TL;DR: Why writing a blog was always going to happen: I met a whole lot of people that had a whole lot of things they cared about – I wanted that. One day I felt compelled to write and it’s always been something I enjoy.
Why now: This project makes for a good documentary and I’m scared of YouTube comments; I met another whole lot of people who normalised sharing creative content; I want to practice to write a book that I’ve only recently had inspiration for.

Following the fairly technical “Utah! Get me two!” post and given I’m pretty sure most people reading are more into reading blogs as a hobby than creating electronics projects, this is a good time to post about my blogging motivations.
This is a long one and attention holding photos as spacers were tough to come by, maybe take a few goes at it. The song titles are separators.

I could go into detail about how I always enjoyed writing, appreciated well-written literature and have been told I “have a book in me” but I suspect that these narratives are intrinsic to most blog-readers’ lives too and I doubt my ability to write about them in a way that gets a reader excited about relating to it. More likely is it reading as a boring and self-absorbed account of my perceived uniqueness. So I won’t do that. Instead I’ll skip ahead to 2018 and the summer I grew up:

Reminiscing about childhoods makes great fodder for easy-going conversations because most of us have broadly similar experiences; grown ups are much more unique and thus adulthood makes for more interesting and stimulating stories. And I didn’t start to grow up until the summer of 2019, at 20 years old. I moved to Wales for my first full-time job. All the responsibilities of adulthood set in: If I don’t cook I don’t eat? I have to develop a sixth “drying weather” sense to know when to hang my washing out? Wait, tax? – Realising the answer to all that and more is YES certainly helped me become a functioning adult and equipped me with the ability to go through the motions as a human being, but I (we) need more than that. I (we) need to grow.

1 – Everyone Blooms

My granda always had sweet pea growing in his garden, as you walked from the back door to the patio there was one moment along the path where the sweet perfume commanded you to look left to the wall of colour in your peripheral vision. You never looked right. The signature of the muted but deeply complex marbled lilac petals in the corner of your eye is engrained in their fragrance so that you immediately know where to turn. Like how you know to look at the green shop front when you smell the herby, savoury delight that is Subway^TM bread – not a sponsor^TM. The way we planted the sweet pea every year would ensure the type of foliage upon the trellising that looks fuller than is naturally possible, enwreathing the evanescent wooden lattice behind it. The illusion created was such that when you stood facing the wall of green, lilac, white and pink, it occupied your entire field of vision, stretching beyond your peripherals and so thick it was impermeable to light from behind. But more than just being optically overwhelming, the natural perfume filled your nostrils and sent a second sense into a trance. A perfume that is so sweet and engrossing, yet gentle and light that only nature could conjure it – only the same force that forms our perception of the world could create something so perfectly engaging to our senses. My favourite sensation it produced, though, is the illusion of the ground somehow occupying two axes at once. Generally, we know if we start digging in one spot all we’ll ever hit is dirt; infinitely, incessantly, inexorably present dirt.

*Apologies, geographers and archaeologists, I’m about to be real offensive*.

It’s that innate knowledge that no matter how much effort anyone puts in all that they’ll find is dirt which gives the sense of grounding we need – something secure to depend on – the ground is beneath us, no matter what anyone does. Now, I can’t begin to articulate why the wall of sweat pea appeared as a second, vertically oriented ground but I do know that staring it down I always felt that if I tried to put my hand through it, all I would ever be able to feel was the supple petals and ridged stems of the flowers as they continued further than I could ever reach. There was no ‘beyond’ the sweet pea, just like there is no meaningful ‘beyond’ the ground – yea, Australia’s down there somewhere but I’ll never be able to reach it through the ground. Giving myself over to believing that I was facing the ground I could feel a weightlessness come over me, the only force I was aware of was my own breath pulling in the perfumed air, which was just as weightless as me. All these sensations rose up even having helped measure and erect the trellising myself and knowing that the plants were only planted one layer deep.

The trellising never went the full way to the ground – damp soil and bugs would quickly rot the thin wood from the bottom up. So each sweet pea plant needed a single support pole to climb up in its infancy and ensure it grew to reach the trellising. When it did, it could then go off and climb along any combination of slats it chose, sometimes using other plants to support itself in an effort to reach a specific area where it felt it belonged.

