"Updates"

Right! First blog post back after essays. I'm so excited. And so glad those things are out of the way. Man, what a drain. Good, you know, always good, but still, you know, just so much work. And for 3,000 words, almost every single one of them a battle, knowing what has to stay, what you have to fight to keep in, wondering if the people reading them will be able to understand the contours of the iceberg under this tiny little floating mountain of frozen information... Learning was simple at one point, wasn't it? Proof of mastery of concept used to be a 100 question times tables quiz that you could fill out in a minute or less. 

I wonder if I could still do that. 

But no, yeah, let's do this blogging thing! Something less regimentally creative. And nobody's grading this. No one's going to dock 5% if I'm two minutes late. Just me and my thoughts. And the people reading my thoughts. And the people in the gigantic warehouse of servers where they save the internet every day. I harbor a secret thought that there's one person in the warehouses where they save the internet, some security guard, who walks past the rows upon rows of all the obscenities we know the internet is made of to the place where people's stories are told on the internet, a thousand million blogs to scroll through, the thoughts of the privileged, and that one day the guard will flip past mine and stick around for just a minute and I can be part of the memory-based preservation of Who Humans Were. I'm a part of that. 

Which is a kind of pressure in and of itself.

What do I write about, with that kind of pressure here? What would the universe need to know if it only had me as a specimen of humanity? What if sometime in the distant future when the world is a desert planet of a wasteland and aliens come by and they find the one warehouse with the one server that miraculously turns on and all that physically exists as remnants of the human race are a couple of Sno Balls and the last flickering light of a monitor displaying this blog post? What would you even say? 

Sorry? 

And thank you? Thank you for seeing me?

(I'm going to hold back. I'm not going to hashtag it. I'm not going to use that joke, the ironic placing of a fleeting internet fad alongside the eternity that could be found in discovery by something else. That's our generations marketing, the hashtag. We made joke when we visited the Colosseum, years ago, my friends and I, as we read up on what they had found when excavating, that if our sports stadia were excavated in that distant future that we can't properly imagine, being people who are so deeply steeped in a world where our experience seems perpetual, that if those future humans were digging us up, they'd think that we worshiped at some mystical temple of Golden Arches. Placing a hashtag here as a joke makes me nervous, like I'm jinxing twenty-first century humanity into being remembered in some dusty tome in another species' library as those who worshiped the Great #.)

Okay, get it together. This is not a helpful way to imagine things. This is not how we do things. Let's talk about life. Let's talk about how life has been. You got this. You do it all the time.

Hi, everyone!

I stubbed my toe last week and the nail turned lilac. So that's news.

Also, look at this cherry tree in bloom I found! So cool!

Man, time really is getting on, isn't it? Who would have thought? Who indeed?

Well, that's all I've got for right now! Look for posts in the next couple of weeks talking about my trip to London to see The Winter's Tale, plus some Scots stories, and probably other stuff! See you soon!

Nailed it.