The last year has been pretty rough. Full of changes, good and bad, with downs that turned out to be ups and anticipated ups that crashed spectacularly to Earth. I’m a person who likes to talk things through, exhaustively and even annoyingly so, and lately I’ve found there’s rarely someone to talk to besides myself. But… there’s always the power of the metaphorical pen.
I started my first blog in college. I hung out my shingle in the College Park neighborhood on Geocities and posted every Internet cliche out there - animated marquees, gifs of construction workers and under construction signs, gaudy repeating background tiles that were never seamless… It was a fun experiment, and the nerdy boys I gravitated toward hung out in computer labs, ergo I hung out in computer labs.
I didn’t really embrace the artform, if you can call it that, until I finished school and started working for a small web development agency as their one and only designer. I trolled the Internet for interesting links and memes, posted photos I took around town, and generally described the mundane bits of life in more detail than was strictly necessary. A habit that’s not all that different from how people communicate on the Web today, myself included.
Life ebbed and flowed, but for a good chunk of time I was a reasonably consistent - and occasionally even prolific - blog author. The Wayback Machine is an embarrassing but nostalgic time capsule of going to the movies with my roommates, burning my lip on my breakfast, playing with cats, streaming myself through an incredibly low-resolution web cam, and generally oversharing. But life got busier, and I posted less and less. Every so often I’d attempt a revival, with a new design or even a new domain, but motivation eventually waned and the blog content withered on the vine.
But it turns out that, for me, writing can be a cathartic experience. And thanks to the very particular ups and downs of the past year, ones I don’t think I’ll ever really get over, it seems I could use some catharsis. So, here we are. Yet another blog. I can’t promise profundity, or even something vaguely interesting to say, but as my therapist wisely reminds me… I can control the effort, not the outcome.
Here’s to things that are worth the effort.