Are you ahead of me on this one? Probably. I’ll say it anyway; humans are like sweet pea. Those early stages we are well confined by whatever path of best support is in front of us – usually the path is being “destined to become a lawyer/engineer/business person/vet/entertainer” and following a route through education that ends with that career. There’s enough going on as a child to have your time fully occupied even when you’re just going through the motions – not giving too much thought to the fact that life might not just be a linear journey up that initial support structure. You don’t begin to truly know yourself until you graduate to the trellising. Sure, you can keep following a straight path up and probably grow to be the tallest plant; but the others, having taken more convoluted paths with twists and turns and becoming intertwined with their fellow plants will find themselves in the sun more often and bearing more flowers.

2 – Lean on me

When I moved to Wales (in summer 2018) I had most certainly graduated to the trellising, but I was also just trying to be the tallest plant. Or in my case the best candidate for an engineering job. The reason I moved to Wales was for a placement as part of a scholarship I had won which had very promising career opportunities; I guess I was succeeding as a pretty tall string of green vines. Pardon the ego.

Every year there’s a summer seminar held for the 150-200 scholarship winners, spread across different universities and sponsoring companies. I don’t think I ever bragged a lot about my success, but internally at least I firmly believed that winning an IET scholarship was the pinnacle of anyone’s university career – I’m sure that has spilled over into ill-timed boasts every now and then, and probably still does. Having dinner and breakfast with the other students made me realise how little of life I had experienced though. Given what we all had in common I thought it was going to be a great ego-inflation event where we could congratulate ourselves by congratulating each other. Shamefully, I think I actually wanted that. But no, while I feasted on fancily arranged, cubed vegetables and pretended to enjoy red wine, my ego starved.

“What have you enjoyed most about university so far?”

I thought was a good opener to invite the response:

“Getting a scholarship of course!”

The whole table would pause and then, in unison:

“Me too!!”
*uproarious laughter with people in the room, implying laughter at people not in the room*

And we’d mutter our boasts and self-assurances over the scraping and clanging of me manipulating my butter knife and dessert fork, each of which in the improper hand, to investigate my starter of miscellaneous fanciness.
The responses I actually got:

“Well I spent a semester studying at a partner university in *insert obscure, impressive sounding place* it was mind-expanding,”
“Oh I started a business based off a project I worked on and we’re doing well.”
“I got engaged last month and I love him so much.”
“I’m president of this society and that club and I’ve made them so much better.”

I’ve reassessed my approach to university in a major way twice; these replies inspired the first instance. I realised I had always looked at the clubs and societies as either frivolous distractions for people who came to uni for the craic or a means to get a leadership role for the CV. But the way these people explained what they had enjoyed about university made me realise I had got it completely wrong. I want to stress these people were genuinely passionate about all these things; reading my vaguely worded sample responses back it sounds like I’m trying to make them sound facetious – not the case.

This is the point where I started to first reach out, away from my straight vertical slat and see if the other plants around me could support my weight. Not only where they up to the task but now they would point me in the direction of slats that might interest me and even suggest twisting together to support each other as we grew towards it. This is the time I began to really pay attention to myself and other people, listening with the hope of being inspired to action and then acting even with a very probable risk of failure. I was sickened at the thought of continuing to just go through the motions until I got to the end goal of being an engineer and only then taking the other aspects of my life as seriously as my career. It was a real awakening. One inspiration that came from just listening to myself is wanting to write. I know that was a convoluted story with a very concise conclusion but it was truly just like that for me. One day I wanted to be a writer but didn’t know it and the next day I knew it. It was just a matter of being asked – like when someone asks if you’d like a biscuit. So I started looking for inspiration for something to write about, initially I assumed my first written material would be a novel but evidently not.

