Where are the new blogs?

After a flurry of blogs about my trip to Hong Kong, suddenly there are no more blogs.  What gives?Well, for starters, I put a lot of my life on hold to have the time to write all of those detailed blogs.  I wanted to capture my experiences in Hong Kong as soon as I could, before they evaporated like the morning dew.  I've been on enough memorable trips to know that after several weeks, the sharp details of the trip begin to fade.  After a few months, it is like some hazy water colored memory and, after a couple of years, you are left mostly with some general impressions and a few isolated memories of especially memorable experiences.  The rest is just gone from conscious recall.  That trip to Hong Kong felt like a very important turning point in my life as soon as I got back home, so I wanted to capture as much detail of the events as possible to get a handle on why this trip, more than any other, felt like a watershed moment in my life.But dedicating so much time to the elaborate blogs (that necessitated selecting not only pictures I took on the trip, but significant borrowing from others for pictures that I could have taken, but didn't, and also some very important videos from YouTube and other sources) left me with no time for anything else in my life except for sleep and work.  Just the mechanics of putting each blog together took many times longer than writing the text.  All of this time spent blogging meant that other important activities, such as exercise and Cantonese study went out the window for over a month.  Now that the trip blogs are "in the can", I've gone back to a more varied life outside of work.  I am exercising as weather permits (we seem to be in a rainy pattern recently with thunderstorms in the evenings about 40% of the time) and seriously applying myself again to Cantonese study.  (I am determined to be able to speak and be understood, listen and understand when I next visit Hong Kong.)  I have also started reading again.  In the past couple of weeks, I have read 3 books.  This might not sound like a lot to the readers out there, but I have so little free time that normally I have about 45 minutes A WEEK to read.  I have stopped writing for the time-being so that I have time to read.  Sometimes you need to feed your creativity through the creativity of others.  I have also been on a small art pilgrimage, visiting art museums the past two weekends.  All of this is absolutely necessary for me to have something to write about and the energy, freshness and enthusiasm to make it worth anyone's while to read.  I was reading about Hong Kong films the past few weeks and shifted gears to reading about Chinese art yesterday after seeing a great exhibition of contemporary Chinese art that takes as its subject the Three Gorges Dam project.  The exhibition catalog for that show has the tiniest print I have ever seen.  I may have to use a magnifying glass to read some of it!  But this catalog is a serious piece of scholarship by one of the world experts on contemporary Chinese art, so I put up the money ($30 US, only) for the exhibition catalog so that I could study the works featured in the exhibition and their context at greater length.  Reading like this takes leisure.  If you don't dedicate 45-60 min at a time, you don't get deeply enough into the scholarship to take anything away for your effort.  This kind of reading also requires peace, quiet and total attention.  But it rewards everything you give to it.  I just started reading the first essay yesterday evening, and was dreaming about the exhibition all night, probably my brain's attempts to further digest what I had seen and read.  This is good.I still have another blog related to my Hong Kong trip.  But it is not a travel blog so much as a philosophical reflection on the nature of fandom in the light of my experiences (inner and outer) as a Leslie Cheung fan at the biggest fan commemoration of the year.  I was asked in the interview with Dick Gordon what it means to be a fan.  I had no ready answer then and I have thought a lot about the question since the interview.  I thought a lot about it again after meeting so many other Leslie fans in Hong Kong and making what amounts to a fan pilgrimage to Hong Kong.  What does it mean to be a fan of some famous (and now deceased) performer?  What does it mean for me to be a fan, especially since I have never been a fan of anyone in this way before?  Those reflections will come out in a blog soon, I promise.In the meantime, here is a link to the exhibition I saw yesterday on the Three Gorges Dam project.http://www.nasher.duke.edu/exhibitions_displacement.php