Too old for this

I went Christmas shopping today: after 2 p.m., on Christmas Eve, in the Bugis/Raffles City area, which didn't seem as bad as the main Orchard Road strip but was definitely more crowded than I like it. By the time I got home at 7-something, my phone battery was almost entirely drained (due to gift consultations by phone), my legs were feeling crampy and even my back was starting to complain. The last time I did this, I was closer to the other end of thirty (or maybe I was thirty) and even had the energy to meet a friend for coffee mid-afternoon, in between the Christmas purchases.

(Heh, I just mistyped "thirty" as "turkey" in the previous sentence. That tells you what I had for dinner last night.)

The funny thing is, I did my first round of Christmas shopping at the end of November and was absolutely conscientious about it, because I was sending those gifts to friends overseas. It's just the local gifts that I put off ...

I'm not being a Grinch about it. I just need to do all my Christmas shopping in November next year. Yeah ... that.

Okay, I'm going to go put my feet up now. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Coming and going

I wanted to see how many blog posts I've made this year, but I couldn't find a date-search function in Blogger. So I did it the old-fashioned way and paged through my archives and counted the posts.

The grand total for this year: 27.
The months with the lowest number of posts: March (1) and December so far (1, with this post)

I used to be a lot better at this.

I've been thinking lately about why I don't blog as much as before, and I think that other than not having that much time-to-blog, it's also that certain things about public and private life now mix online and off, in ways that make me write in a less bloggy fashion online. It's not necessarily a censorship issue. Sometimes, jabbering about something on Twitter or Facebook is enough to satisfy that urge. Sometimes, I don't want to get into a protracted conversation or discussion online about an enormous issue.

Sometimes, even though something fun's going on in my own life that I'd like to blog about, like being interviewed for a Channel NewsAsia current affairs show, On the Red Dot on Wednesday, shortly thereafter real life intervenes with much more pressing matters.

(I will say that Wednesday's interview was the first time I ever had to snake my hand under my shirt in full view of the Lorong 8 Toa Payoh hawker centre  in my 'hood, in order to pin on a clip mic.)

I don't see how I could possibly blog less in the new year, and I'd like to bring myself up to an average of one post every week, if possible. It might be a good break in the next few months of intense novel writing.

That reminds me: During an informal WriteCamp session at the Singapore Writers' Festival, where I was talking about how writers can use Twitter, I remember a young man who asked a question along the lines of, "Isn't Twitter a distraction from writing?" To which I said, if you want to procrastinate, anything can be a distraction: "When I really need to write something, suddenly I'll decide that I really need to clean my bathroom."