may be harmful to collective consciousness.

Managing this blog layout's beyond poor ole me.
I might as well try to chew hot rolled steel.

If readers aren't going to be smug and bug me about my blush, I'll just flashback here.

About a month or three back, I found a couple of nicely designed blogs with curiously compelling fonts and colours. And human nature being what is it, the grass on the otherside felt a little greener, a bit more luscious with a slightly richer, stronger tang to the mown. My mind immediately made its customary leap, and feverishly imagined running proudly a journal likewise. So I hurriedly identified a small post I'd made to trial with, and reposted it with no wee glee.

Looked good, YAY. But then the beta was no betta!

For when I tried to change it back to the earlier font, no go. It just didn't. Ah, I thought, must have overlooked some small parameter, heh. So you know what I did? I tested the font change with a couple of bigger posts, my novice mind ignoring the insistent peal of the warning bells.

Breath baited, then I tried to change them back to the earlier font. Now the faint peal of tin (warning bell, oh you know!) was an awful iron din. They seemed stuck, wedded doggedly to the new font; I felt like I'd violated something sacrosanct.

I even tried over the weekend, creating pseudo-posts, making quasi changes, and faking reposts quickly before the blogging software could recover from the last one.

What's worse, I created more new blogs just to check this compelling, buggering phenomenon. Although, I insist it's pretty irrelevant here that I couldn't gather enough courage to try it with them. I really do.

At any rate, I ended up feeling like a particularly low sort of a repeat violator, of a blog's dignity, like. I couldn't reply to some kindly readers of my blog, nor look in the mirror. I couldn't control my compulsive logging and my obsessive rechecking. To fail is to ail with no avail.

Awright, I'm a flying doodah if I know what that means, but can't you just empathize!

So I fell back on my last, final, ultimate resort: the mystical. What I did was this, (my very own Blog Correctional Manifesto) :

1. start new day with positive attitude; power up PC and whistle nice tune.
2. ensure ergonomics - arm rest, check, straight back, check, monitor level, check.
3. focus: no trade-offs between calls of blog and nature.
4. take break every 45 minutes, walk, breathe, loosen up carpal, shoulder, neck.
5. remember: regularly practise mystical practice.
6. pay no regard to screaming banshee of urge to just... just log in, even once.
7. utterly abstain thus for one whole week.

The weekend would come with attendant distractions and go leaving a host of little chores in its wake for me to take care of. And then... STAND BY.

It's noon, Monday. I am stoic, aware of the now poor, bedraggled temptation peering over my shoulder, following my navigation of information on the PC and the net. Till now, I've managed to keep it at bay inspite of its rather heavy, rather warm sighs on my neck.

SUDDENLY...And I mean real, hyper suddenly, ok?

my fingers lunge over the keyboard,
calling up my blog,
login with lighning fast taps,
race the mouse to the 'Edit Posts' link,
couple of rapid clicks to change the font back in the errant post,
and a strong daub at the 'Publish' key.
One single cursor leap to 'View Blog' and my hope is sky rocketing.......

Hopeless.

Well, imitability can lead to irritability, I've learnt.

Even meditation
(Yes! So? I did that!
That was my mystical secret, of course!
What would you do... eh? Hrrrmphh!)
with abstinence doesn't make up for the mysterious shortfall in consummation; there's always that, some such little itsy bit of a detail that always escapes the eye.

Oh well, WYSI hardly WYG, so to say. or more like, WYWINWYM. (What You Want Is NOT What You Can Manage). Huh.

Now all I've ended up with is some posts in the girdle (middle) of this blog with one distinct font, and at the neck and feet - a totally different one. Go look, you'll see what I'm talking about. (sniff!) Ah well. Might as well learn to live with it, take both smooth and rough, learn soft/ not rough, let it go/ hellward ho, stop and cease/ be at peace/ learn to eat/ rotten peas ... and all that rot.

Am I too proud to seek expert help? Or am I too bashful over what seems quite silly - decidedly inconsequential - or a needlessly beguiling complication or... or well, - by a long, improbably long shot, I concede - quite simple.

Not trivializing Nietzsche or other such effective regurgitators of reason, rationale and rapacious sagacity... but I do wonder sometimes now if true misery is after all the mother of maudlin compromise with technology. I mean, Kafka, Orwell, Gibson, Stephenson & Co. weren't just doodling idly, you know. There is something alarming about this growing virtual intelligence, with overly sophisticated technology, much bandied killer app programs and computing complexity around us and our children that, I'm convinced, should place us squarely in the circle of chaos in future. May sound like a defeatist's conspiracy theory. Being a hapless, self nominated victim, it's not that I subscribe to it or that I don't, but I do! Er...

Well, it's with no light heart that I say that I hardly scroll down my own blog nowadays. It's like - in the middle of a popular play on stage, the protagonist suddenly spots two sniggering, nudging viewers in the front row and develops an irrepressible suspicion if his fly's come open.

Well, talk of being a martyr. You are reading about one, for sure. The play does go on, has to; might as well enjoy the breeze.

Gah!

Micro Review: Blood Diamond

Rating (out of 5 stars) * *

An issue-based thriller with a weak story, Blood Diamond is almost good. Mind you, no more.

A white diamond smuggler (DiCaprio) and an innocent black fisherman (Hounsou) join reluctantly together - with opposing moral and psychological motivations – in civil war-ravaged Sierra Leone (late 90’s Africa). They are on a violent crusade to find a pink diamond in a race against death and brutal, warring government and rebel troops that covet it too. The background is unethical international gem trade, terrible reality of child-soldiers and slave labour in a poor, brutally ravaged continent.

The film boasts of above par action sequences and a remarkable performance from Leonardo DiCaprio. But the screenplay is an over-done advocate for your conscience. Good first half, heavy second. Thanks to the disappointing stereotype of a sermonizing American journalist (an attractive but wasted Jennifer Connelly) helping the smuggler find nobility in the midst of moral chaos.