Rearranging

I don't know if it's the ADHD. It probably is, but I have this urge to constantly rearrange everything.

By everything I mean: my home office, the bag I carry with me wherever I go, and lately, this website.

The Home Office

With the home office, I've never stopped since I got one in 2018. It's been a constant stream of modifications. My old one ended up full of patched holes in the walls from shelves I put up, moved and eventually removed. A floating desk for guests (I rarely had guests).

During the COVID lockdown, things got especially intense. I spent most of my free time watching woodworking videos on YouTube (along with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, woodworking and sourdough bread YouTube videos maintained a relative level of sanity in the worldwide male population during 2020).

Let me cut that paragraph there to comment that those really long parentheses breaks are also a manifestation of the very thing I'm writing about.

Anyway, I bought some power tools, sourced some plywood and planks, and spent almost a month designing and building a big and complicated closed monitor stand with hidden space for cables, nooks for the laptops, and a mounting system for two monitors. It was glorious.

Glorious and all, I spent more time building it than I enjoyed it. The next week I set out to modify it. Then, a few days later, I did it again. I don't remember its final form.

I think I'm addicted to building things, not to having things.

From that era, a table I built for my youngest kid still survives, and he still uses it and loves it. The red table. That makes me smile. At least something tangible remains from all that.

This Website

This is the subject that led me to write this post. Since its relaunch, I haven't stopped messing with its code, very much like I did with my fabulous closed monitor stand.

I add things, I remove things, I change the navigation structure, I get tired of it, I fall in love with it again.

In the last few months, I tidied up a lot of code behind the code of the website and modularized everything into components. I even generated a secret style guide that I like to look at just because.

Now I'm setting out to throw all that away.

Yesterday, I was looking at Darren Hester's website and the need to simplify got into my mind. Straight pages, minimal layout, and structural changes.

I don't know what I'm going for, but I want something simpler to look at. Fewer bells and whistles, straight text and some images here and there. Here's what I'm thinking:

• Group blogish things (posts, thoughts, links)
• Group slash pages (about, now, plus adding a bunch more)
• Move memories out again to a Pixelfed account, and import them from there, as I'm doing with the Art section, to outsource the management.

Although I don't really have a plan, I might start doing it really soon (I know myself), and I'm afraid to regret it later.

As I wrote that, I realized it's my fear of uncertainty acting up and rejecting change. And I have to remind myself here that I usually enjoy the process more than the result, and if everything fails, I can always scratch everything and go back.

And they say writing is not therapeutic. Yes, I know, nobody says that.

In Conclusion

There's no conclusion. This post was really a stream of consciousness, almost like a free-writing exercise or a conversation with myself. I think I needed that.

If you're still reading at this point, I'm very sorry, but thank you very much.

<3