Web 2.0 Mystifies Me

I managed, a few years ago--and actually even a few years before that--to get a hold of some CSS coding techniques. But let me explain what that means. That means that I copied the template for my Livejournal onto my own computer and changed things until it looked the way I wanted it to. I taught it to myself, back in--I do believe--2007, while I worked at the History Center for the first time. I just fiddled with it until it worked the way I wanted it to, but by no means did I actually know what I was doing.

The web design course that I took in high school--even with all the work I put into designing my website every couple of years, teaching myself important things, using the obligatory dumb google question when necessary--that is just absolutely not cutting it anymore. My website is hopelessly out of date because it's still, predominantly, in html!

As I'm sure you can imagine, as a web-restless individual, and with excessive amounts of time on my hands, this does not please me at all. So I've been examining Wordpress, and how I can turn wordpress into a website for me. The biggest issue is getting a fully integrated blog into my site. I have always really hated the way that I couldn't get my blog onto my site and vise versa. The easiest fix to that is to get a blog install that also upgrades the site to a 2.0 platform... but I have no idea where to begin.

I bought a book about wordpress--mostly because I just like to buy books--and I feel like I'm redoing this whole thing. When I first bought my domain name and website, I was in the early years of high school--coming off of an Angelfire site or something like that, way, way, way back when personal websites were a tool more like facebook or myspace. A lot of artists--especially non professional artists--had sites where they could just show off their artwork. It also became a kind of "show off" to see what you could do with the web too. I used whatever I could get my hands on to design my sites, and I did get good at it, but it gets more and more complicated every day. I don't have the knowledge to back it up anymore.

So I've been frustratedly flipping through this book on wordpress, trying to understand what's going on. I do want to have a fancy website by September, so that I can make a lot of necessary changes to my "web presence". I want an integrated blog (which I will of course update with a lot more frequency, hardeeehar), and an integrated set of purchasing tools... and what that means, is just that I can get this Zazzle plug in to work. It also means getting flash galleries for my artwork, so that I don't get that nasty "popup blocker" notice when I try and look at the art on the site. I feel like some people get error messages when they visit KP because I have messy code that looks potentially malicious to an browser.

Anyway, I also want to get a domain name that better reflects the reality of what's on the site. The site was first named "KagaiPalace", in 2003 or 2002, after the "Kagai Family" in my novels, Demon's Broken World and Serpent of Souls. They were the evil demon family, that used to brutalize the mortals just for fun--back in the day when I was young enough to understand evil as being less complex. The theme for the website was full of black and bright colors, a "tortured", "gothic" teenager's dream. I remember I looked up "evil" in my online romanji Japanese dictionary, and it spit out "Kagai" and that is how these people got their name. A pair of them appeared in Serpent of Souls much later in my life, and they were much more fluid, complex characters. But still pretty evil and manipulative.

Now that you know that, of course, it's obviously not an appropriate name for a web portfolio of my own artwork, in a era of the internet where one does not fear putting out one's full name. I need a domain with my own name in it, on a web 2.0 platform, with a blog. In two months. It's doable. I know that. I could use a vacation for a couple of weeks so that I have the time to just do it. Oh! What excellent timing... the state government is shutting down, and I'll be out of work! Sounds like a great time to do a website.

The Past Six Months

Have been rather uneventful and quiet. I'm now approaching my seven-month mark here in the USA. It's hard to believe. When you first arrive anywhere, you feel like a visitor. When you know the lay of the land, it's a really enchanting place to be. When I first arrived here, I definitely felt as if I--as a visitor--had lots to learn and take from this delightful city, that was also my home.

Of course the longer one remains in visitor mode, the less and less appealing it gets. After a while, that slips away and you simply become a ghost, going thought day-to-day tasks and ignoring the things that used to be so exciting. Constantly worrying about the future, excessively saving money--and then binging later. Being this kind of visitor--a permanent visitor--becomes exhaustively lonely.

