I write communication plans for a hobby

While it's not true that I don't have enough work to keep my mind full, I must say that by training, I am accustomed to executing things after a rigorous process of strategizing and I ergo sometimes miss this time-consuming crafting.

Now, since the comm. strategizing is done for my brand by other people - people who are paid to do the strategizing - my input in the comm. process is limited to my executions. Sometimes it is challenging because I have to make sense of the strategy laid down for me, even if I disagree with it. Sometimes it's easy because I only think of natural executional extensions of the original idea, if brilliant and brilliantly crafted. Which is rare.

So sometimes I do my own planning and comm. strategizing for brands for myself, to challenge myself. It's weird. But it's like crafting a beautiful chair you can never sell to make a profit. It's weird that a business function, business being ruled by numbers, can become a craft and art you devote your time to.

They say advertising is both art and science. But I guess you'll never arrive at labeling it art if you don't make something beautiful for its own sake as a source and form of self-actualization.

One among billions

Writing.

I used to love writing. I wrote all over notebooks, back-to-back, cover-to-cover. I wrote on text books and reference books, on tissue paper and on McDonald's paper trays and paper cups that I stare at while waiting for friends. I even wrote on post-its that I stick on bus back seats during bus rides on lonely nights from work so that other people may share what wisdom, theory or hypothesis I have in mind - just to share a feeling. The knowledge that someone will most probably read what I wrote, keep the post-it and bring it home, maybe stick on his own notebook if the message resonates, kept me writing randomly.

It started in high school and college where writing kept me sane and competent. I had bad memory, except for history, so I had to scribble down lessons I can understand in my own language on my notebooks to remember things that pop in my head. I had to support textbook definitions and lessons with my own reflections so I can understand them. I also saw myself at that time as a student, not only of my school, but of the world at large - with nuggets of wisdom and ideas popping in my head uncontrollably I had to write them down to record them. To remind myself of lessons learned and ideas I can call mine. Writing was my head's reserve and my hands' preoccupation. Without writing, I could have been a different me as I would have no recourse to sift through my head's own work. Until blogging came.

The knowledge that whatever I wrote online will be kept online forever was such a comfort. I had confidence that I will never lose a note or idea, or lesson learned through hard work. Always I'd say, whether I get to execute them or not, my ideas are my greatest wealth and asset. To hold them through words is like keeping my hard-earned money in a bank. Ideas to me are the products of one's imagination and creativity mixed with personal observations and experiences, seen through one's own values and principles. You cannot force-produce ideas, they just come to you subconsciously. In the same light, that's why only some ideas come to all while only people of similar minds and experiences produce similar ideas. "Great minds think alike," so they say. That's why to me, ideas are ultra precious worth owning and keeping. Even musings on ideas are ideas themselves.

So why have I lost it seems the desire to write? Many things. I feel the space for expression is overly, overly crowded. Even if no one reads you, the fact that just a few changes in your blog address produces a blogsite entirely different from yours, from an entirely different person, crowds the world wide web of expression. Social media has crowded our personal universe. It has become polluted. The blogosphere is itself polluted with ugly ads, paid write-ups, corrupt writers and know-it-alls with super baaad grammar. Especially among Philippine blogs, the stench of backroom deals, social alliances and petty bickering that make up phony urban "society" here have surfaced on published posts and tweets, crassly, without hesitation nor reflection among the writers and readers. Local blogging had become a picture and expression of the feudal mindset and aggressive mediocrity that have continuously assaulted and hostaged our society.

So I got my notebook back and created my own personal space where I started scribbling and writing again.

I'm not saying that blogging to me has become a lost battle. It is after all, a venue where great ideas still surface and there are still fantastic writers out there worth my time and respect. Gems do lie in heaps of rubble and dirt and diamonds are produced under great weight, heat and pressure, dug through industrious labor. It is in this hope that I will continue to try to be different in the blogosphere whether people read me or not. Many treasures are found by people stumbling upon them. It's a hope that some still stumble upon these thoughts and get ideas or lessons from them. To be read and be relevant are not desires, not wishes nor causes of joy. To be read and understood however is blazingly hoped for, serenely, peacefully, with thoughts of connecting and progressing our society and humanity as a whole.