august 15, 2002

i was looking desperately way for a quick way to clean up the wildly overgrown and under-maintained archives last night when i realized that re-visions is about four and a half years old. i had no idea it had been so long (but you know me, i can barely keep track of what year it is at any given time so this might not be a very significant thing.)

in the early stages of conception (back when it was called "scramblings," a take on someone else's "ramblings," i believe) it was just a sounding board, a blank wall to graffiti during a semi-difficult time. that time evolved into a sweet and chaotic time, and the scratchings that were "scramblings" evolved into "re-visions." you know, first a vision, then a twist, then musings on someone else's subsequent two cents and maybe a refund on that somewhere down the line.

i update sometimes. i wish i could say "regularly," but i don't have the discipline or an exciting enough life to write daily or sometimes even weekly. (of course that doesn't always stop me; i feel free to write about my breakfast and post my shopping list whenever it seems particularly interesting to me. it's a read-at-your-own-risk kind of thing.) now, in particular, my life (minus mundane daily aggravations like not being allowed to use the dryer because it's perfectly sunny outside) is pretty calm, unremarkable. one of these days i'll get around to writing about some things that happened or that i did or saw that i never wrote about that really changed me -- or at least really changed the way i saw things, for whatever each was worth.

a few things have changed since my very first teeth-and-hands-clenched entry in '98. for starters, i rarely write with teeth and hands clenched anymore. i know i'm entitled to my visions and re-visions, but i hate having to take things back outright. and i used to try to extract some kind of deep personal revelation from every little thing that went right or wrong for me. (i still do, but these days i wait a little while to announce my newfound wisdoms, ha.) also, i have a sense of humor now, about myself and everything else. "you wouldn't worry about what other people think of you if you realized how seldom they actually do," and all that. i'll attribute that when i find the yearbook i first read it in.

i almost never use real names -- of people, places of employment, locations, etc. for all the common-sense reasons, and because stumbling upon an appropriate pseudonym for someone is just so much fun. actually, the only people i can think of right now that i've never used nicknames for are my friends ryan and greg, authors of the first online journals i ever read, and inspirations for my own. before them, i thought "online journal" was an oxymoron. anyway, i've thought about including a "cast of characters" but i don't think i write frequently or thoroughly enough for such a feature to make sense. it has something to do with my squeamishness in talking about people who may not know i write about them -- something i never got over or learned to fully, comfortably work around as a journal-ist. i may deeply dislike someone but still might not want to tick them off and/or hurt their feelings. make sense?

so that's the brief story behind re-visions, which got its readership (however large or tiny it may be, i don't know) primarily from Isleties, a site well-maintained by the aforementioned ryan ozawa.

i should mention that use of things like "creative" spelling, puncutation and grammar, dangling modifiers, and my all-time favorite, the run-on sentence, do not reflect my training as an english major or once-aspiring journalist. i know i do them. it's kind of like smoking, except it doesn't hurt anyone sitting next to me. that made sense, and yet it didn't. oh and one last thing, check out this disclaimer that i haven't updated in years.