Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

This online journal is 5 years old today, and starting pre-school. I'll have to buy it a lunchbox, a backpack and school supplies.

In two days I would pass 700 posts in the student accessible version - and 2000 posts total including the ones here, making it an average of 21 posts per month in each since this started.

It doesn't seem like five years have passed. I guess that speaks a lot about how much I slip myself quietly into routine that I don't notice how much time has whizzes by for me.

Then again, maybe that's also because there are those who say hanging around young people is synonymously rejuvenating, as we teachers get a brush of their zest and hope for life, without necessarily sucking it out of them, although there have been some I know who unconsciously do that.

Maybe it's also because I'm not a coward. That is, in the sense that they say a coward dies many times before his death, in that (A) before he faces some danger, he dies while dreading it in full detail in their imagination when it hasn't arrived yet (of course, part of it is just accepting the notion that it may occur, and thinking about the worst that could happen and how bad the straits they'll be in if that happens); (B) when he's already in the middle of that situation, he's reliving his fears all over again, maybe even admonishing himself "I knew this was going to happen, so unlucky is me, there's nothing I can do about it but accept it"; and (C) after it has happened, instead of putting it all behind him and looking forward to the best of what the future has to offer, he wallows in the rut - to mix metaphors - of those past mistakes or misfortunes, further accepting the role of helplessness to change one's own destiny, and the cowering more in the uncertainty of the future.

Wow, that was a long paragraph about what I'm not. And I guess that's another thing. Despite having written a blog all of these years, I don't believe that I've really bored the potential audience (and myself) talking about myself all the time, or what I know or what I like or what I believe to be the bomb.

That, I believe, is because I always keep in mind that it's not just my latest post that is a reflection of me, but of everything I've written so far, and that it would be thus dishonest to myself to stop this because I find it painful to read what I've written in the past (which I don't) or I don't like my progress (or lack of it) since those early documented days.

Session 1997 can't see how it will be another five years down the line. Class dismissed.