A new house; a home
What’s in a website? It’s fascinating how our virtual worlds (and the words for them) remain tied to place and space. We navigate to sites on the net, search for addresses, leave our writing on walls. Nifty arrows help us find our way back, and yes, ‘the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started’ - a page, finally, called home.
A couple months ago, I reached out to my friends at Sarah and Schooling to help put together this site, a kind of repository for my lives scattered over the internet. Most millennials would have taken some of the same steps here: Blogspot (at 12), MSN messenger (at 13), Facebook (at 15), Twitter (at 17), Instagram (at 18)… not counting brief flirtations with Livejournal and Tumblr along the way. After all, growing up in the 21st C has taught us to profile ourselves endlessly, or have others do it for us.
Adulthood has brought its own accounting: LinkedIn, created over one late-night guard duty shift in the army, and Academia.edu, where I try to keep one foot in the world of research (see Projects). Since returning to Singapore three years ago, maintaining a presence on the internet has become a way of staying connected with distant friends, and engaging - as a writer - with issues and communities that stray, often willfully, across borders. To paraphrase Thoreau, ‘nothing makes the world (wide web) seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes’.
All this to say that starting this site seems a natural next move, to help braid the many threads, and in the words of a wise friend, ‘bring my whole self’ to each endeavour. To complete the virtual process of ‘Moving House’, I’ve also begun shifting over to a new email address, courtesy of capitalism, by which I mean Google Suite.
The old one still works, but if you’re reading this and want to get in touch, drop me a line at hello@theophiluskwek.com!