A metapost (a post about posting)
Wow, it’s been over 2 years since my last post here. I doubt anybody’s reading this blog anymore. Nevertheless, this blog was conceived as a way of documenting my experience in Beijing and I only made it halfway, to August 2008. It’s time to pick this up again, and finish documenting the latter part of 2008.
Why now? Well, by the time I’d left Beijing in Feb 2009, I had become pretty negative about the city and my experience here. It’s taken the intervening years for me to realize that a large portion of that negativity was me. So this year - early 2011 - Albert and I decided to come back to Beijing, to see if things were as “bad” as we remembered it.
They weren’t.
So, part of the desire to finish this blog is a desire to both capture the negativity and hopelessness of the latter part of our year, and to lay it to rest.
But the other part is far more personal. When loyal reader J died in Oct 2008, I promised myself that I’d finish this blog even if she couldn’t. The problem is: the dead can’t forgive, the way the living do. And when life started to get in the way of finishing this blog, I found myself with this low-level background guilt that I could never expatiate. I’ve let this promise drag on for too long; and I’ve decided that now is the time. Faciendum est.
So, to my remaining living readers: expect one final push of posts, to finish up the latter, darker part of 2008. Expect also that the post quality will go down; my memory is less clear, the topics are more complex, and I’m in Beijing with no access to Picasa photos to jog my memory. I’m the kind of person who lets “perfect” get in the way of finishing something, and in my drive to prevent that hold me back, I expect I will produce lower-quality posts. I think I’m ok with all of this, and I hope you are too.
It’s time to finish this blog.
-- Cross-posted from http://blog.albertandhannah.com/hannah