3 – Up on Melancholy Hill

In Tenby, Pembrokeshire, there’s a hill with magnificent views of the water. I brought a lot of books with me to occupy myself in Wales and ordinarily Castle Hill would be the perfect place to read them but I never got through a single novel there. That entire summer any time I was alone on that hill I was obsessed with this new outlook I had on life and trying to dream up new things I wanted to apply myself to. One evening in particular the water was just one, very low, undulating wave reflecting what was a pristine sky. A small boat was bobbing up and down quite far out and I got thinking about the tide and how much I loved the Pembrokeshire coast. I imagined myself down there in the water, feeling it gently rise and fall from just below to just above my knees and back again while I looked around at the colourfully aged cliff faces. That inspired the first thing I ever seriously wrote. A very short ‘poem’ (or just verse? I’m not sure on the semantics) quickly jotted in my notes app, just for me. I thought (and still think frankly) it was pretty good. But I wasn’t (and still am not) convinced. Regardless, when it came time to leave Wales I wanted to leave something behind; the people I lived with there deserved to know how much I loved their home and that without them it wouldn’t be their home and so I wouldn’t have loved it so much. So I wrote the poem inside a farewell card, bought some presents and one evening left it all on the kitchen table. I should have called them in then and shared the moment with them, but the thought of being able to see their face as they read it, contorting in that “I’m not sure what this is but I know I don’t like it” fashion which is always followed by a facetious smile and an “oh, that’s nice” was too much to bear. So I went to my room and came down later when I knew they had been in the kitchen some time and had a chance to formulate a polite response to my nonsense. I think they liked it, though. It went:

A Smile
The same tide that has formed the natural beauty all around me
Now moves through me
And across my face
The most natural of beauties, now grows

So that’s the very long story of me learning that I want to write, resolving that I can write and attempting to write. Since then I haven’t written much else but inspirations have popped up here and there and a blog was always going to happen. More on that in the next part. This is a pretty good time to stop reading and come back another day if you haven’t already.

4 – Big Bird

Why now? Three reasons. First up is undertaking the Arduino project. I’ve always said if I was born 5 years earlier I think I could have had a stab at being one of the initial engineering/curiosity channels on YouTube (VSauce, Veritasium, Practical Engineering). In reality I could start now and if I was good enough I’d be successful but it’s easier to just say I missed the window. Even with this belief that I’d have to be exceptionally good to gain any sort of significant viewership, my first thought as parts started to arrive for this alarm clock project was that it would make for a good video series on YouTube. I don’t want to spoil the illusion but at this stage the alarm clock is pretty much built, the blog is lagging well behind and even now at the end of the build I believe the whole process would have played out well on camera. I’ve used so many engineering principals that it would make for a great long form talk covering a bit of everything, plus there’s the sensationalism of tests ending in fires, laptop crashes and board meltdowns. I’d certainly want to watch it if the almighty YouTube algorithm decided that I wanted to watch it.

However, I’m terrified of that prospect; YouTube has comments and an unpredictable audience of critics. I love YouTube, it’s easily my main source of video entertainment and has been for a while but the comments are ruthless and I don’t have the stomach for it. I always thought the toxicity was overplayed by creators but then I realised I was just reading the comments YouTube and a democratic and mainly well-adjusted viewership allowed to float to the top. Go on any video and sort comments by newest instead of most relevant – you’ll be horrified. Factor in the fact that the videos would be badly edited and include my stream of thought commentary as I go about pretty much every task in the wrong way and it becomes easy to see where my anxiety about the whole ordeal comes from. There’s also the fact that YouTube comments are more personal, criticism is always voiced in a way that implies the creator is inherently flawed and incapable of change. Writing a blog, I can make it much more removed from myself. I absolutely invite criticism here as I’m trying to develop my writing skills, if nothing else for future posts. It’s much easier to see criticism here as a constructive judgement on one aspect of myself, an aspect that I’m not only capable of changing but am actively seeking ways to change because I know it’s flawed. That’s about the most straight-forward reason here. I started the blog for this project because I was too scared to start a YouTube channel.

As an aside – I do feel as though a blog would have happened later, more than likely with music providing the narrative somehow or serving as a more professional insight into my character. It was always the plan to make a blog at some stage. However, I always wanted to use it as a reason to learn how to develop my own website from scratch. I probably will do that at some stage, possibly making a more professional, career oriented site, but I saw the opportunity with writing about this Arduino project and took the quick and easy option of WordPress. For now.

