Introductions

It’s a bit remarkable how much setting up a blog makes you feel vain.

Hi, I’m Elise. That’s not my legal name. That’s not even my chosen first name. But it’s mine, and I like it, and I’m trying to grow to like other parts of me, too. I’m not a writer by trade or even by hobby. I’ve done a few student op-eds, and I write a little bit on a Substack with my friends, but the thought struck me today to write somewhere by and for myself. Most of the writing I do is essays for school (I have one city planning degree, half of a second, and am teetering on applying for a third) or shitposting online. A few times a year I get the compulsion to journal for a bit, and it never sticks. Routines that have anything more than menial involvement don’t last, not for me. Rare are the times when I get to write for fun, but that’s nobody’s fault but mine.

I have, for a long time, wanted to do something creative. The expression of making something original feels so, for lack of a better word, cool, and infinitely far away from me. For the most part, I just exist through life, and have found a few outlets along the way. I do film photography, I make little jokes online, but those aren’t the same thing. Film is capturing what exists and stripping it out of time and place, especially with a point and shoot, which my primary camera is right now. Shitposting online is cheap heat and doesn’t even belong in the same conversation. Both are fun, neither are enough. If I was happy with where I am, I wouldn’t want to grow.

Writing is about as close as I can get, and even then I’m nothing special. For a year in middle school I skipped art class and hid in the bathroom because I was too frustrated at how bad I was at it. But I could write, and I could get told I was good at writing. This is meant to be two things: an outlet for all the thoughts I find myself wasting as I go through life, and a place to hopefully push myself to create something of meaning. Not meaning as in consequential, just something I can feel like actually took self improvement and parts of myself that I have yet to understand.

There’s no plan right now, nor do I really expect there to be. But it’ll start as a place to just talk and figure it out as I go. Maybe I’ll figure something out along the way, and it’ll be here for you to see.

Yes, the blog title, and my socials, make some reference to ‘puddles’. It’s just a nickname, from the early days of the pandemic when I was starting to have an online presence in earnest. There’s no real origin to it, but it’s perfectly good as a nickname.

What would you like to know?

This is a segment I wish I had done in my column days. Seemed like such an obvious idea. But, no time like the present.

I don’t quite know, yet. But something, and hopefully soon.

See you then.