It’s…ALIVE!!!

So, I’ve let this blog languish for, jeez, 7 years now. Part of that was because I started a new job at the time (which I’m still at), which at the time required a lot of my attention, not to mention my daughters being younger and requiring more time. It’s also partly because I’m not really a social person - I can certainly give people the impression that I am (aka “protective coloration”), but expressing myself in social situations (i.e. to other people), with a few exceptions, takes a lot of energy. This includes online interactions, even one-sided ones like blog posts.

The other issue I have with blogging is that talking about my thoughts is hard for me. It’s not so much that I’m a private person - I’m actually not, which is another dimension of my difficulties with social interaction, in that I sometimes “over-share”, which can cause those close to me distress. It’s really more that I find verbal and written communication a terrible way to actually communicate thoughts. As someone much more eloquent than I once said, “Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down”. I’ve been constantly, painfully aware of this tension between words and meaning my entire life, and it’s been a source of great frustration to me. I’ve been told I’m “good with words”, which I take to mean somewhat eloquent, but I never feel like my words actually capture the meaning I’m pursuing.

In terms of the technical stuff, I’m using jekyll plus github pages for this, partly because it gives me more control, and also because it feels more like “programming” in some sense, which helps me be less, I guess, intimidated by the whole process.

I should also mention that I’m not a web designer or programmer by any stretch. To be honest, I’ve always been a little in awe of people in those fields. I mean, programming itself is one thing, but programming something that doesn’t just “work”, but also has to be aesthetically pleasing in some regard, using tools which are constantly in flux, and having to make this work on browsers which render things very differently - the ability for people to do this is amazing to me, and is definitely not something in my skill set. Hence, I’m using someone else’s layout setup

However, all that being said, I’m going to try to keep up with this as best as I can.