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In the Beginning There Was Confusion…

So…somehow I’m writing this: the first post of the website. But…when will this find itself published and accessible to all? No idea. Part of what I’ve gone through in the process of thinking and building this website is a glimpse into something that I can fall prey to at times.

When I was just thinking about this website and what this place could hold, then I was more or less overwhelmed. Some things were sure, like I want it to be really lightweight, it should be totally libre/free, and it should be a static website. But that didn’t really stop me from overwhelming myself more. Should I do all of this in my newly customized tool, Emacs? Or should I just stick to my old friend vim, writing markdown files and use a static site generator? If so, what static site generator? Hakyll, or the popular Hugo? I like functional languages, so I should go for Hakyll? But at the same time why should I go with the mess, Hugo is simple (at least from what people seem to think usually). Also, I had been going on blogs of tech enthusiasts and… there’s an immense diversity in these kinds of blogs. There are blogs of total libre software enthusiasts who are obsessed with having extremely lightweight websites, then there are people with blogs that are more or less their way of showcasing how much of fancy web developing skills they have garnered and then there are websites that are pretty generic. So I started questioning myself again, should my website be minimal the way I am? Or should I do the best of web developing? Should I forget about everything and just focus on the content, since that’s all that matters, no? Should I use classless CSS? If so, should I just link a CSS or have it local? Should I stick to my lovely TufteCSS or make something from scratch? Shouldn’t I make everything from scratch?

sigh

And that’s where I drop it, at least for the moment. I hope I was able to express the problem. As someone who’s aware and interested in a whole lot of things and methods, it become sometimes virtually impossible for me to find a hierarchical way of making a decision. Now, of course, it doesn’t replicate itself in every decision I make in my life, that’d be quite a disaster. But especially when it comes to things I’m relatively good at, I do suffer from the problem of finding enough reasons to decide what’s better and what’s not. And now one can answer: “well, you wouldn’t know without trying or experience…so just go with whatever it is that seems closer to your experience and then continue.” But is that so easy? Even if so, is that really any good?

So, what is to be done? Part of my problem, obviously, is overthinking. As vague of a concept it might be, it does point at the gesture that I’m thinking more than I “should”. Now, the problem is where to draw the line? That’s kinda the way to fall into the issue, you try to draw a fixed line, and fail to meet it. But without a line, you just keep yourself stuck in the loop? Deadlines, I think, can be effective and that’s what I’ve been trying to implementing when making these little decisions, little as they seem can be extended into taking up a big chunk of your time.

Another such knot related to this website was deciding what `topic’ I should center this website around, should this be my mathematics portfolio, or a place to showcase psychoanalytic knowledge? Or should I make this another FOSS tech blog, reviewing all the software I use. At the end, I decided to indeed knot all of them together and see where I end up with it. So this is going to have a lot of things from fields which are pretty far apart, if not conflicting, to each other. Mathematics, physics, philosophy (of nature, of love, of science, of maths, of langauge, etc.), psychoanalysis, literature, poetry and everything in between is going to be covered here in one way or another. This is also a reflection of how I want to hold myself : as a polymath, working across disciplines to integrate things.

So, that is what this website is going to hold–in one form or another–things that interest me, things that bother me, things that intrigue me, all the while I’m struggling to shape them into the form that I wish to give them. So there will be a lot of brainstorms, frustrations, moments of inspiration and of course doses of procrastination. That’s why I had decided to name this symptoms, and the domain being jouissance, which is what I should be on the way of ;)

To know how to handle, to take care of, to manipulate…to know what to do with the symptom, that is the end of analysis.

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIV: One Knew That it Was a Mistaken Moon on the Wings of Love