I missed the chance to commemorate the true birthday of this little blog, last Monday. but
today, January 19, 2025, marks exactly 20 years since the first actual, fully-fledged post: a response to our first key reading assignment about webdesign and such.
what a different world. such a different place it was. or maybe twenty years ago wasn't so very different, and it only seems so because I and my perspective have changed so much since then.
what happens if I stitch together a few snippets from all the blogged Januaries of each year since 2005? what new montage will spill into this digital page in between them all?
I tried my best to pull from sections nearest to the 13th and 19th of the month (a thing much easier to do from the posts before 2014ish, when the apex of graduate school + its aftermath slowed down my writing here so much).
what I notice amongst these snippets and what you notice will be different, I imagine. I notice the unending pulse of learning and academia. books and thoughts chasing each other in circles. comments about the weather seem to sit neatly in the background with questions of identity and all its tangly unspooling. these words always have been for me more than anything. does all this pontificating from past amelia still sound like useful advice? mostly yes, I think. but I would say that, wouldn't I?
the fact that energy is behind it all is somehow unifying. simple
linguistic structures will be a low-key class. it is full of people i don't see in my other classes. the other english majors. non tech writing people: the lit majors, the teaching majors. it's weird.
get used to the fear and the doubt. get used
to being faced with new facets of your own ignorance. get used to the
pain. embrace humility. you can't always feel in control.
but really, how comforting is that?
I don't know. I'd take humility over false confidence anyday. but then the humble rarely get much respect.
2008-2009 (a pause.)
the world is big.
there's a lot going on in it. even in this mostly empty house, there's
me sitting at the table, typing, stretching a bit of CSS out over a
half-built website skeleton, scribbling a few what-ifs, listening to
Radiohead. and I made banana nut muffins this morning.
in the beginning, this blog was just a place for all my first impressions--all my doubts and worries about the usefulness or meaningfulness of all the stuff I was learning. after that semester, I decided to keep blogging--mainly about writing (Starcustard and random short stories), school (rhetoric, more webdesign, and Isotope), and life (philosophical thoughts about my job, vague complaints about boys, and so forth). and so it continued. I'm still here. I still blog.
what do those stories say about me?
I'm thinking about all the texture of my life. all the patterned and
patternless history I've collected so far. telling stories is one way to
remember it. and on the other hand... telling and retelling and
re-remembering these stories is one way to completely revise the past.
after a few months or years, it becomes easy to bend the details. to
emphasize the funny parts. to leave out the things that make you look
like a bit of an idiot.
how I envision myself is pretty complicated, I guess. perspective is weirdly limited like that.
which we am I talking about, anyway? and when? and where?
it may not make any huge difference in the long run, but even so, the
ultimate pointlessness of things should not be dragged up as an excuse
for us to stay in bed all day. at least not more than once or twice a
year, anyway, right?
this seemingly misnamed semester will inch along to spring in due course. and when that happens, finals and stress will no doubt prevent me from enjoying it as thoroughly as I could, but for now... well for now, the semester is glowing with warm, cozy pillows full of insight and excitement. this might be the best January ever.
I have spent much (but not enough) of this long, mostly-pleasant weekend sitting by the window, trying to focus on readings for classes.
.... 2015 is here, still all new-feeling. gradually we'll get to see both how it changes my life and how it doesn't.
today it is raining in spurts, like a chilly and unkempt spring. Tuesday's snow is long since melted. it'll be back this weekend. the universe is giving us yo-yo-ing seasons, somewhat drab all the way through, with occasional bright sunset smudges.
the trees are bare. my apartment windows open onto more distant views than they did in summer and fall. at night, more and more streetlights perpetually leak into my bedroom under the edges of the blinds. I notice the faces of buildings I have never seen from such an angle before.
it's empowering to reflect on the background structure
of your whole life. to actively participate and acknowledge your role
in either accepting/reinforcing or resisting/revising the culture you
swim in. and that seems important. that's what it takes to make all of that
power and structure more open-book, more readable, more transparent and
less like a vice.
if I had the brainpower on this Friday evening to make some additional
academicalish comments on how these beautifully-commentated marble
races and our fascination with them could link up interestingly with
some of the tenets of object-oriented ontology, I would. but I don't
know all that much about object-oriented ontology myself, and should
probably not let it distract me much more than the Marblelympics
already have from writing up nicely finished dissertation chapters
about digital ethnography and distributed commons-based peer-production
and what that all may mean for technical communication and human
culture and such.
and then the speaker said something about facebook hopefully having a
major role in someday establishing some kind of global online
government. after that, according to my notes, I typed out this:
"eeeeek."
does the world want and need to be connected by a central online
platform, really? is the capitalist interest that facebook has in being
the medium by which everyone is connected anything we can trust?
all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...
to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?
to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?
or is it?
and when I listened to this recent episode of So Many Damn Books with George Saunders
I felt more affinity for Saunders's love of teaching writing than
perhaps I might once have felt. his advice is to remember that you're
never just teaching 20-somethings who barely know what to do with their
adulthood when you meet them-- you're also teaching the
40-something-year-olds that they'll become. I like that. (not all
college students are 20-somethings, but the concept holds. we are all
humans-in-progress.)
why does this small saga of knitting woe and triumph deserve
documentation in this little blog of mine? I don't know if there's an
answer, other than my typical interest in capturing bits of experience
and emotion in as vivid and accurate description as I can. I like to
write these vignettes of where and when and how, with all the metaphor
and adjectives they need to vibrate satisfyingly from my imagination to
yours.
I trust that learning is happening, little by little, in all of our spongey-curious brains.
January, perhaps fittingly, seems so very long. all the transitions it spans-- all the shifting, deepening of the dark season, the post-holiday recoveries, the shiny new beginnings of a calendar year and of an academic semester-- all of that is a lot for 31 average winter days.
I don't know if it really did feel longer for me this year, or if I'm only saying that because it seems like an appropriate thing to sigh into this semi-bleak and impermanent world.
- - -
and now what? do I still blog?
time will tell. if you'll indulge me, I have one more excerpt, this time from May of 2014, when so much of me was so unsettled and rearranging itself and I clung to my love of writing as if nothing else mattered:
from time to time I wonder what it is I'm trying to do here. does it matter what I'm trying to do here? I write. our reasons for enjoying things are seemingly inarticulable. is there irony in that? I claim that words can make everything better. is that true even when the words crumble into meaninglessness as they fail at encompassing feelings? do I mean that even crumbled words are worth something?
yes. crumbled and halfhearted attempts at capturing it all still beats blank silence. I know only so much stuff fits into one life. there are only so many live possibilities. this is the way it needs to be, I guess. but the way everything is carved up now isn't how it'll always need to be carved. our crumbled communications don't stand still; they change.
.... and even if I can't really say I know exactly what writing means, I can try to explain what I like about my practice of it.
I like the pausing and sifting through potential descriptions and the shuffling of parts of speech. I like the dancing of clauses and punctuation and space. I like the starts and stops and backtracking, the meandering fragments that stretch so subtly for their finish. I like the way these little symbols can twist and mold intangible thoughts into a dozen differently shaded shapes. I like unknotting a tangly draft, picking out the pieces that don't belong and pulling away each piece that does, tidying it all into a hopefully-clean curl of interesting prose. sometimes I save the scraps for later. sometimes I can't. .... I write for the writing's sake. I sketch and wonder and experience plenty of other things for the same reason. they don't have to be means to some other end, these creative processes. maybe all the best things are their own ends, or at least neatly wrapped around something like one.
after twenty years, does this blog count as art? as an end in itself?
doesn't matter. it's here. I'm here. for now.
