and Words
I’m 15 for a moment
Caught in between ten and 20
And I’m just dreaming
Counting the ways to where you are
I’m 22 for a moment
And she feels better than ever
And we’re on fire
Making our way back from Mars
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
A number of years ago a friend read through my Facebook posts and felt the angst and passion I poured into my thoughts. While we didn’t agree on everything (no two people ever do), he both encouraged me to write but also suggested that I change my medium. He observed that my writing may be better suited for a blog and pointed out that WordPress would make it fairly easy.
Spewing words about social justice and yearning for fairness and equality filled those early days when I started to find my voice. I could’ve very easily diverted the firehouse from a Facebook post into a form on a website. However, being the prototypical test engineer, that idea violated my sensibilities. A blog couldn’t simply be a collection of disjointed posts; it yearns for cohesiveness, its own voice.
In order for me to do this, I’d need to find a distinctive theme and name to the blog. Hint: this is not that blog.
Obviously, this blog exists, and I continue to post in it. This is not the blog filled with ideas about social justice that yearns for fairness. As I pondered on a name for that blog, I realized that I had registered a domain many years before. In fact, it was this very domain. Years ago, I kept an online journal on Geocities. While I found writing to be both therapeutic and fulfilling, I stopped writing. I needed to think through both my concerns about others’ privacy, the immediacy of the conversations, and maybe even a theme that would pull everything together.
Meanwhile, the story unfolded in this way. I still want to blog and write down ideas on those very important issues. I had already registered a domain name, which sat dormant for ten years, quietly mocking me. However, this domain name did not fit the theme for that content. I, having engineering sensibilities, concluded that the only reasonable thing to do is to launch two blogs. In a twisted way, it made sense.
I would establish this blog first. Each blog, independent of content, required me to learn some basics. Many sites run on WordPress, probably more than you realize. It allowed me a wealth of options to configure the look and feel of my blog. Truthfully, there were probably too many options. I learned the difference between a page and a post, established users on WordPress, started to tweak miniscule settings about one thing or another. As I figuratively sat chest keep in different settings, trying to keep it all in my head, one voice of reason from my engineering discipline spoke. It said, “‘Better’ is the enemy of ‘Done’.” This is precisely the reason why I kept this domain packed on ice for a literal decade, and I quickly slid down that path again.
I focused and whittled everything down to the essentials, what many would call an MVP, Minimum Viable Product. Images and text for main and bio pages. Did those. I needed to reason through the layout of the page with both a music player, lyrics, and of course, the post. Once I got those down, I just wrote. That first post went up on February 26, 2021.
I first discovered ‘100 Years’ by Five for Fighting many years ago with my then girlfriend. It chronicles a full life as he passes events, builds a family, and ages, and he accomplishes this while set to music. In a distinctive way, this song follows the line of this very blog, where I recall different events of my life while almost setting it to music in my own personal soundtrack. It should almost be a theme to this blog.
On the other hand, this song always elicits a certain sadness. First, the theme of the song consistently felt as if life was happening to him. His journey filled with instances of how he reacted to events in his life, and not necessarily in the ways that he steered his life or took control. He was a sailor in the seas of fate, but never the captain. Second, as he recounts the events in his life, I can’t help but to feel a certain regret. It stinks with an air of could I have, or should I have done more?
Why do I bore you with all this? This post marks the 100th post in this blog. It somehow feels like a milestone. All I do is get on this mechanical keyboard and scribble. Meanwhile, before too long, those keystrokes translate into quasi-coherent thoughts that amuse the occasional reader. I alternate between the two blogs. This one looks backwards onto the origins of me, trying desperately not to forget my roots. The other looks forward to the promise of a better world, and my finding my place in it. However, I stand squarely between the two in the present, while I oscillate between these two worlds.
As I approach four years of writing here, I can’t help but to think about all the other events in life artificially scoped to four years. High school is scoped to precisely four years; we even label each year with a name, in addition to just a number. College education typically lasts four years as well, though I spent on extra year in order to get a second major. Naturally, I could entertain the idea of stopping after a uniform four years of this blog.
However, I’m a creature of habit. The very act of maintaining a streak amuses me. As a Fitbit enthusiast, I have achieved 10k steps per day for over nine years now. I am, in fact, walking on a treadmill while I type these words. I have maintained a number of traditions both personal and work for literally years now. This includes such rituals as The Breakfast Club.
A friend once asked the length of my ‘favorites’ playlist; it’s over 500 songs long. If you do the math, it’ll be between 20 and 25 years before I chronicle each song with a post. However, not all songs trigger a memory, nor do I necessarily write a post linked to a song from my playlist. Pragmatically, a 20+ year career in anything is extraordinary. To think that I may still be blogging here for that long is wildly optimistic.
The honest answer is I don’t know how long I’ll be here writing in this way. This too may go by the wayside like my tradition of observing Thanksgiving twice a year. Alternatively, it may outlast my 29-year career at Microsoft. I continue to write as long as the words flow, and it continues to inspire me. I’m humbled by your company while I continue to write.