Sunday, 17 February 2019

10 years challenge

Today, 10 years ago (is this quaint form which I heard and read several times in use by native speakers correct – in Polish dziś, dziesięć lat temu sounds at best clumsily?) I posted on the blog for the first time. Few bloggers soldier on for so long, few bloggers do not run out of determination to write. As the Internet is full of #10yearschallenge comparisons, I will not spare the effort to come up with some salient ones, yet without any photo documentation.

In February 2009 I was a 21-year-old student of Warsaw School of Economics. I moved to a different role two years later; today I work at a bank controlled by one of bigger financial groups in Europe (fortunately not repolonised), striving to keep a low profile and remain anonymous.

Despite coming of age, I have not raised my own family yet. In the meantime the family I hail from has gone less populous after deceases of my paternal grandparents.

I set up the blog slightly more than a month after a break-up with a girlfriend. Today, my tenure of being single lasts 7 months (and despite keeping up appearances, it still feels traumatic).

In 2009 and for several years later I lived with my parents, then rented two flats, finally I purchased my own one and after overcoming all tribulations (cards stacked against me several times on the remont front) I should move in to my dwelling in March.

Politics-wise… Ten years ago Poland was under the rule of Platforma Obywatelska, the president was late Lech Kaczyński. Today his twin brother keeps a tight rein on Poland and will refuse to give in. The autumnal election will be the battle for the future of Poland.

Economy-wise… 10 years ago the world was in the doldrums of the economic crisis, with stock markets hitting many years’ low and Polish currency being the weakest in 21st century. Today several developed economies are facing threats of recession, while Poland again resists economic contraction, however for different reasons than a decade ago.

Society-wise… In early 2009 I did not know the word smartphone, which revolutionised not only technology (cell phone, computer, camera, video camera, clock, dictaphone, organiser, radio, mp3 player, calculator, torch, map crammed into a tiny device) but also marked a negative change in interhuman communication – made people stare at their smartphones instead of talking to one another. Sadly…

For the sake of statistics, most often viewed posts of the decade are:

1. Black swan theory, inadvertently published exactly two days before the theoretically unimaginable disaster.

2. Freaks of the dicts – linguistic puzzles were one of my passions around that time. I believe once the remont is over I will need to take the trouble to refresh my English, whose command has definitely seen better days (using it every day at work, yet reading far too little, which has negative impact on vocabulary resources – lose it or use it! Err… oddly enough, I observe the same has happened to my Polish)

3. Oscar and lady in pink – a review of a poignant book, reminds my remont-related quandaries appear miniscule when confronted with an innocent child passing away slowly.

4. Pushed around, ridiculed, degraded – an analysis of part of current ruling party’s electorate. Moherowe berety are no longer a hard-core voters of PiS, yet my to-do-list should contain a study into who the mindset of most avid believers of the first property developer in Poland.

5. The banker’s role from bank employee’s perspective – a response to a post written by a fellow long-distance blogger whose tenure will always be nearly two years longer than mine. Michael, thank you for inspiration and for being the only one from the Polish-English blogosphere, thriving in 2009-2011 and then waning, who has not dropped off.

There was a time when I was planning to give up on blogging on the 10th anniversary. Today, despite headwinds, I am determined to keep it up, however in a while I will need to abandon the predictable formula of one post each Sunday and bring in some element of irregularity.

No comments: