Things I used to forget before I had a place to write them down...etc.

From Et cetera

Hi there! Nice to see you.

Let me extend to you a warm and friendly welcome. My name is Randall and this is Et cetera, my humble little corner of the internet. As you no doubt have noticed, this website is quite lengthy and composed almost entirely of text. My job here is to first of all tell you a little bit about this page and its contents and once I'm done, I'm going to leave it up to you to decide whether or not you'd like to stay for the rest of it. It can be a lot of reading at first glance and in this little introduction here, I'm not going to advertise anything about it that isn't true. Naturally, there are a great many people who are disinterested with everything about this page. For example, if you prefer the excitement of rich colors, humorous videos and delightful pictures, there's a vast expanse of websites out there chock-full of flash movies and dynamic photo albums just waiting for you to view them. This is not one of them. That's fine but for those of you who have gotten this far into the paragraph without turning away because you are perhaps merely having doubts as to whether or not this is a tremendous waste of your time, I encourage you to stay for at least the rest of the introduction and then decide whether or not to read the second installment. After all, I would prefer that you stay. Like everyone else, I appreciate it when someone reads what I write and takes an interest in what I do. It's a vainglory we are all guilty of and why not?

Et cetera is, in many ways, self-explanatory. However, for the sake of clarification, I feel that I should be more specific than that and give you the whole story as I know it. The very first manifestation of this website actually began during the summer of 1999, partly out of boredom, but mostly because I have always spent the bulk of my leisure time creating things. I have a long history of starting on various "projects," mostly for my own amusement, that range from story writing to choreographing swordplay for cheaply made home movies. I've always been of the creative variety; whether my creations are of any quality or not is hit-and-miss. As I usually do when approaching something new, I entered the world of webpage creation headstrong with little or no concern of how to do it or what kind of content people might be interested in. When it began, there was no flashy banner, no links, no title and precious little formatting. I had just decided to write for awhile. Write stuff just off the top of my head. Over time, Et cetera became one long, uninterrupted stream of consciousness, arranged sloppily into numbered "entries." The topics were, as you might be able to imagine, extremely diverse because it was all improvised commentary on whatever I happened to be thinking about at the time. Some people read it. In fact, many people read it. I continued updating Et cetera regularly for about a year and by then it had grown to a monstrous eighty-two entries in length and expanded to twenty-two different sub-sections. Furthermore, it had become a network of websites. A few friends of mine agreed to hop on the bandwagon and soon enough there were three other webpages like mine (cleverly titled DiEt cetera, FrEt cetera and QuiEt cetera) within this bizarre Et cetera empire.

For all due purposes, neither of those original pages exist anymore. Eventually, they were all abandoned, as websites sometimes are. Even Et cetera itself began to lose my interest after awhile and although I'm sure this has been enough history to bore even the driest of personalities, I feel that I should mention something about that old website of mine--namely, why it doesn't exist anymore and how it is different from what you are reading today. I did not stop updating Et cetera because I had run out of things to talk about. Instead, it was because when I read what I had written, it began to look just a little bit too much like an angsty teenager's online journal. I thought then that perhaps what I was doing wasn't creative after all and was really just another mundane electronic diary in disguise. Surely, it was disheartening to think that all that text, even if it was unique for awhile, had gone on to transform into what everybody else was doing. It's true. Everywhere you go on the internet, somebody's got a personal page with a journal. Hell, there are entire websites dedicated to hosting other peoples' journals. As I said before, I am of the creative variety and suddenly coming to the conclusion that I had put all this effort into creating something that wasn't so creative after all was a bit of a let-down. It was then that I felt that the entire project no longer deserved my dedication and updates to the website became more and more scarce until they stopped altogether. Boo hoo.

So now, with a little help from all that history, we're right back where we started. I'm here to tell you what this webpage is about and you're here to decide whether or not you'd like to read it. This reincarnation of Et cetera will be similar in many ways to what began many summers ago. The difference is that I am starting this website with a clear idea of what I want it to become. As before, it is still a whole bunch of text broken up into numbered entries, but it should be clear that what I am writing here is not a journal. I won't be commenting on what happens in my personal life and I won't be saying things like "I'm hungry" or "It's cold in this room" in the middle of a point. Instead, these entries consist of the things that I think about, my reactions to things that other people think about and, hopefully, some things for you to think about. I considered referring to these entries as small essays but that isn't really right either. There is no format with which I plan to write them and there won't necessarily always be a distinct topic either. It's just commentary on what I think about transposed into text as clearly and accurately as I can muster.

Introductions have a pretty poor track-record when it comes to being fun and exciting and for that I apologize. Much like reading a book, though, you can rarely be completely enthralled by the story within the first two pages. You have to be patient. Putting myself in your shoes for a moment and re-reading what I have written, I get the vague impression that all the other entries that follow must sound awfully boring, which is why I have to say one more thing before moving on here. I am not a boring person. I used to think that maybe I was but now I've decided that I had just confused "boring" with "quiet". Socially, I suppose I am quite boring because it is assumed that anyone who doesn't talk much must have nothing to talk about. However, I want to make it clear to you as a reader that right now, we are not in a social situation. You will read this entry long after it has been completed. The significance of this is that were we in a social situation right now, you probably would be bored and I wouldn't be nearly as talkative as I am on this page. Outside of the social community, however, it is not what you say or do that dictates whether or not you're a boring person. It's what you think. Which is what Et cetera is: it's what I think about. Of course, just because I don't think I'm a boring person and I don't think that the contents of this page are boring doesn't mean that you won't. There's only one way to find out, anyway and if you're curious, please continue on, or maybe just skim a few entries. Some of them are fun, some are serious and many probably make no sense at all. Do whatever you want, I can't stop you but these are the things I have chosen to write about and it's pretty much all I have to offer. Take it or leave it.

Thanks for dropping by.