It's Been a While

Hard Truths: I started blogging back in like 2001-2002 on Xanga of all places. I started as a Lineage 1 blog and detailed my exploits traveling around with my trusty canine companion, which mostly involved being murdered in upsetting ways in what was, I think, the least forgiving PVP game ever. From there, I moved around a bit and started self hosting. I came to Korea in 2004 and then around 2010, I got married and my life went in a different direction. I stopped paying my hosting bills and lost those six years of content, and Xanga obviously stopped existing long, long ago, which means that about a decade of my writing went poof. To be honest, I kind of like the ephemerality of it all, and while my Lineage blog might fulfil some nostalgic yearning, it isn't exactly the works of Shakespeare, or even Dan Brown for that matter. My early years in Korea might have had some curious value, but the world changes and it was mostly stuff written about places that no longer exist and friends that I no longer meet, and so it pretty much falls into the same basket. 

 Anyway, for the past fifteen years or so I have been wanting to start a blog again. It isn't fashionable, and I don't ever expect anyone to read it, but I find the concept of putting my ideas into words cathartic. However, I've changed a lot in this long time. I got a 'serious' job, I have kids, I am almost through a grueling PhD program, and so on and so forth. BUT! I was talking to some students this morning and happened to be talking about planning for the future and mentioned that it is a good idea to do some self-reflection before making a plan. Think about who you are and who you want to be, and then try to make the necessary moves to put yourself in a position where you can be someone who you like. I know that when I was younger I just made decisions based on what I thought would put me into a better position relative to my peers without ever actually considering what position I actually wanted to be in. It took me a long time to realize that, for instance, chasing money or status at work is not the only way to progress along the path of life, and this is something I wish I thought about earlier. Actually, when I first came into my current job, some people I work with were here for ideological rather than financial reasons. Like they wanted to help people and do the right thing and make the world better, and weren't here just for the paycheck. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that the way I was looking at life might not be the best way to do so. Honestly, it took me a long time to even realize that it might not be the only way to do so. Still, once I made that leap, then I realized that I should be focusing on the things that make me who I want to be, and not the things that I think will raise me in the esteem of others. That being said, it turns out that these are often the same things! In my blinkered past, I could only imagine people being judged based on income or job title and never thought of people being judged by the quality of life they lived. Or, I never imagined that there were other ways to judge quality of life than through financial and career success. 

 I know, I know, there are tons of after school specials that explain this stuff, but for whatever reason it took me four decades before I finally started picking up what they were putting down. All of which is to say that I have spent a lot of my recent years checking boxes off of someone else's bucket list without ever thinking about if it is what I am supposed to be doing. On a macro scale, my life is moving in the right direction, my kids are healthy, I have a good job that I think I am good at, I am finishing a terminal degree in a subject that I am strongly interested in, and I think that I am working toward making the world a better place. On a micro level, though, a lot of this building towards the future caused me to cast aside things that I enjoyed but couldn't quantify the value of, if that makes sense. Of course, blaming all of this on a lack of self reflection is kind of ignoring the fact that there are lots of things we do as adults because we have to, and I didn't really have much choice in my lack of free time due to work and family. Still, my kids are young but getting a bit more independent, I am fairly entrenched at work, and this should be my last semester as a student (knock on wood). All of this means that I need to start reprioritizing and figuring out what it is I want to be doing, rather than focusing on what I have to be doing. 

Chief among the things that I would like to start reinvesting my time into are coding and blogging. Neither are related to my job or anything like that, but I enjoy both while being good at neither. So all this navel gazing and rambling is basically to say that I am hoping that I will start both blogging and coding with some regularity going forward. Indeed, I just published a fifteen minute incremental game called Snail Facts! (go check it out, I'll wait), and am working on a homepage redesign to reflect my current style sensibilities. I finished the desktop version, more or less, but now I need to figure out how to translate that aesthetic to work on a phone screen. Still thinking about it. Anyway, until later, yo.