"You're doing this all wrong," he tells me.

"What am I supposed to do?" I ask. "How could I do it any better? It's not like anyone is going to read this crap anyway!"

"Slow down for a second... take a deep breath... there you go. Now imagine each blog you write as a valuable part of your life. The precious time you spend writing a blog and thinking about blogs is time you will never live through again. Picture yourself looking back at today from your fifties. How will you feel then about the time you spend now? Will you wish you could go back and redo it all? Will you see that you spent too much time being fake? I wonder."

"I'm not being fake! I might not share the deepest parts of my heart with complete strangers, but that doesn't make me a fake! I'm selective."

"Call it whatever you want. The truth is that you are still focused on the masses. You want to please the masses so you can make money, but what you keep ignoring is the simple truth: the masses will approve of your work when it stands on its own merit. And your work will stand on it's own merit when you focus on finding the message within and sharing it rather than finding what topics people are interested in and limiting yourself to them."

"Maybe you're right... but it's hard to know. I sit here and wonder if it's all a waste of time. I wonder if I'm going to grow old and waste away because I've focused on the wrong things. I lose sleep at night wondering about that. But I don't get any answers."

"I wouldn't think so. well, it's for you to decide. Do what you will; just remember that you will never be 29 again. You will never see this day again. Each moment you breathe, it is a joyous and unprecedented moment and it is also a most grievous and unsettling realization. The finality of Time allows for no second chances. There are no 'redos'. You can continue to write for AdSense if you want, but I think you will see that writing to express the beauty within is rich and satisfying enough."

"You could be right... I'll think about it."

Popularity: 4% [?]

Blogging, as most things, can become an obsession that steals away one’s life and time. There have been times when, despite the lack of anything important to say, I feel I must write to reward those regular readers (how precious you few people are) out there.

Days like today, I question why I ever started blogging. I had journals before this, and those took less time to design and update.

There are days when nothing seems to go right, and it feels like the world is against you, and you wonder why you waste your time writing down your thoughts when they aren’t good enough to keep you out of trouble.

On days like today, it’s not worth writing. It’s not worth it.

Popularity: 2% [?]

You will note that the new WordPress version of CultureFeast is lacking photos. Being the technical genius that I am (not), I have yet to configure the blogs to allow photos without causing stylistic damage to the right column on your screen. Once that is achieved, we will do our best to put some color back into the blog. For now, the only way to add visual appeal is to create separate blog posts for for each photo.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Since we began the switch to WordPress two days ago, we've decided that I know just enough to be dangerous. A couple of wrong clicks with FileZilla and all my hard work disappeared. We're starting from scratch yet again, hoping to re-post all the previous blog posts soon.

Thanks for your patience.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I’ve been toying with a few blog ideas. I’m still not sure whether to create new blogs or add sub-blogs to one of my existing blogs. The ideas are solid, but they require time to develop and expand just like everything else. Time is a precious commodity.

CultureFeast is in the process of switching to a Linux server as we speak. It may or may not become inaccessible for a few hours sometime today. We’ll have to upload the new content management system to the server as soon as all the current files have successfully transerred over.

I’ll keep you updated

Popularity: 1% [?]

Great news! The transition to WordPress has begun! I'm so excited. I can't begin to tell you how much I will enjoy the functionality and usability of WordPress. CultureFeast will have nearly the exact same appearance, at least in the beginning. I've toyed around with some other looks, and though some of them are pretty cool, I don't want to freak anyone out just yet. Unfortunately, I had already made the switch from Blogger to the Google/Blogger Beta version, which means that I can't go into my new WordPress account, hit a button, and import all my Blogger posts. So now I have to import manually. This could take a little time!

Popularity: 1% [?]

I cannot express how much I like WordPress better than Blogger. I actually look forward to writing on this blog more than my CultureFeast blog simply because I enjoy the look and feel of the WordPress GUI (graphic user interface).

It’s a brilliant blog platform. It’s more than that, though. You can do almost anything with it. With WordPress plugins, I’ve added an online forum and multiple cms functions (including the ability to add META Descriptions and META Keywords to each individual post.

It’s a lot of industry talk, but I really like it. Bottom line, if you are going to start writing a blog, you absolutely cannot do better than WordPress.

Popularity: 2% [?]