I've been cleaning out my archives. Call me paranoid, but I have this nagging feeling that I have too much of me out there on the internet. I used to not care. I had nothing to hide. Why would anyone select me out of the gazillions of other blogs, xanga's and online-journals to harass? But things have changed. My work in Korea has become a little more sensitive than it used to be. I should be more careful.

In any case, it has been interesting sorting through my almost-three-years of blogging. I discovered countless mundane entries consisting of what I ate that day and how my students were misbehaving. But I also found a few interesting posts that I had forgotten about.

It's interesting...everything I wrote seemed so important at the time. All my stories, now reduced to print, had color, faces, and reality behind them. The reality of those stories has faded a little and I am left to recreate the scene through words that don't do it justice. Nothing does reality justice; not spoken words, not typed words, not video, tv, movies. Experience is something that one can only experience.

I write down my life to remember it, but when I'm 100 years old and on my death bed, I'll read everything I have ever written and die with the knowledge that no one will really understand what it was like. Life is an adventure we each live alone. Surrounded by people, we occasionally have the impression that we are sharing our life with others. We do share experiences; we share time, we share laughter and tears, but in the end our life, the sum of all our thoughts and experiences, are ours alone.

That sounds depressing, but I really don't mean it to be. It's more like a fact spoken out of sudden realization. My life is my adventure. It is beautiful in its uniqueness. I should be aware of its beauty, its subtlety, its richness and cherish it.