Christening the Virtual Home
Posted on | March 27, 2007 | No Comments
‘Round about the tail end of 1994, a college freshman who had neither grown up with computers or even so much as taken a computer science course in high school found herself wandering aimlessly all over the Internet – and loving it. From the very first moment I discovered that the computer I’d received as a graduation present (a 386DX with Windows 3.1 – yeah, yeah, so I was a little late) could link me up with the entire world, I was fascinated. I bought a ginourmous book (bigger than the biggest WoT novel) about the Internet and read it from cover to cover. I explored. I emailed. I discovered BBS and MUD and Usenet. I taught myself rudimentary HTML. I absorbed Internet culture and “netiquette” through my fingertips and learned to type like the wind.
The Internet evolved, and I evolved with it as it became more popular and more useful. Keeping up with the ‘Net helped me to become comfortable and conversant with computers, and that gave me an edge in many ways. I joined Elfwood in 2000. I signed up for LiveJournal in 2002. I learned CSS in 2003 and am still teaching myself PHP and Perl. I found NaNoWriMo. In some ways, I began to feel more at home in virtual space than in real life. No, I realized; it’s the illusion of a home, but that’s OK. I can exist in multiple dimensions, virtually and really. We’re designed with that capability, we human beings. I believe in virtual unicorns, and so they exist. Now, the Internet is inextricably entwined in my life, as friends have stepped out of virtual space and into reality, and other “real-life” friends continue being real across thousands of miles of fiber optics and wires.
I always wanted my own place on the ‘Net. And here it is… my virtual “home”. It’s a lot easier to find a home here than in the “real world” – virtual real estate is, thankfully, still affordable for the average user.
Choosing a name for the site proved to be a much more difficult task than acquiring the domain name, picking out my layout from WordPress Themes or figuring out how to tweak this theme to my liking. Names are so important. I didn’t want to just call it “first name, last name” – I hear and see my own name enough from day to day. I wanted to name my new home something on par with Pemberley or Mansfield Park or Thornfield. In a non-English-country-house or gloomy-gothic-novel kind of way. So David and I sat in front of my computer and tossed around words, dug through Thesaurus.com, and found a bunch of random word generators, none of which helped me to find the perfect name. I wanted something that sounded like me, like the way I see the world. Everything sounded too angsty or too trite or too contrived. Or too copycat.
Despite my claim of being “a writer”, I suffer from a lack of invention. I confess, I can’t write a bio for myself, either. (I take comfort in the fact that Anton Chekhov wasn’t much into writing bios, either, apparently – even geniuses have some limits. Sadly, I don’t have genius to balance out my lackwittedness.) I even thought about calling my entire site “UnWitty” and very nearly did. But I think Chimaeralogue, an elusive, many-colored thing, for lack of a better term, gives the best description of what I hope to accomplish with the website.
I see this website as a cloudy portrait of myself, my very own patchwork, asymetrical, multifaceted monologue of thoughts, dreams, wishes, rages, moments of whimsy and wonder; and yet, all me. Or how I want you to see me. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Names adapt themselves to the object that receives them, and vice versa. One of my favorite bits of poetry says: “And what we said of it became / A part of what it was…” Just as my life online has shaped the person I am today, so this website will be shaped by how I choose to use it and who chooses to connect with me through it.Welcome to Chimaeralogue. Welcome to my home.
(P.S. – Site name subject to change at my whim or with the changing of the wind.)
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