the perils of the singapore blogosphere

i just received an email from my literature tutor. she went from agreeing to meet me to review my paper and maybe my grade to referring this to the lecturer and coordinator for my course. i think it's going to get quite ugly, because she said that i am "not going to get the instantaneous response that i want." i think this shows she thinks i am trying to twist her hand in all of this. oh well, i'll just meet up with my lecturer on wednesday or thursday then. but i am not going to give up on this quest to seek some form of explanation.

well, i hope this posting on this blog would not have the effect of some second-year law student who tried to share examination tips with his peers on his blog or another incident reported in the sunday times yesterday in what is now popularly known now as the chang zhan affair.

it's either people are just getting increasingly bitchy about things or that the witchhunt-mentality is ingrained in our singaporean consciousness. but since i have got no scientific research to back me up, this shall remain a hypothesis for now.

which brings me back to the point which i was struggling with when i first started blogging - whether the blog is part of one's private or public realm.

over the last few months, a certain mechanism that helps me decide what goes on this blog or not has developed naturally. call it anything you want - but this is my blog and what constitutes self censorship varies from people to people.

and there are some things that should remain in your journal. i think one of the reasons people get hurt all too easily is because blogs draw people into this false sense of security. technology has made writing so much easier, typing becomes faster, and people get to read our thoughts. but fact remains, there are just some things you don't want people who don't know you at all, to know. not that it is some dark secret, but some things just require contextual knowledge.

and really, because blogs are a personal outlet for some, not everything they say represent what they really think. it's just a spur of the moment reaction for most. the crime chang zhan committed is not posting racist comments, it's his failure to write them down in his journal and not his blog. you can rant all you want to your close friends, but would you rant to an utter stranger?

personally, over the last 2 days or so, having seen comments questioning my faith both here and on the bce blog, the whole matter of how willing i am to stand up for even only the things that i choose to portray as my public personna just emerged with a vengeance.

the eternal question of whether to engage them baffles me. but being caught in some apparent no-man's land is no excuse for me. because it occurred to me that the reason why some people maintain such misrepresented concepts of God is that when these thoughts first appeared as doubts in their minds when they were younger, there were nobody to deal with them. because christians didn't bother and brushed them aside as being odd.

sometimes, it's really all about listening, and admitting that it is beyond your ability to offer that advice, but that you are willing to check things out and get back to them. because more often than not, people choose not to believe not so much because of their lack of intellectual conviction, but by an accumulation of negative personal experiences.

what i choose to share here or otherwise, i can only hope people read it with an assured sense of maturity. as daniel tham commented - there's always a price to pay for being public.

the trick here is to decide what's public and what's not. and coming to terms with it.

in an aside, i would like to apologize to the second year law student mentioned above for my inappropriate use of the english language in equating him to the second example i used. it has been now corrected and i thank him for pointing out the error. i regret causing any inconvenience and mental anguish.