The next step in my life is looming over me without a lot of nice things to say. I vaguely remember my terror before I went to Hamline. I remember how exhausted I was with stretched relationships from high school, how anxious I was to leave that place and start new, in a place with fewer restrictions, especially on the types of relationships that were available to me. I had no idea what was possible, and that was the most difficult part. I believed it would be just as difficult, and in exactly the same ways, that all my previous experiences had been. And I didn't have the energy to meet my old life with a new face again.

This is how I feel about Chicago. There are a lot of things I'm going into blind, but there are more things that I think I know a thing or two about. I'm scared of the overly academic mumbo-jumbo that I see written all over the place. I'm scared of the overly difficult questions posed by the people there--an academic tool that I fear will be used to pull me away from the things that ignite my life. I am afraid that I will be tethered to this academic jargon, and pulled away from every day people with it. It is much the same way that my English vocabulary and eloquence fell away after a year in Korea. I know that I am naturally introverted, cautious, and a deep thinker. But I have worked hard to become something above that. I cannot let it atrophy, and I already feel the effects of it here, sitting in my dark town home, far away from the kind of boisterousness that keeps me going.

Then, of course, there is the classic fear, the one I felt before Hamline. "What if, in the end, I just don't fit?" Hamline was a big school with a lot of different people. Chicago is a bigger school with even more different people. But graduate programs are tight knit and close, and with their demands, they rarely wander away. And what about all the oddities in my character: the year abroad, the year teaching, the devotion to the women's center, the irreverence for academic inquiry, and a serious desire only to make a difference in a community? Even as I type these things, I realize that this is an irrelevant question. Many of the people I met when I visited had spent time abroad. Many of the people I met were in similar situations to me.

I also feel a similar anxiousness to my first few years at Hamline. There was a particular moment, when I was bored at work, in my first semester, when I began looking up all the history courses that were offered. And it dawned on me, after reading them several times over, that there were no courses in Classical history. No Rome, no Greece--nothing before the modern era. I choked a little, now suddenly aware that I had come to a place that was not what I thought it was. The same is happening now, as I browse for courses. I see no liberation theology course, no social justice oriented theories. Only courses on serious theologians that I've never heard of before.

Then, of all my fears, there is this one. With three courses considered a full course load, I will have very little time for serious language work. I am so committed to Arabic language. I am so, sincerely, utterly devoted to learning it. But I chose a Christian degree program, with several electives, yes, but with its own biblical language requirements, and all of them with reading goals, not speaking. My biggest fear at this point is that I will be unable to accomplish all of these things--that at the last minute, I will be convinced, once again, that I do not have time for Arabic. I cannot be convinced of that. Fluency in Arabic may be the only thing capable of paying off these enormous loans.

Obviously I will need to have a serious discussion with my adviser right away. My language commitments may cause me to be unable to do the dual degree program that I am so interested in. But I may also be able to do both degrees separately. If I still maintain a commitment to Minneapolis--and particularly to the Somali community, as I have now--it may be more advantageous for me to take a public policy degree at the Humphrey.

There are a lot of unknowns in all of this, and like I said at the beginning, I can see a lot more of the scary ones that I can the happy ones.

I had a dream the other day which spoke to all of these fears. I dreamed that I had to say goodbye to all the Somali ladies, the moms of the kids that I work with. I had to explain to them that I was leaving, but it wasn't because I was moving. It was because I had died. I had come back as a ghost to explain to them why I wouldn't be with there anymore. That is what I am most afraid of, that the part of me who is able to be a member of this hodgepodge, chaotic, and beautiful community--the part of me that worked so hard to not be afraid of such sincere interaction--that part of me will die if I go to academia. Part of me insists that it has to, because I don't want anyone or anything to replace this place in my mind.

So, I have a lot of fears. And very little assurance that they will be answered. Then there is logistics, the nightmare of moving my things, transporting my life, finding housing, paying for it--everything seems too difficult to swallow. But I know that I will get it done soon. I know it will come together in a couple months. I know that I'll feel safer soon. At least I hope so.