A Small Introduction

Well hello there, world!

For a long time I've thought about creating a blog, and for a long time I questioned whether it would be worth it. I've always had a strange relationship with social media: who cares about what I think? I'm a nobody living in the midwest - what thoughts might I have that could amount to anything worthwhile? I've struggled with this since I was a kid crawling around learning botched html in the high days of Myspace where Tom was always your friend and the top 8 was a coveted social position. (Admittedly, I liked Xanga a lot more, but I digress.)

As I've grown up in this computer age I've watched the internet go from the wild west to this curated, corporate thing that it is now. Is it better? Is it worse? Well, it's better in some ways, and worse in others, but it is certainly different than it once was. That is something I think we can all agree upon. Social media is vastly different now - especially now that algorithms have taken over and learned that ragebait is better sales than actually showing you what you want and the game is now to collect as much data about you as possible and sell it to the highest five bidders available.

And yet we all feel so much more lonely now than we did before. I'm sure everyone's seen this before, but in a world where we are more interconnected than we ever have been, we find ourselves more isolated than ever. I don't even wish to get started on the topic of AI. (This blog is entirely AI-free, by the by. All of these posts will likely be off the cuff random musings. I doubt there will be a regular schedule. Sorry.)

My own sense of loneliness and addiction to the right now nature of technology and short-form content has been somewhat remedied by my continued desire to keep my life organized through planners, which means - of course - that I've developed a hobby for stationary and journaling in general. I tried bujo and found it too much work to keep up, I found Hobonichi and the Weeks works well for me, while the Kokuyo Jibun Techo is perfect for my day to day. I keep an A5 notebook for just journaling and the day to day memory keeping.

These are things that have helped me to slow down and just remember to breathe. Writing with a fountain pen and keeping my day organized, checking off my to-do's for the day or week or month, gluing in the latest ordered items so that I have that memory in my journal... These things bring me a sense of calm I haven't had in a long time. They help me keep a record of my life and history that I can go back to. They help me organize my thoughts and I find myself writing more each time I sit down, and I find myself wondering if perhaps there are things I can contribute to this online world. Will I ever hit it big? Probably not. Even if nobody ever finds this blog, it is at least a place I can collect my thoughts and musings somewhere, and sometimes that is enough.

Online, my name is Coop. I am - at the time of posting - a 31 year old trans man living in the middle of the United States. I play too many video games, I like journals and planners and fountain pens and ink, I'm learning how to bind books, I have started to go really hard into gardening as less and less food is safe to eat, I love to play TTRPGs, I have two cats, and I'm sure I could list a million other things here, but this is where I'll stop for now.

So welcome to my little corner of the internet - I hope you enjoy your stay. 🙂