Tips show up in my WordPress home every day, but I’m so used to it that it becomes a familiar landscape I don’t see, a background noise I don’t hear, a recurrence I don’t notice. Am I obtuse and stubborn? I wouldn’t say yes before but now I am not so sure. Now I know more of my weaknesses than before, or rather now I am more comfortable with my weaknesses and wouldn’t be too defensive about them. A lot of things I should pay attention to but I haven’t; things I should say but I haven’t; things I shouldn’t say but I did. An existentialist would laugh at my self portrait of ostentatious modesty. My existence owes nothing to essence, they would say. I often wonder if existentialists are Buddhists in modern disguise.
A friend asked me the other day how to see all her posts in one category. I really don’t know. I have several categories myself but I’ve never had the urge or necessity to see one category only. And I wonder why she asked me that as if I were an expert on WordPress–I am not. I barely got my homepage up, after spending an hour to get rid of the hideous picture in the theme I selected. Trying to be a good friend with a good work ethic, I went digging around and found a way of doing it in “settings”. Then I immediately sent a message to her to announce my discovery, as if I wanted to get her thanks and approval. Or I wanted to show off as an expert–that’s even worse.
Then there’s the question of adding videos and pictures. It took me a while to figure out that the free account doesn’t offer much space and the only way of doing it is uploading elsewhere and putting a link here to “fake” a presence on WordPress. I thought it’s a complicated faking process, but eventually realized that it’s so easy that one can just drag a picture or video over. So she must be doing a lot of things with her account. And this brings me to this question of helping friends feel good about themselves online–to be a devout fan to each other. I don’t know about other communities, but among Asian immigrants, this is as sacred a creed as family tie and ancestral worship. I am all for reciprocating favors, but I also know that genetic similarity doesn’t often translate into comparable tastes, views, perceptions, especially when “like” or “dislike” of a writing is concerned. Having people to pretend to like me sounds more pathetic than not having anybody to like me.
Haoyan Do 