Coming back from the gym, I suddenly thought of a phrase that reminded me of my old MSN space that I used prior to acquiring this website. So here I am, still sweaty and smelly from the gym, reflecting on how I got here.
It’s funny, you know, how the phases of the last five years of my life coincided so much so with the blogs and websites that I keep. A melding of personal change and technology.
Runaway Future all started on a free website, that was hosted by a company called Future Research and Technology, frandt for short. I had a blog there that detailed basically my entire time in college. To be fair, it didn’t really detail my college education as much as it detailed my college experience. Plenty of talk about the news, about politics, about different things going on and my opinion on them. The content in itself was a reflection of my own attention to my college program, where often, my mind was elsewhere.
I went from college to the RCMP work term. My computer crashed and I had to use some tools from the lab to fix it and recover everything (losing only my bookmarks in Firefox, which at the time numbered in the 800. that was probably a blessing, as I would never had been able to organize them, but at the same time, I always feel like I lost something valuable and never to be found again). Around the same time as the work term, my website blew up. Since it was a free website, there was no backup and the main content of two years of my life, the database of my thoughts, my dreams, my fears and my stories was gone forever. Again, maybe that is for the best, but again, I feel like I may have lost something worthwhile, lost the record of an important part in my story, my battle.
Regardless, there was little I could do, besides I had bigger fish to fry. Namely, entry into the University of King’s College to take Journalism. So off I go, get accepted and plan to hitch my cart on being a student for the next four years. Life had other plans and soon I had a job interview, closely followed by a job offer.
The next month that followed was one of indecision and perhaps one of the more defining changes in my life. I had to choose between work and schooling, money and experience or academia. Wrought with conflicting emotions and insecurity, I again needed and outlet to express the struggles inside of me. Thus the MSN Space version of Runaway Future was born. It’s rather brief and not completely fluid in content or voice, which I think is a perfect reflection of my attitude at that point in time. Bearing the tagline “neurotic idiosyncrasies”, the Space no doubt means little in terms of actual content to anyone but myself. I keep it around purely to remind me how hard a decision I eventually had to make was. I spent a lot of time at Public Gardens, reading and thinking, trying to funnel that outside peace into myself. Thinking of it now, that’s something I should do more often when the gates open up again.
Once things settled down, both externally with my job and my decision to stop being a student after 14 years and internally with me dealing with that decision and putting those demons to rest, I settled down with this space, where I have been writing what I’ve been thinking since August 2005.
All in all, that’s how I got to hear. That’s how I am where I am. This website will never be “complete”, I always will have something to write (currently 23 drafts saved on the site and countless ideas on scraps of paper strewn about the apartment). But I think it’s important, for me, to see this journey. I have been wondering about the purpose of Runaway Future over the past few months. I don’t know if these words are read, if they resound anywhere but off the empty walls of some server space in California (quite frankly, I don’t want to know, as Don Crowdis found out, sometimes having an audience scares the muse). But, when that muse isn’t there, I wonder why I keep trying to ensure I have at least a post, of something, of anything to fill out every month. There’s so many abysmal efforts made over the past year that I feel ashamed. Especially when thinking of the futur.frandt.com days when I posted at least once a day, if not more and digested so much more on everything around me.
The common excuse is time, and maybe that’s right. Maybe I am busy, or maybe I can’t stomach writing. Lord knows, there’s so many words I owe others. I’ve also been tempted to pull the Facebook feed on this, if only to continue what has been a slow and gradual withdraw from that phenomenon over the past few months.
If I turn to something different, maybe I’ll have to get another website?