welcome to my junk drawer :)

I think a lot of things are cool and interesting or worth thinking about but I'm not always certain those thoughts have an audience, so I put them here, in a place that doesn't send notifications or emails or fill a feed. It can just be. 

I have a lot on my mind all the time, and when I write things down I feel like I'm actually digesting something I'd otherwise be chewing on until it's tasteless. Like with kids and their toys, the cycle of interest goes faster and I can open my mind up to more things when I can devote 100% of my attention to a thought and then release it.

The stakes here feel very low. My first ever website project was here on Blogger, back when it was actually, I think, called Blogspot — I had that theme that looks like a bunch of stacks of polaroids. Except I didn't think I had anything to say or write about; I thought about it like I didn't have enough lore. I wish I'd kept up with it; I'd love to see what 12 year old me cared about and did and see the words she was typing out on her dad's old IBM ThinkPad. 

This was an advanced "dynamic theme," and it's still available lol

Now's a good a time as any, though, to spin up a little blog that people will stumble upon when they're bored. I adore Blogger and its many lost sites; I started knitting a few years ago and a lot of hobbyists from the '00s and the '10s have prolific, detailed, painstakingly articulate blog posts on specific knitting techniques and experiments hosted on old Blogger sites, and there are real comments in the replies. The internet I grew up on was so manual, so truly engaged, and I miss it. 

There's something incredibly comforting and welcoming to me about the Blogger interface. I don't want it to look more contemporary. I don't want it to look legible. I want it to feel human, and as I get older I realize my idea of what good design is is really quite functionalist; I want it to serve a purpose more than I want it to look like something, and the theme I chose (Awesomeness, Inc.) is exactly how I want you to feel about being here — relaxed, welcome, at home, curious, a little like the version of you that existed 15 years ago is reading this and wondering about the strange semi-anonymous human on the other side of it. 

My friend Richa asked me a bunch of thoughtful questions about why I started this here, the implication being that I could have done something quite different, given that I know how to make a Real Website and all of that. What matters to me right now is capturing things — documenting, journaling, recording what matters to me, the motion in my life, the conversations that shape me. If it matters to me, chances are that if someone stumbles upon this blog, one or two things might also matter to them. But also, I think I'm terrible at documenting things that are strictly for myself; there's some commonality between the massive spike in drive I experience to write things that are quietly and passively discoverable and the massive spike in productivity I experience when working or body doubling in a bustling cafe.

I think often about death, but not in a morbid sense. It's probably slightly more accurate to say that I dwell on the evidence we leave behind of lives spent well, spent intertwined with in other people's lives, spent caring about a bespoke collection of seemingly random things — and when I die I want that evidence to survive me. To be utterly clear, I love life and do not want to give it up. But let's say I get hit by a bus. I really would want my friends and family to know how they mattered to me.

I don't expect any of my friends to keep up with the things I put here, but I do dream of a situation in which they remember I have this thing up once or twice a year, come here out of curiosity, and see reflections and abstractions of our friendship scattered across a smattering of posts — the evidence that they matter, the ways they've inflected and directed my attention to specific details and running threads in this wide open life, that they make me feel big things, that I'm thinking about them all the time. 

"I guess it turns out my thoughts aren't particularly simple but THAT'S MY WHOLE BRAND!!" - Hank Green