Re-forging the "Sword"

...

Umm, yeah. I'm back!

Actually, the truth is, I never went anywhere.

So, I realize that the "vast majority" (all two of you) who are reading this have never heard of me before, and thus you don't really care that it has been just over two years since the last time I posted something on this blog. Or, maybe there are a few of you (all one of you) who came across that one post I wrote about Majora's Mask, and have been waiting for me to fulfill my promise to write follow-up posts about the Moon Children. Or maybe you're one of those people who are the reason that I used to consistently see this blog receive page views from Russia, Germany, Brazil, etc. If so, hi, again.

Whatever the case is with you, my apologies for seemingly abandoning this blog. I'll have you know that I never forgot about it, never deliberately thought, "Blogging is a waste of time; I'm done with it." The truth is, I thought about this blog often. I considered posting things, even went to work on the drafts of those Majora's Mask posts I promised. Earlier this year, for instance, I thought, "Hey, the Majora's Mask remake is coming out. These posts will be topically relevant again!"

And then I didn't do anything about it.

It wasn't apathy, if you're wondering. It wasn't even a matter of simple writer's block, or a lack of confidence that got me thinking that nobody would like what I had to say. No, it was more of...





...Let me go directly against something I said in one of my earliest posts, way back in 2010. Back when I was stupid enough to believe it was a good idea, I said that you would not hear anything about the real "me;" I said I would give you no details about my personal life, tell you nothing about my experiences, and only let you hear the thoughts in my head. You know, so you could all hail me like some kind of magnificent genius.

(Was I really that conceited, only so few years ago? Ugh. I'll try to avoid that in the future.)

Well, to heck with that, past self. If anyone is going to keep reading, they need to hear a real person and not some machine who has no life.

Heh... heh...

"The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself
at the ground and miss." - Doug Adams

...

I do have a life. Really.

So anyways, this oh-so-important thing you need to know about me is that I began this blog in a different era of my life. At the time I had no formal education beyond high school. To make matters of writing even more difficult, I was a recently returned missionary for my church. This meant that I had just spent two years speaking mainly Spanish, and that not exceptionally well. (I was considered fluent, but not eloquent.) This was during a time that I was still trying to find my niche in adult life - I mean, not that I'm totally beyond that even now - and it was a time I still felt excited about things sometimes. I still believed in others by default. I was blindly optimistic. Life still held so much potential that looked so easy to snatch.

Other crud like that, heh.

Yes, this was a time before I started going to school, accumulated a mountain of student loan debt, and had the terrible idea to go to school in the United States as an international transfer student. This was a time before I finally got tricked into talking to a doctor who finally told me what I had suspected for many years: that I have severe clinical depression. This time was long before I went through various trials of different medications that are supposed to fix that condition, but instead usually make things worse. This was back in a time when the world looked so full of hope, when I had friends on whom to rely, and I could afford to be idealistic when I wrote.

That person from 2010 is not me. I am not him. ...And thank goodness, says I. In spite of all the new trials I face these days, and in spite of how I expect much less of people than I used to, and in spite of how much harder I have to fight against despair, some good has come out of my life in the past four and a half years.

And that's a really long story. I won't make you suffer through it right now. Someday, maybe. You've been warned!

This wrist carries a lot of stories. Enough to fill a book. (Literally, in the case
of that flash drive bracelet; it has the first draft of a novel
stored away in it.)

Suffice it to say, much has changed, and that's been the real reason that I haven't written for this blog in so long. As a university student majoring in English, I am learning more about the techniques of reading more deeply and writing with greater power. And I have found, in these recent years, that my writing style usually changes drastically every four months. My outlook on life can sometimes change even more quickly than that. So, if I were to start writing a blog post in January, become too busy with homework, forget about that post, and try to finish writing it in April... well, an old metaphor for that is "putting new wine in old bottles."

(To explain the metaphor, first of all you should know that it would have been better if it were translated into English as "putting new grape juice in old wine skins." You see, to make wine, as many people already know, you ferment grape juice. Fancier wines involve more to the process than that, but for basic wine, all you do is leave grape juice alone. For a long time. Basically, you wait for the sugar in it to rot. By doing so, the sugar becomes alcohol, and thus the grape juice becomes wine. Now, in 1st century A.D., when this metaphor was spoken by a man named Jesus, the method of the time was to put grape juice into leather pouches called wine skins. The bacteria in the leather helped the grape juice to ferment, but it also caused gases to be emitted. So, the leather wine skin would stretch and swell. But because the leather was new, it could still stretch, and the contents inside would be safe until you opened it up. However, if you took an old, used wine skin - one that was already stretched - and you filled it up with new grape juice, as soon as the new juice started fermenting, the old skin would not be able to stretch anymore, and it would eventually burst. The lesson here was, "Don't put new wine in an old bottle. It doesn't fit there." Less metaphorically, it meant, "Don't try to apply new teachings to an old mindset. They won't fit there." Kind of a weird way to think of your mind being blown, eh?)

So, I'm going to try it again, this blogging thing. I've had someone counsel me recently, saying that I should pick up this blog again and just write about things I'm passionate about. It could be a career boost for me, he said, as much as it is cathartic.

Well, ok, then. I'll do that. There may be some drastic changes around here. Anything from taking down some of my old posts where I kind of ramble pointlessly, to changing the blog's format so that you don't have to read green letters on a grey background (aww, that makes me miss computers from the 80s), to actually having a theme in mind when I write my posts, and writing about things people actually want to hear. You can expect I'll be back, or better put, starting over.

And... I don't have anything especially witty to say in closing, so I'll just say good-bye. See you soon!

- TAB III
(Because I still won't tell you my real name, dontcha know. Have a nice day!)