In addition to this more-or-less “public” blog, I maintain a completely private (I think/hope) “diary” blog. I do not put anything truly embarrassing even there, but it is more personal than my writings here are. I do this so that I can go back and re-read my previous entries and remind myself of where I was and track what I was doing and what I was feeling in the past, and just to document my passage through life as a future memory-aid.
My big fear in doing this is that someday, as technology evolves and people’s habits change, all this stuff that I am writing will just vanish before I am done with it since the platform and storage device where it sits is not under my personal control. Obviously, this is a chronic issue with anything that is “In the Cloud” (as sexy and “modern” as that concept may sound), and it is not a vacuous concern. This has already happened to me before with a web site called “Eons”. I had a year or more of personal writing out there and then one day it was just gone without warning and it never came back. It seems that the sponsors of the site ran out of money and the hosting facility turned off their servers. I do wish that they had at least asked for donations first because I really would have paid money to have had that data even for a week or two so that I could have offloaded it and stored it somewhere safe – like printed on paper and stuck in a box in my attic (along with my G-grandfather’s letters from the Civil War). I have no interest in trying to be “immortal” through any of my words – I am not that egotistical – but I do want to be able to review these musings as long as I am alive and maybe even leave them as a personal legacy to be unearthed within my “effects” for other’s amusement and enlightenment after I die (although that is of decidedly minor interest since I won’t be there to enjoy the fun). It is clear however that “Cloud Storage” is not the same thing as “Forever” despite the hype, because nothing of human design can exist without someone somewhere making money from it (not judgin’; just sayin’).
Anyway, this morning I was glancing through a few entries in my personal diary/blog from 12 and 24-months ago and I noticed, as I have commented on before, how curious the passage and perception of time can be. When I read these old blog entries, all at the same moment time seems to be going both very quickly and very slowly. As is my intent, I remember what the scene was when I typed those words and I can recall what was going on around me and what my emotions were and it seems like it was just yesterday; and then I blink and in a slightly different context the same moment and scene seems like it was ages ago. It is like when your hand is cold and you put it under your armpit or in your crotch to warm it up – you can feel both warm and cold at the same time and in the same place. There should be a word to describe such a phenomenon – the simultaneous coexistence of complete opposites – and maybe there is such a word, but I can’t think of it. The best 2-word phrase that I can coin for it though is “Synchronous Antithetical” and I find that the older I get, the more it is that time and in fact my entire life becomes one of these synchronous antithetical paradoxes.
John's Jejune Journal 