Selective Amnesia There was a point to this. But I forgot.

Too many drafts, too few posts.

This morning, I was wondering why I haven’t been blogging with the same intensity and frequency as when I began. And the answer to that is so deeply profound, it will shake the very foundations on which the edifice of blogging is built.

You see, blogging is supposed to be spontaneous, impulsive, spur-of-the-moment and other synonyms of the word. It is also about democracy of opinion, of publishing and such like. You know, every asshole and his opinion and things of a similar vein. So you have too many blogs and too many opinions in one blog. So that leads to a kind of fatigue. And then there are cliques and cartels and groups.

Oh, err, the answer to the question.
Yes. Why haven’t I been blogging? Because of WORDPRESS, that’s why!

Let me explain. I have too many drafts.
You see, every time I think up a post, (which happens far more regularly and often-er than you’d think), I write it. I actually do. And then I hit, here’s where reason and logic fails me in coming up with an answer, I hit the save-as-draft button. And therefore, one more post goes into the deep-dark-gloomy regions of wordpress. From which I cannot rescue it.

Yes, WordPress is to blame. WordPress prevents me from blogging.
You know those big walk-through aquariums? The ones in which people are in a cage and the fish swim about freely, and laugh at the pointing humans? You can see the fish, the fish can see you. But you can’t touch each other, nor talk (if fish could talk). There’s absolutely no way the two of you can ever establish a communication channel.
Fish are drafts in WordPress. Everytime I log in, I can see the drafts. WordPress taunts me with it. It gives me a beautifully underlined, blue coloured link to the draft I can, in theory, edit and publish. But clicking on that link only will wreck eternal damnation upon me and, here’s the second place logic and reason fail, you.

Yes. Drafts are not supposed to be reviewed and published. Drafts will stay drafts no matter how many times you try and edit them. Drafts will forever be unpublished. It has been designed that way. Cosmic law.

More evilly (on wordpress’s side), it is far easier to save a post as a draft than publish it. It is true. The save button is big, bold and a convenient tab+enter away. The publish button is regular sized, non-bold. What’s more, it is two tabs away and hitting enter doesn’t activate the button. It merely laughs at you for a space of few seconds and goes back to clipping its toe nails.

And when you do manage to overcome lethargy and evolution and actually move your mouse (and cursor) and click on the Publish button, you get a connection time-out and or a 404. Not to mention 10 years in the slammer for violating cosmic law.

TO illustrate, let me list the drafts I have been staring at for over a year now.
1) The follow-up to my old Marriage futures service
2) A series of satire called the Theatre of Dionysus
3) A critique of AK Ramanujan’s translation of Red earth and pouring rain
4) Urban violence and its implications for moderns Indian metros
5) A deconstruction of Illayaraaja and Vairamuthu songs
6) Multiple, many many stories of, about, for, in Madras

SO you see, it is not easy to blog. Not when the very tool that lets one blog doesn’t, well, let one blog. Keep that in mind the next time you criticise me for not keeping up the tempo.

(P.S: This post almost nearly went to the draft-hole. Only a critical deadline at work, 4 days of pending jobs and my boss’s repeated complaints that I have been neglecting my work (the one that pays my salary) ensured this post saw the light of your monitor’s CRT. Or LCD for those who like to keep up with yesterday’s technology.)