i'm writing this directly into the cms. wonder how many blog posts writings started in a rich text block. anyway, i'm wanting to b̶e̶ try something different and complicated and maybe interesting by t̶h̶r̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶s̶t̶u̶f̶f̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶h̶e̶r̶e̶ sharing what's going on in my life in some kind of public way that avoids the slot machinic, algorithmic, monitized capture of my psyche.
in a way, this might be why i've gotten so interested in web development and design in the last few years. i like what the internet makes possible - connection within networks, information archiving, creativity, function, beauty, etc. but feel like my own relationship to it almost never represents these possibiliies.
i guess it actually all started when i built the website for my business. i had too many opinions, no money, and a little bit of an interest in what would happen if i just dove in¹ and it turns out, people responded to it. my business is not at all an ecommerce venture or anything. it's basically a small local community of food and bev businesses who use the site to buy my products. i don't even need a website to run my biz, most accounts just email me their order and i send an invoice. for me, the website mattered because i'd never built a website, and i suddenly had a reason to, and suddenly i had a justification to learn something i'd basically never thought about until that moment. i did not know what a div was, or flexbox, and nor did i really care too much. and i guess i still don't care. what i̶ ̶d̶i̶d̶ ̶c̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ i might have cared about was the fact that i suddenly those were the rules of the web, and I get to find their limitations, where they breakdown, how they look what i change this or that, etc.
i'm a bit sporadic with my interests and what i find myself getting into, but i've always deeply cared about art, broadly construed. music, film, design, sculpture, literature, poetry. i don't know why, but i always want to fill in the gaps. i realized i had never stretched canvas a̶ ̶f̶e̶w̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶t̶h̶s̶ ̶a̶g̶o̶ about a year ago, so i bought some wood, canvas, gesso, and a staple gun and just figured it out. another motivation was i wanted to paint something (i haven't painted much at all in my life, but it probably wasn't a proper gap in my artistic journey - i took art all through highschool, but certainly do not have much of a body of work to speak for, though you can see some of it on the home page of this site) and especially wanted to paint something on a big canvas. canvas is expensive as frick, and i knew the work i'd throw together absolutely did not warrant a slick, well constructed platform. so, another excuse to just dive in.
maybe we're here to dive in together. or, maybe i'm asking you to hold space for me to keep that small part of me alive, against all of the reasons i might find to not accept that curiosity in me as something worth loving.
¹a theme for my life and one of the few things i have little trouble loving about myself (oof didn't want to get that honest yet.) also, when i say dive in, please hear me say 'rashly indulge in the not-knowing-how-to-do-x-thing-and-utterly-sucking which, every time, yields either a mess, unfinished waste product, or, on lucky days, something that gives me a bit of satisfaction.