It's the beginning

Hey everyone, how are things? I appreciate you coming this far. Take a seat, and a deep breath. This is only the beginning, and I welcome you to the first installment post of my blog.  If you haven't came here from my Instagram, I'm basically just bringing back a 'passion' that I enjoyed doing back in the days, and that happens to be writing.  For many of you that have known me, I tend to be wordy when it comes to writing. An irony considering I'm pretty introverted.  I'm usually that silent person in the background that rarely gets noticed, but when it comes to writing or sometimes when it comes to a conversation that I know about, then I tend to speak my mind about.

I guess maybe that's why people say I'm a "good listener".  My brain has always been wired to think very 'logically'.  I like to hear from people and I take in what people have to say. Why they say it, what brought them to those moments.  I wasn't a perfect student back in the day.  I always got a "B" in reading, and my comprehension was so bad in grade school.  I guess back then, I took things so literal, and it was a struggle to learn that I had to read 5 paragraphs, in order to understand what one sentence meant.  But, I think that's what made me to be the person I am today.  I want to know context, and I want to know everything around it because I feel like everyone has a story, and I don't want to digest the one sentence.

So what does that story have to do with this first blog post?  I want to start posting about the context.  I want to post my stories and experiences, talk about them, and assess my life.  I have a lot of emotions in my head running all the time, and I think it'll help myself to talk about them. I want to use this platform to tell stories, share experiences, and give advices whether it's about life, design, products I use, and so forth.  I'd like to connect with more people and I feel like that's what I've been missing an so it's time to start.

For those that followed me in the past, I originally had my "Pandan Newsletters" that was more or less a weekly type of thing for people that subscribed to follow my Dualistique brand.  I'm going to try to reincarnate that, but I'll be more focusing on releasing these blog posts in a timely manner, and I'll cross post them on my social media so everyone can be in the loop of when the next drop is.

I'm going to do it a little different as you may have seen above.  CR;LML. Can't Read, Let me Listen.  Instead of the TL;DR, I'm just going to give you the whole blog post in a different media for those that don't have the luxury to read or don't care about reading.  The audio posts will touch lightly on what I write, but I wanted to use this chance to practice and get better at talking in addition that I feel like certain things I type can be interpreted differently and so I want to also make sure that certain expression is expressed.

My goal is to release my inner thinking in hopes to keep me sane, connect stronger with friends and family, relate to strangers, and help others that may be dealing with similar situations.  We're all humans, and we all have our struggles, but we don't have to do it all alone.

To wrap this up, I'll tease you guys with some things that you can expect/not expect.  When I write, I tend to write in a very conversational matter. So don't expect a well written novel. I apologize if I trigger anyone's grammar and spelling senses.  Trust me.  I was in your shoes when I was in school.  In fact, I had all As during the grammar parts in English class, and then when we got to Reading/Comprehension, it would go downhill.  For the 'audio' portion of blog posts, I want to try to have one for each blog post.  I'm not sure if it's going to be a "podcast", but I want to try to find the balance between minimal effort to record and ensuring there's an audio clip to facilitate the post.  Future posts are going to consist of fun design ideas, we're going to build my portfolio site together, and I think I'll do an episodic "Startup" story to talk about my 6 years in a tech startup.

After writing this, I think a good name to call this series is "Context".

-Dan (Pandan)