Kimberly Hirsh

I’ve been wanting to clean up my blog at least since I migrated from WordPress to Micro.blog, maybe longer. But at over 1000 entries and more all the time, it felt too daunting. Then I read John Johnston’s post, Gardening in the Stream, in which he described using an “On This Day” feature to surface old posts and then go back to the posts from a given day in previous years and clean those up. I love this idea. It’s manageable and if I miss a day, it’ll be only a year before I have another chance to look at it. I’m using Jonathan LaCour’s On This Day snippet for Micro.blog to get this going.

It reminds of me of Austin Kleon’s writing about stock and flow, referencing Robin Sloan’s writing about stock and flow. My hope is that by circulating old flow back into new flow, I’ll discover some things I can turn into stock, clean up, and link in places that make them easier to discover.

I’ve been on the Internet for a quarter of a century. I think I want to write a big, full memoir on the subject, but for now I’m just going to make some notes.

I got my first email address in 1993. I was in seventh grade. My dad set it up on a public access server at the university where he worked. I don’t know why I was so excited to have it, because nobody else I knew had an email address. But I was sure that email would mitigate the loneliness I felt. I had a loving family and excellent friends. I had basically the best middle school experience a person could hope for. But I still felt this need for more connection, and I thought this tool would get the job done.

I signed my crush’s yearbook with my email address. We went to different schools for eighth grade, because of redistricting, or because I moved. (They both happened at the same time.) He never emailed me.

I don’t think I got much out of that email address until I signed up for listservs.

But that’s a story about 1995.