While dining out with a couple of Tokyo-based friends this weekend, the much animated conversation turned to blogging and how it kept everyone updated with each other’s lives despite the absence of contact. The talk was so convincing that it managed to rouse my lethargic fingers from several months of self-imposed online hibernation.

Close friends would attest to the fact that I am one of the world’s laziest letter writers. My alleged affliction was so bad that some who used to get exasperated over the scarcity of responses gave it up as one of life’s unavoidable discomforts. They would express their consternation every now and then, but for the most part, I would like to believe that they have quietly resigned themselves to their fate. I jot down private thoughts on journals, receipts, napkins and chocolate wrappers all the time, but when it comes to answering emails or returning SMS messages, I can be quite unreliable. It’s easy to sit down and indiscriminately chronicle the current direction of my mental tides, but forcing it into a single, inflexible stream is a battle that has been waged since the moment my parents decided that I have a knack for expressing myself on paper.

I have agonizing memories of being a 10-year-old forced by my mom to write messages in english on greeting cards to be sent to relatives. I vividly recall how harrowing it was to sit in one corner and try to compose a letter to my overseas-worker dad. Try going in circles in your head over what to say after the line “Dear Daddy” for about an hour and you’ll get an idea of how ingenious a torture it was back in the age when snail mails and envelopes marked “via airmail” dominated the messaging scene.

Then came the era of emails, SMS and blogs — along with it, the dramatic reduction of acceptable excuses for not keeping everyone informed. This time, one would have to concoct technical reasons for momentarily staying out of touch (i.e. the server was down, out of coverage area, and the all time favorite: my mobile phone ran out of charge). Effortless for the techies, but bewildering for majority of the populace. Unfortunately for me, much of my friends and colleagues are technically adept, if not downright geniuses. Excuses, no matter how technical, get mercilessly butchered from the outset. I have long learned that honesty is the best policy situations such as these.

Much as I love putting my thoughts down into writing, I sometimes find blogging a tad restrictive since thoughts that are normally given free reign in diary logging is held back to a certain extent in blogs. After all, no self-respecting human being would go running around naked in front of the entire world, with the exception perhaps of a bunch of fraternity guys back in my university who have made it an annual “tradition” to parade in front the student body (and media people) in their birthday suits. But then again, they manage to keep their anonimity by covering their faces so I guess that disqualifies them from being an exemption.

And so now I tap my thoughts away to you, dear reader. I may not bare my soul entirely, but I hope that I have in the past shared, and will in the future continue to share with you a few occasional slivers of it. Bear with me if it is not done as often and as openly as you would prefer.

To the untiring authors of the hundred or so unanswered emails aging away in my mailbox — my combined appreciation and apologies. My only excuse is that the foes are far too numerous in this assault, and I am but a single soldier fending off the email barrage.

To the news-deprived friends who believe they were duped into not properly reading the fine print when they signed the “friendship” contract, I say: “Talk to you when I see you…”

After all, who needs written words when talking is sooo much better.