5 – Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus

“Why now?” Reason two: Since that moment at the seminar where I found inspiration in other students and up until very recently I’ve been pretty insufferable in my own opinion. That internal shift of beginning to look for and be more open to inspiration lead to an external shift of often appearing disinterested, aloof and bordering on stand-offish at times; counter-intuitive, I thought. Basically, I managed my desire to want to learn and attempt new, interesting things in a very immature way. I started to get very hung up on the pointlessness of small talk and expected people to just immediately jump in with an inspirational story to tell me. When I felt a conversation was of little value I often shifted to put less effort into it and let my mind wander to whatever the next big thing in my life was because I just had so many important things going on (/s). Even when I met new people who I knew had a story to tell and who I absolutely wanted to have as part of my life I was a horrible conversationalist. Selfishness-induced, adult onset social incompetence. I lead with presumptions and had no issue appearing as if my mind was somewhere else; supposedly somewhere much grander. I still can be a bit self-absorbed, and no doubt I had been at times before Last Last Fall, but a lot of reading and reflection has at least allowed me to notice when I do wrong.

Thankfully a lot of people in my life are bright enough that they can swing even the most lack-lustre conversation into a deep exploration of some amazing facet to their life. Included in those people are a lot of people I met during that year after coming back from Wales as I incorporated myself into a lot of new groups in line with my no longer latent passions. Through meeting people who publish creative things, it normalises writing a blog, just like meeting people who enjoy cooking normalises spending a weekend experimenting in the kitchen. I don’t think I’ve ever consciously shrunk parts of myself in an effort to avoid being different or ‘weird’ but in retrospect I can conclude that a lot of what I have done is very ‘normal’, as defined by the people I have always had surrounding me. I would never write a blog because none of my friends write one. What’s the point in doing something if it won’t help me find my Bravado and get the applause, the approval, the things that make me go oh. I don’t think having met more people that share their creative work has necessarily convinced me that I now have an audience who will like my writing but it has certainly normalised the act of writing a blog and sharing it with friends.

So I’m very thankful that I’ve met such a variety of people who have persisted as part of my life despite me taking myself very seriously for the last while and being very analytical about everything they say, trying to involve myself somehow.

I’ve picked up a lot of habits recently, reading a lot on mindfulness and communication skills, being conscious of the present, reflecting at the end of the day, even yoga and, most importantly, talking a lot more. I still catch myself sometimes not engaging in a conversation the way I should but at least now I’m catching myself on it. Now is the first time I think in my life that I’ve been so acutely conscious of my own unique perception of the world and been happy with it. Now is a good time for me to start creating content that goes on the internet. Forever.

6 – These Words Are Everything

The last reason for the blog being written now is that I very much want to write a book. As I said, I’ve always thought a novel was brewing but inspiration for something so substantial was lacking. I have creative thoughts where I’ll imagine a scene, or a way to describe something in great detail, or short aspects of a story/character which will pop up quite often. However, an overarching theme capable of forming a storyline has proven elusive until very recently. I came up with a concept that I think I would love to read a novel about and I know all the little tidbits I have noted over the last 2 years can add flair to a story that I would appreciate; so I sat down to write.
Apparently it doesn’t work that way.

This is why I don’t think a potential audience is a major factor in writing this blog. The biggest reason I have started it is because I want to learn how to write for an audience. Not because I think I already know how. I want to have shorter pages that I put through multiple revisions on the off-chance that someone else reads them, I want to practice re-reading and re-writing until I actually enjoy what I’ve written myself and I want all the records stored somewhere so that I can reflect on them forever. I really, really want to write a good book, even if I’m the only one that ever reads it, which I know is very probable.

The concept I want to write about is one of my absolute favourite things to appear in other art forms and I want to do it justice. If I finish the book and when I re-read it realise that the whole thing is just poorly approached and poorly executed, I’m not sure how I would manage that realisation. Quite possibly I’d burn the manuscript and never try to apply myself to anything new ever again. Maybe move to Nepal and live as a mountain goat. So while all the above reasoning is absolutely true and relevant, most of it would have been true and relevant to any blog I started. This blog is the way it is, with liberties taken to use figurative language excessively and go off on tangents, because some day I’d like to read a book I’ve written and be proud of it. This is practise.

There you have it, the main reasons I can think of for my writing of this blog. Next up I’ll start into actually commentating on the build process of the clock. This post was pinned for a later date but I think I needed to make up for the excessive electricity chat in the last post, at least momentarily.

Note to self: Learn when to use “whom”, it almost certainly applies to this post.