A Year Where Stuff Happened

Can BuriedintheNoise-dot-com be a year old already? Amazing. It seems like just yesterday I was hacking into Yahoo, manipulating their directory structure and deleting a bunch of user accounts to accommodate the terabytes of server space I’d need for this site.

And now look at it.

Resplendent in #888888 glory, I managed to coat this little corner of the internet with a fair quantity of words before graduate school came along and crushed my imagination into so much quivering organic mush. Actually, I’ve been desperate to get some time to update this place. It’s just hard to whine about being busy when there’s dated evidence on the www of me not doing my homework. But today is special: today is BuriedintheNoise-dot-com’s birthday.

I suppose there’s some good stuff on here. Some bad, too. (But don’t worry, I’ve deleted all of that.) I still don’t really know why some stuff is separated out as features and some is just tossed into the vocabulary blender that is my journal archive. Some of my favorites are buried deep in those archives.

Since I’m usually painfully self-critical and always sleepy, it’s been hard to justify why I would put anything out into the infoverse for others to read. It was conceived as a way for me to force-start the right brain, long intimidated and abused by my dominating and coldly logical left brain. Always comfortable wading neck-deep into all geek waters, I needed to throw off the oppressive weights of my knowledge of realms like object-oriented programming and Fox Mulder’s mysterious background, and backstroke into the slithery funk of right-brain wackiness. It’s kind of cool and colorful over here, actually, but I keep losing stuff. And after you’ve watched enough episodes of Dr. Who on PBS at midnight on Saturdays (about one episode), you can never scrub hard enough to wash out the nerd smell. Plus I still like to write, perhaps more than ever. So all of these psychologically-embattled, vaguely geeky word streams will have to go somewhere.

I think the site also has a purpose similar to that cited by atomic physicists (yeah, Josh, you’ve really cut out the geekiness). Follow their work along the logical lines of working on giant atom smashers, ramming hydrogen ions into each other at significant fractions of the speed of light in order to see the quantum signatures the collisions produce. From this, they might eventually discover how the universe was created. Now, I’ve left a few steps out, but I’m trying the same thing. Maybe if I write enough I’ll eventually stumble upon the meaning of existence. It’s somewhat unlikely, but if it works, then who’ll be pointing and laughing?

Probably the best theory I’ve got going so far is that reality is like falling off a cliff. Except the cliff is so monumentally high that it takes a conscious amount of time to fall the entire length. You can’t even justifiably spend the descent screaming, because it would look utterly ridiculous to run out of breath, then inhale and start screaming again. So you just sit there and fall, knowing exactly how it’s going to end. And even though the falling is kind of brutal and cold and lonely you have some impression that you don’t actually want to hit the rocks. It’s bound to hurt and certain to be messy. So maybe there might be some way to make a go of a life as bizarre as all this. The hard part is therefore figuring out what won’t be an absurd way to spend your limited falling time.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten. It’s not much, but the site’s only one year old.

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