You must understand one thing about this website. And that is it is currently under construction - as I get a handle on how to write posts via Markdown & shimmy them up into the Github space. This is because I'm cheap - I don't believe in paying a server to host a personal website when there is no profit expected to be made of it. I'd just like to join the conversation, & learn by doing. Everything is practice, in the hopes of becoming more substantial (useful) by-&-by.
I rather like the Jekyll format here where the post md files must begin with the date YYYY-MM-DD . In my personal notes I also add the hour & minutes, as it makes it easy to separate notes chronologically, & when these notes are zettles they are such small units several may be typed out in a space of an hour. It gives me an odd sense of security, knowing that my notes can easily be sorted into the right chronological order. I sometimes still surprise myself by things I had thought at one point, & it gives me a good idea where my nutrients came from. I imagine a true genius would have less difficulty in believing in their originality. As a non-genius who wished she had a better memory to compensate for this neglect, I am relegated to being surprised by both what inspired me, & how my past self had responded.
At a certain point over the past few years I noticed that the time I spend writing almost equals the time I spend reading. Alan Bennett described this process in his fictionalized account of the Queen of England picking up reading quite late in life, becoming incredibly voracious, & then reaching a stage where she wanted to write. This caused me to suppose this likely a common development of people who read. On the other hand, I have heard anecdotes of those who only read, but never write. I find that quite curious - how could you never be inspired?
The good thing with writing your thoughts down is your notions are given more space to stretch out, expand, & reach some conclusions. The sorry thing about merely writing your thoughts down is that they are rarely to a purpose. So I've always found blogging an incentive to lay my thoughts out more legibly & logically, & whittle down the inane. Oh, unsound ideas still get in there sometimes, but I'm proud to say it gives me something to fix a month or so later, when the allure of the passion (though while writing I almost always believe I am perfectly collected) has faded off enough for me to detect a bit more of my rhetorical & compositional defects.
The supposition that someone should read this, a stranger who glows glamorous by their anonimity - is thankfully facile. I have kept a blog, & barely any of my posts get commented upon. Whereas in most cases when they are commented upon, it is spam. The other danger lies thus: I have heard of a practice, of late (hopefully going out of fashion), of strangers going to dig up people's old comments & then castigating them about it. This practice I find utterly deplorable, & though I haven't experienced enough enemies yet to truly say I won't wish it on my worst enemy, I can safely say I don't wish it on myself.
This blog is for growing myself. If you don't know what it's like to mature, don't resent other people trying to.
& what is this duress referred to in the title. Well, 2 years ago I had spent some money purchasing a domain name I rather like, & the SSL is to expire. & not being able to understand if this is an irrevocable thing for my domain ownership, I sat myself down to set up this website.
To wrap up the purpose for this blog: having never been popular in my writing, I don't suppose this blog's performance shall be much different. & thus with complacency I hope this to be a place to air my better-arranged notions, whilst getting comfortable with Github, & not being too much the poorer for it.
Reminder to self to delete this first draft post when I actually start posting substance.