About this corner of the internet
Why have I made this site?
One evening I was sitting down trying to read Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, but my mind kept wandering into thoughts about how I am almost jealous of Keiko. At that point I just shrugged it off and read the book, which by the way is a fantastic little read and it made me think, happy, angry, all that a good book should.
Weeks later, I still couldn’t shake this feeling of being jealous of this fictional autistic woman living, by all accounts, a horrible life, and I decided I needed to know why I was feeling this, instead of burying it like normal. So what did I do, Sorry to say, I didn’t come up with a great spiritual awakening, and trust me I tried, I tried a lot over months of time. A small sample of the multitude of approaches was meditation, talking it out, writing feelings & thoughts, painting, long walks in nature with no digital distractions, and nothing worked as I still got the feeling and no explanation to show for it.
Then suddenly I was walking to my PC and in the midst of dodging a dust bunny the size of a tangerine (the lesser of the citrus fruit family, come at me) it suddenly hit me.
She was proud of her achievements.
It was such a simple, small, banal, common feeling to be jealous of, but here it was, clear as day, shining and blinding me in my living room. I never looked back on what I have achieved, I always finish a project, am glad of it and then I look on the todo-list of life and move on, never looking back, never being proud and it was killing me slowly.
I know, no one is ever reading this long-ass About page, because no one ever does. This is also not the point of this website. I am not looking for engagement, I am not making content, not looking for acknowledgement, isn’t even looking for praise, I am doing this for myself and to heal whatever it is inside of me that just tune out everyday small accomplishments and forgets big goals as soon as they are finished or abandoned.
Why not just use SoMe for this? The things I describe would benefit from having an audience established social contract to keep posting/uploading and have people bring up past things I did and done. This wouldn’t help me, simply because I love optimizing. What I post will become what people wants to see, as I can’t stop optimizing, as that is fun. I play a game, Factorio, that is solely that and nothing more. It is brain tantalizing to optimize especially for numbers and statistics as I LOVE doing statistical calculations and make changes to see my numbers dance to my fiddle. This is not something I am ashamed of, actually it is one of the things I will exhibit in here and I want to be more proud of, but it is detrimental to the overall lifelong mission of this Museum of Life if that becomes the driving point.
Tangent to this is also the reason I won't be using words such as content and its ilk for my museum. Here I will do exhibits so I don’t get sucked into the idea of posting for others' enjoyment at the cost of my own.
Why would this website help? When we all know that all other approaches I have tried have failed miserably and fast. Simply because I now have a social contract with my desire to brag and that is one of the best feelings in the world to come and say “See, I am not a total failure in life” and that brief moment, gone before the sentence is over, is what drives me to be better, it drives me to do stuff, it drives me to look ahead, but it also drives me to never look back, to be abhorrent about starting projects I don’t know if I can finish to a high enough degree to be proud of, to be neglecting to do things just for me and not the acknowledgement. This website doesn’t judge, it just is, and the beauty of this relationship is I hopefully can then start showing the non-perfect stuff, the failures that still are successes, and the projects that are good enough.
So why not make a website to archive my achievements! This site will be a monument to my madness, a beacon of my insanity and, most importantly, a gallery of my achievements (A distorted quote from my brother whom you should all be jealous of me for knowing).
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What about the cute horses, you say. You can’t just end the tale here without addressing the horses. Well, yes, I can, but for you I’ll just say, they Alicia and Artur they both like carrots and scratches behind their ears.