Early in 2000 I had this website.  It was the first domain I’d ever registered and I spent many hours playing with it.  Having had no web building experience, the domain was sometimes my blog, sometimes an experimental project.  I built it again and again.  It was the laboratory through which I taught myself the few things I know about websites.    I loved the domain name because I have a rather cluttered mind, full of the floating detritus of thoughts and ideas.   As most college kids do, I fancied myself a tinkerer with grand thoughts and a grander future.  The sheer variety of my interests were my proof that I had a vibrant mind meant for bigger things.

As it tends to do, time went by and sometime in the mid-2000’s I accidentally let the registration lapse when I became distracted by a new job and Grad School.  By the time I realized my error, someone else had registered the site.  I kicked myself, but life went on.

The domain appeared to be someone else’s blog for about a year, but soon he too let it lapse.   Then it sat in one of those domain farms for many years with a premium price tag on it.  When I saw that, I did what any sane person would do.  I wrote off the domain as lost forever.  I still loved the domain name, feeling it conveys the still-cluttered mind full of varied interests which I never seemed to outgrow.  The only thing I did seem to outgrow was any grandiose notion of what having a messy mind meant about me as a person. It simply means I have a cluttered way in the same way I have a cluttered office and a cluttered living room.

I’ve built a couple other websites since I lost this domain.  They are designed with particular projects or particular career goals in mind.  None of them lend themselves to the type of blog which I used to keep.  A blog of thoughts and observations, moments of excitement, which I made as an undergraduate student 15 years ago.  A couple days ago I began toying with the idea of starting such a blog again.  This time with the addition of creating updates on the variety of projects that, as an adult, I now have the resources to indulge.  A blog with no other purpose than to amuse myself.

I began trying various domain names to register, but none of them really fit the kind of purpose I had in mind.  None of them felt right.  My thoughts turned to my old, early 2000’s blog on miscme.com.  That felt right.  On a whim I checked the registration availability again.  To my sheer delight I found that it was available and was back to being the sane price of any normal website registration.  I registered it immediately last night.

There was a sense of reclaiming a little bit of my youth when I set up the email address I had used as a kid barely out of my teens.   Now the blog is up and here we are.

On this patch of digital earth from my past, here’s to the future.