Balk

Balk: Defined by The Free Dictionary as:-

1. To stop short and refuse to go on.
2. To refuse obstinately or abruptly

After finally deciding that, yeah, I’ll get Facebook and filling in the prerequisite forms and such, I was suddenly filled with a sense of horror/dread. In short, I actually felt quite sick to my stomach, which is odd.

It’s been a while since my all and sundry has been aired out on the Internet.

Back in the advent of Friendster, emerging blogging sites and the sudden explosion of cellphones + knowing more mates, most of my friends were still people I met in school, tuition, church, or from different organisations that I regularly took an interest in.

Friendster was the initial way to go. Having taken off to the Land of the Long White Cloud, Friendster was pretty much my first flirtation with social networking websites. EVERYONE I knew then had Friendster. I would write these long deliberate testimonials about people I knew or even people I didn’t quite know but I knew them from somewhere, whether it was BB or whether we went to the same music school, etc.

Other sites started popping up, such as Zorpia, Bebo, and friends of mine who’ve also gone overseas ended up adding me on these sites. I think Friendster was primarily a Malaysian thing, just as how Bebo is a New Zealand thing. And it was pretty fun for a while. Friendster exploded into the blogging thing for a bit and then opened up its HTML code to users. Things became a little…..garish. You would get 6 feet tall messages that sparkled like the sun and said nothing more than wishing you a happy Chinese New Year.

Then Facebook came on. Initially, only a few friends were on it. And that was fine. But after a few personal life crises, I decided that I would like to revel in my own personal privacy. So I shut my Facebook down and declined further invitations to restart it.

After a message I received on Friendster alerted me to the point that yes, I was still able to be stalked online, I deleted that as well. Which was fine. It was okay.

Quite a lot of acquaintances thought I was very antisocial. Apparently, networking on Facebook is the way to go but hey, who am I to judge. But I didn’t see the need to have people sending me quizzes to do, tagging me in photos I didn’t want to be in or appear to everyone else in the world in, and besides, anyone that I really wanted to talk to or keep in touch with was either a phone call or an email away. A personal touch wins hands down anytime.

I must say, even though I’ve opened up a Facebook account, I still really enjoy the peace and quiet of a private existence. Known to the close and few, my little stories and goings on remained close to my heart and on a need-to-know basis. Perhaps the privacy settings on the account needs to be activated then.

Having Facebook made me recall the online article where employers tracked down their potential employees with Facebook and made such judgements from their profiles. Scary thought. And besides, with me being quite an ingenious stalker myself, it is amazing what I’ve had to do to cover my internet footprints. Unless you know exactly what to type in, I’m virtually non-existent on the Net. I’ve tracked down quite a number of people and with relative ease, I might add. Dangerous place to be.

So I’m kinda having second thoughts at the moment. I don’t exactly know how to use the website as such yet but it might be a brief thing. I’m not too sure if I do want my life exposed all over again.

Interesting thing, this whole blogging phenomenon. I used to splash my emotions, my personality, and my physical self onto a page every single night. And I got pretty cut up for it. People knew who I was and I was accessible on Google from the word go. Type in the right keywords and I’m glowing at the top of the list. Trust me, if you still know, you might have some access to an old blog site that I’m unfortunately unable to take down. My techie skills only go so far, after all.

So even this blog now that I’ve opened to a number of friends may even be in jeopardy of closing down, usually depending on how dangerous the threat is. But so far, this is one of the things that help me ease out Life at the moment.

I used to think that it would be cool to maintain blogs and then I can track them from one year to the next and you know, maybe even show someone in the future. “Hey, this was my life from ~ year 2000 to now. Have a read.”

But as the old adage goes, if I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.

Of course, nothing really happens in my life now. I’ve got my work, I’ve got my dance, I’ve got little things that I get up to nowadays and little projects and performances. I still imagine that I’m a tech geek and would love to have people give me new little gadgets to try and blog about. I like shopping and would like to go more, as long as I win Lotto big time. My room is still the death of my existence. I’m going to die buried by clothes one day.

And I’ve got all these random little thoughts that I write about on here website and y’all have a read and wonder what I’m smoking.

Well, its called chicken and its delicious. Eel, here I come!

Random comments aside, yeah. The point of this post: I’m not too sure about Facebook. Eiyer. Dunno la.