I’ve always kept journals, always been fascinated by the act of turning life into history. If we’re all the sum of our pasts, then me-of-a-minute-ago doesn’t feel entirely real, until me-of-the-present is turning around to see her and, seeing her, bringing her into existence (but also freezing her into non-living). There’s this feeling that I’m writing myself into being.
I started my first diary when I was very young, in murky early childhood, before we start filing memories by year. The first entry was in pencil and probably about three sentences long. I have a hazy visual of the small notebook page, about the size of my adult palm, the punctuation buoyant on the lined paper. The last time I saw the diary was maybe seven years ago in my parents’ house in Singapore. I didn’t take it with me.
My journal from when I was fifteen, my most vividly troubled year, lives in a clear plastic zippered bag because it is bulging with apocrypha, scraps from teenage girlhood stuffed between its pages. When I look at it I am transported back to humid afternoons in Singapore, particular rooms and people. I know again the loose wet smell of the air, the quality of the light, the feeling of home and alienation.
I’m still that person.
Since then my penmanship has become more adult, i.e. incomprehensible. Although I get compliments from strangers on my handwriting, I’m too impatient to decipher what I’ve written, so I journal mainly for pleasure and reflection in that very moment. Strange that I record the past as a way of being in the present.
I had countless blogs (LiveJournal was particularly long-lived). My approach to composition was simple: write down what happened to me, what I felt or thought about it, what I hoped would happen next. And that’s approximately what I’ve continued to do over the years.
Something changed this year. I started having reflective experiences that felt entirely non-verbal. It’s a longer topic for another post, but lately it has felt less necessary, or even irrelevant, to turn my feelings and experiences into words. This is a new experience for me, but a positive one.
And something else is emerging. I’m finding myself with more spontaneous energy for creative and cognitive projects, and a desire to verbalize and share about them. Maybe now that I’m not turning my brain inwards as much, all of that energy is getting pointed outwards. I’ve always wondered how people found the inspiration to write blog posts that are not just about their lives, and now I’m feeling some of that inspiration too!
Which brings us to now. As a software person, I feel some pressure to have a bit of a web presence, and I’ve created my share of Jekyll and Octopress sites, and pictured filling them up with content, but it’s never actually happened. A while ago I gave up and made a single page site that just had my name, some links, and about ten words to sum up my professional persona.
Last weekend, with these essays bubbling away latently, I thought about making yet another Jekyll site, and really didn’t want to. All those templates, and all that CSS, ugh. I just want something simple I can write on. An Internet notebook. So I decided to try making my own. I’ll spare you the details, but two hours later I was very happy with my new XSG (Xianny Site Generator). It’s about 200 lines of Rust and builds the site so fast that I was momentarily confused by the movement in my peripheral vision when my editor auto-saved and a new file appeared in my sidebar
I’ve been adding little features throughout the week. I’m quietly pleased with how natural it feels to add incremental small features, and how quickly I can zero in on useful additions. I don’t think I could have done this three years ago! I would have got bogged down in making everything modular and reusable and figuring out “correct” abstractions. But I’ve gotten a lot better at it this year. And it has been really, really fun to write code, because I don’t get to do that much at work these days. And I really enjoyed getting to learn a little bit more Rust!