Homecomings
This is strange -- I branded this site as me. As something to represent myself online when social media was barely even a buzzword. And yet, I feel like it's here that I can be the most anonymous. CyberBlade...wow...just stepping into an old screen-name is enough to trigger a lot of things I'd forgotten about. I look back at the old posts and I wonder -- that was me!? Oh my god. And I know I deleted the worst of it. Still, it challenges that whole notion of a stable identity, because I just can't even connect the dots of how I got from there to here. Life, I guess. And all of this has just been sitting somewhere on a bunch of servers, largely forgotten.
I figured it was time to write another post. Since I am pretty awful at journaling, this really is one of the few time capsules I have remaining to me. I bought a journal today, a nice new moleskine. But I'm afraid to write in it. Every time I start a journal it stalls out and I feel like the first page is the worst of the transgressions against the idea of writing as something worth preserving.
Oh yeah, I teach writing now. Well, I would be teaching writing if I hadn't gotten a slightly different assistantship this year. I'll be teaching writing, though. Isn't that strange? I study digital platforms as well--mainly in terms of their materiality. So it's odd, thinking that when the earliest writings on blogs was starting to get out into circulation, here I was, struggling to figure out the genre. I suppose that's the most flattering thing I can say about my many, many, many, MANY posts that consisted of nothing other than "I am so bored"; I was unaware of the genre conventions in place (if they were in place) and therefore had no way of...ugh, I'm just going to stop there. Studying for prelims means that I'm going to be spouting a whole lot of nonsense because it's all that I see each and every day.
Still, CyberBlade...CB. That was an identity. For someone. A person that very much doesn't feel like me any longer. I wish I could find some old chat logs from the #T_N_S days, but I'm even more afraid of what I would find lurking there.
I figured it was time to write another post. Since I am pretty awful at journaling, this really is one of the few time capsules I have remaining to me. I bought a journal today, a nice new moleskine. But I'm afraid to write in it. Every time I start a journal it stalls out and I feel like the first page is the worst of the transgressions against the idea of writing as something worth preserving.
Oh yeah, I teach writing now. Well, I would be teaching writing if I hadn't gotten a slightly different assistantship this year. I'll be teaching writing, though. Isn't that strange? I study digital platforms as well--mainly in terms of their materiality. So it's odd, thinking that when the earliest writings on blogs was starting to get out into circulation, here I was, struggling to figure out the genre. I suppose that's the most flattering thing I can say about my many, many, many, MANY posts that consisted of nothing other than "I am so bored"; I was unaware of the genre conventions in place (if they were in place) and therefore had no way of...ugh, I'm just going to stop there. Studying for prelims means that I'm going to be spouting a whole lot of nonsense because it's all that I see each and every day.
Still, CyberBlade...CB. That was an identity. For someone. A person that very much doesn't feel like me any longer. I wish I could find some old chat logs from the #T_N_S days, but I'm even more afraid of what I would find lurking there.