My blog manifesto

I know it makes no sense and as I write, seeing the words in black and white is a stark visual reminder of just how paradoxical this blog might be. This blog is being born out of a year-long writer’s bloc, read, code for the most epic stint of procrastination I hope to ever admit to in my adult life.

Let me explain. I sat down the other day to finish my novel, a work that had its beginnings in my early twenties when I ran around Paris frequenting cafes and clubs under the pretense that I was “gathering material.” Or at least, that was the advice given me by my boss at my day job, an older English intellectual with an Oxbridge education and such an intimidating command of the English language that, at first meeting, I nearly broke out into a cold sweat. It was only until he laughed, a disarmingly boyish guffaw, that I found myself endeared to him forever and from that moment on, looked to him as mentor and friend.

“Live a little,” is what he said. “You need to garner a little of life’s experiences, amass a bounty of material from which to draw on later.” (I swear he spoke like this, his grammar was impeccable. I’m sure the idea of ending a sentence with a preposition would make him shudder.)

Two countries, a career change, and some ten years later, I did eventually sit down to write that book, or at least two-thirds of it. And then I got side-tracked: work, fashion, appearing on a reality tv show, and so many other things sort of took priority for a while. The book sat shelved for nearly a year, and during this time, it felt like an incomplete sentence. Like I had started writing out a thought, come to a comma, and rather than complete the idea, just left it there with that dangling arc of a punctuation.

It still dangles, which brings me to this blog. I sat down to finally write, to seek the closure of that elusive period when I found that I could not. I sat there, with the blank screen blinking back at me. And so what did I do? I couldn’t just sit there, do nothing. I did what I do nearly every morning, I read all my favorite blogs.

The last thing I want to do, especially as I write my first blog entry, is to go into a diatribe about blogs. I am completely divided about them: their inaccuracies, the way they are used as tools to vent personal frustrations or further biased agendas, their lack of journalistic integrity, not to mention the rampant animus that seems to pervade the blog underworld. And believe me, as a reality tv personality, however fleeting that role was, I think I can say this after having been the subject of many a blog.

But still, like some sort of highly addictive prescription med, I find myself reading no less than half a dozen blogs, mostly fashion related, every single morning. Not for their news content, because it would take too much scrutinizing to weed out the nuggets of fact from the propaganda. I read these blogs to get a reading of the climate of today’s pop culture, which is so important to the work I do as a fashion designer.

Blogs can be so incredibly powerful. And I am one of those who bought it, hook, line and sinker when Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” So bearing this in mind, I will try to keep my blog as (we)blogs were perhaps originally intended to be, online chronicles, purely my comments and views on things as they happen, things that I think are worth speaking about. I will try my darnedest not to pass these off as anything but a blog, no hidden agendas here. The subject matter of this blog? Fashion, without saying, television (of which I watch way too much), people, art, the world around us, and issues I think are important, informative, or just plain entertaining.

No, on to the blogging!

Victorya Hong