Introduction: 19 inch CRT monitor

 

19 inch CRT monitor

Several years ago I “stalked” my dad on the internet. I was bored, there was nothing to do, I had just learned how to use the Wayback Machine and there were some tendencies present inside of me that people could call “being obsessive” and “easily fixated on abnormal stuff”. They were probably right, because that day I found several long forgotten forum posts and websites that were created by my father. I was indeed, as expected, very much intrigued by what I found. The content that I had discovered wasn’t scandalous or anything outrageous. There were no deep dark secrets, controversial political opinions or juicy gossip. Heck, I don’t think he even complained about his job once. The websites and all the other traces of him that I was able to find on the internet was just my dad, in the 00s, simply typing about stuff he liked. He wrote short introductions for all the friends that he shared one of the websites with, spent time writing detailed reviews, talked about renovations happening in his house and shared funny stories about his firstborn, my older sister. What my father put out there on the internet wasn’t about anything dramatic, awful or incredibly amazing that had happened to him, he just wrote about, well, what would I call it? 

I guess he just wrote about life. 

It’s a picture inside of my head that is really special to me. My dad in his mid twenties typing away on either this chunky thinkpad or sitting behind a 19 inch CRT monitor. This man, just married, having a fulltime job, living in a recently bought house while he and his wife, my mom, were taking care of a newborn daughter. It must’ve been an incredibly busy and hectic life he was living, and despite all that he still found the time to sit down and write about whatever he wanted to. He wrote because he liked to, wrote for himself and for the people in his circle. He wrote for the occasional stranger passing by in the rural landscape that was the internet in the aughts. He wrote excerpts about his life, not knowing that one day a second daughter that wasn’t born just yet would be reading the sentences.

My dad is still alive and kicking. I could just go up to his home office and ask him about stories from the past if I want to, but something about these digital crumbs of mundane life in the form of a GeoCities blog or answers in an unknown forum, scattered all over on the web, are very captivating to me.

It has been several years since going down the “rabbit hole” that was my father’s online presence of him in his mid twenties to mid thirties. My detective skills have gone a bit stale since then and I don’t really have the need to revisit it all, but recently I have been thinking about what it means to have an online presence. What will I leave behind for any possible future kids to find when they scour the internet for a trace of my past life? What do I want to leave behind for that day when my child will eventually act like a private investigator? 

I think I want to be like my dad, just writing about the things I like. Typing away on my 2015 Chromebook about the smaller stuff in life that is happening to me, the things only I find interesting. I want to publish these tiny essays written only because I want to, putting it out on the web for me and whoever else is interested in whatever I have to say. Texts written for people to stumble upon in the future, people that maybe will be very important in my life, that I don’t know about just yet.

Who knows?

I’m not a blogger and neither is my father, but I think I will be following in his footsteps by starting my own little website filled with whatever comes to mind.

Thanks in advance for reading it, and to anyone who knows me in what shape, way or form: welcome and hello!