In the library of the Mascoma Valley Regional High School - circa 1996 - there was an ancient beige computer that sat on a squat table to the left of the main door. This computer was not exceptional. To the extent that it ran at all, it ran Windows 95, and would occasionally antagonize an even more ancient dot-matrix printer in to producing this screeching/scraping sound that caused everyone sitting at nearby tables to look up in pain. On good days, this computer was connected to the internet, and, as it held the distinction in our school of being the only computer connected to the internet, it was where I first showed a friend (who might well have been the librarian) a website that I had made. I realize that everyone with opposable thumbs can make (and has made) a website of some sort these days, but in 1996 this was quite a thing, and I have a vivid memory of feeling as though I had succeeded in conjuring a certain sort of magic.

As a student, I was average by just about every metric. My grades were ok, my performance in sports was dismal, my performance in band (as a flute player) was worse, and apart from a few good friends that I'd grown up with, I wasn't terribly social. In other words, I didn't have much going for me when it came to the basic identity-type questions that haunt all of earth's 13 yr old boys. What I did have was a Macintosh Performa that my dad had brought home from his office, and all kinds of time to learn how to use it. Rural New Hampshire was (and is) not really designed to be enjoyed without a vehicle, so before I turned 16 I had hours and days and weeks of time that I clicked away in to a certain sort of proficiency with the Performa. And then our up-the-hill neighbor (an older kid who had spent even more time clicking than I had) stole Photoshop 3 and gave me a copy.

The kid would go on to become a trial lawyer. I became a web designer.

Every so often someone will tell me that I am lucky to have a job that is so flexible. I agree, but my agreement has a dimension that I think (or flatter myself to think) they haven't considered. Namely, that being a freelance web designer and developer in the facebook era gives you more than just the flexibility to work in coffee shops: it gives you a very real sense of control over the most prevalent modes of modern expression. And, in an internet that is increasingly dominated by templates of all shapes and sizes (templates for businesses, templates for artwork, templates for selves), this is a pretty extraordinary skill to have. Templates, by their very nature, force a structure on to the information they are fed, which, before long, becomes essential to that information's meaning. What is an activity feed without facebook? What is the value of a like? Would you really be sharing this stuff with strangers if you hadn't been asked? This is true of Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Squarespace, Wordpress, Wix or any of the less popular but similarly structured apps trying to solve the problem of human expression. It was true of MySpace and will be true of whatever comes next. The medium matters. A lot.

Of course, to say that I've always felt this way would be a flat lie. This website is not some ode to free expression in the modern world. At best, it's an obsession that I have come to treat as a very real extension of my actual, 3D self. I realize that that sounds unhealthy, but there's no other way to explain the sheer quantity of time I have poured in to it over the years. Hundreds (if not thousands) of hours have been spent designing, coding, revising, rebuilding (and revising again) each page you see today, along with just as many that never made the cut. This version is just one face of a document in a constant state of revision, and its role (in my life at least) sits somewhere between reflection (of the Narcissus variety), one-man media venue and a carefully curated catalog of past experience.

So why?

Something snapped in to place when I showed off that first website in my school's library. It felt good to do something other kids couldn't. It was my first whiff of pride, and sure, maybe these things just snowball in a profession. But the scope of it - the constant compulsion to curate, to update, to adjust ... I'm not sure where that comes from. If pressed I might say it's a way of exerting control over my otherwise floaty lifestyle, or that putting all this stuff online helps to buttress my troublingly fickle memory, but try as I might, no one explanation quite gets me all the way there.