Eleventy Base Blog v9

My Blog and Me


I used to blog almost daily in middle school. My school was weird and we didn't have much of a formal curriculum or strict lecturing classes. It ended up with me having a lot of free time on my laptop to post on Blogger. Now a private blog, I used to post about the antics of my classmates and general preteen angst and anger towards the world. You know how you feel like the world is ending when you're 14? Yeah and imagine updating a blog often enough that you now have a time capsule to look back on. I'm glad to have kept records because blogger is a semi-reliable hosting site, enough to have kept a lot of images that were lost between laptop changes and broken hard drives.

My blog was constantly updated up until my senior year of highschool, where I was studying for finals (+college entrance exams) and didn't have much to post about. The spark to maintain the blog was no longer there, so I slowly phased out entries and now it's an archive for only me to look back on.

That wasn't the end, though. In senior year of university I briefly picked up blogging on tumblr again with the premise of reviewing cafes and restaurants. Back then I had a lot of free time to do my thesis at cafes and thought I might as well kill two birds with one stone by milking content out of the images I've taken of the food and drinks I ordered. This was much more short-lived, as when my undergrad thesis was finished I've already settled on one cafe to frequent nearby my housing.

Now this is my new thing. My new shiny thing to keep up with. I feel less pressured to keep up appearances here because, well, let's face it this is a niche website. I don't feel the need to polish whatever I write here like I do over on instagram, where I have a lot of IRLs and internet acquaintances. I do feel like the coding interface (for now) is a novel way to blog and a brief respite from the overly polished platforms for writing like Medium or heck, even google docs. Sometimes I overthink too much about what I should write that I end up discarding hundred-word long drafts because it doesn't "fit a neat image." I miss the days of middle school where I wrote for the sake of writing and didn't care about optics or the level of polish. It was great writing excercise.

I've tried journaling multiple times, but almost always fall out due to the fact that I have to a. remember I have a journal and b. remember to open the journal before even thinking about writing in it. It always ends up being a special-event-only scrapbook/junk journal when I meet my friends or watch a good movie instead of daily writing practices. I don't really subscribe to the whole "manifesting/mindfulness" woo woo journaling techniques because, to be frank, I kind of already practice mindfulness by venting to my friends and on twitter. I just file all the stuff I know about be in a cabinet inside by brain for future use and that's it, really. My mood is often dictated by my period cycle and that's super predictable once I wrote down (on my whiteboard) a period tracker

That's another thing, I love having a monthly wall planner and sticking physical sticky notes on it to remind myself of schedules and events. I find physical media to be irreplacable in terms of planning and note-taking. I love having it on my wall because then I don't need to remember to take it out of the dusty cabinet and open it up, it's just there when I wake up and I can see it

This has been a yapfest, but to be honest I miss just being able to write paragraphs and paragraphs of text without worrying about appearances. I hope I can keep up with this blog for at least 2 months, since that's the standard time for my hyperfixations to wean off.