A Tribute to My Xanga Page (aka. a recent past)

Xanga was the sh*t before Facebook became popular. So when I found out through a Facebook status that it is closing down, I had to archive everything and take a quick look at my own blog before it is gone for good.

Reading my own past through my Xanga page is like reliving my own emotions through out the five years of which I've been actively blogging, and yet uncovering parts of myself that I've forgotten about, as if they are new. A lot of posts were two world cups ago, way before the financial crisis, and at a time where China wasn't as much as a spotlight as it is now. Yet even for someone as interested in current issues as myself, none of those really mattered as I flip through the pages of my dying Xanga page.

There is immense nostalgia when I reread the carefree after school bubble tea sessions with my high school friends, and how this combination of names may probably never appear together again. There are pictures of faint dreams that I had; of people who I thought I would hang out with forever, but now when I see them I'll only nod, try to have a small chat, then realize there's nothing more of which I can say. There are some who I wish I can hang on to further, but it all comes down to timing. A lot of my posts are not as coherent as I thought they were. Most of my later posts were quite cryptic, meant only for a selective audience. Although I wasn't a good chronicler of events, I was good at recording emotions. And for several times I choked up a bit as I reminisce the "golden age."

And then I discovered the poems of which I wrote, most of them quite free in structure, but there is one Shakespearean Sonnet that I wrote for a friend, because as Robert Frost said, writing free verse is like "playing tennis without a net."

If there is a dividing line between the "real" happenings of life and mere fantasies, most of my documentation on Xanga would be about the latter. Yet perhaps because of this, even if I forgot a lot of the things that happened and the words that I wrote, this Xanga page is a witness of how I came to be who I am.

Alas, I could go on and on forever about this neglected part of the past that I found again, but all (or many at least) good things must come to an end. And I shall bid thee farewell, and Godspeed. Ciao. Au'revoir. Goodbye.

www.xanga.com/archyami
7 June 2004- date soon to be

P.S. I did download all my past posts, photos, videos and music... but that is just to say a person is survived by his creative work. It'll never be the same again.