I am the kind of person who crumbles under pressure. For the longest time, I thought it was the other way around, because pressure actually helped me in many aspects in life (like working 10 times harder and being productive when faced with a deadline) and led to almost every success I have had in life. Even my stubbornness actually helped, because you have to be stubborn to ask for what you want again and again. Nowadays, I think the three values I cherish most in life could be summed up with gratitude, empathy and simplicity. I even think these are the things that make a blog great: Appreciation for the people who read it, the ability to understand how others perceive the world and adapt to it, and a simple organization and writing style.
I was under time pressure when I wrote my last posting over 2 months ago, the celebratory 1000th one. It was probably the preparation for our Singapore trip, but I don’t even remember. What I remember quite clearly is how I was generally satisfied with the way I wrote the posting, but not what I wrote. I managed to cram what I thought was every relevant memory of the Berlinale (which was not too personal to blog about), but I completely failed at even mentioning what I actually wanted to write about the most: A reflection on this blog, the journey (haha buzzword!) of this blog until today, and, most of all, to show my gratitude to everyone who has been accompanying me here. I perceive you guys who are reading this blog as eternal, even though experience shows that friendships dissipate and interests and hobbies don’t last forever (I don’t read manga anymore, can you believe it?) Perhaps I am simply taking things for granted, but I don’t think that must necessarily be true. The romantic belief that this blog and its readers will exist forever no matter how crappy my writing and how deep my writer’s block shouldn’t keep me up from feeling grateful to you, my readers, for being in my life. Instead, both of these feelings are grand and meaningful to me, the first makes me feel secure and the latter makes me feel lucky. I don’t really know how to express these in words (poetry is so not my thing), so I will try the simplicity route: Thank you for having me. Please make my dream come true and continue to be there.
With that said, my goal is to kill my backlog before the PIFF begins on May 28. There, I said it. Publishing goals are supposed to help with maintaining them, so now I shall go back to doing what I do really well: Keeping a deadline.