reflection

Dear Readers,

Hello, it’s me here. So it’s been quite a week, and I have been bouncing all over the place,and tangentially so has my digital project, but in a great, creative-energy bursting way. This week, for the THIRD time— I changed my WP theme on my site. The first one changed because it was a bit too retro. The second one was a minimalist theme but parts of it crashed when I switched to https, so it seemed best to switch again. That was all before this week; this week, I enacted my new theme, which itself took a while of reconceptualizing the site’s presentation. The content still needs to be put into there and I’m working on making a video now. I hope something of all these dreams gets done this week.

On to my more important story I’ve been dying to share with all of you ever since it hit me sometime in the wee hours of the night sometime in the middle of the week: I’m dropping the acts and the masks. I’m Ikra— yep, that’s the girl behind Fern and everything I’ve posted on here. I tried to find every way to run from myself, and I didn’t really realize I was doing that. First, it was the desire to narrate my project from St. Valentine’s voice— that quickly became impossible with my taste for literalism. I’m not a Saint, how could I even pretend without doing a bad job? Then, it was Fern speaking— but making a whole new Twitter account to just say everything I could say on my actual Twitter account to my class + 100s of other followers (many my friends) looking back just sounds ridiculous. If Fern is just Ikra, why not just be Ikra (on Twitter at least where she already existed). Why was I trying to hide my own life from myself and people who knew me so much? I’m still not sure, but my guesses: I doubt so much of what I do, am super conscious about it, and putting myself out there scares me. It’s an act of vulnerability, and well, I guess I just have a hard time being open with people.

I’m not really one to trust

but once place I have been trusting is in this reflection process and it has allowed me to be more open about a lot of what has been going on behind the scenes of my Valentine’s Day investigation. I’ve also seen the fruits of these process blogs, especially when— immediately after I had that lightbulb moment this week of using my actual personal Twitter account I’ve had for years @Ikrathinks— the funny thing was that  the first thing I thought about was how I couldn’t wait to share this in my process reflection blog this weekend. Yes, seriously— I even came up with a name for my process blog then and there…something like “coming of age” through the course (hence, this blog’s name). In the becoming of my project has been the becoming of myself. And this little spot on my domain is the sweet-spot that integrates the what I do with who I am, the place where I get to authentically speak and has become more and more dear to me as time has gone on. “That special little place” we all have somewhere in- or out-side of us has been, for me, this place, these process reflection blogs.

Alright, enough mushy stuff now. TTYL, got a lotta work to do in the finishing up of my website (for whatever finished means).

Sincerely,

Ya girl Ikra

The Face Behind Fern 

Hello ENG306,

I did some user testing of my site today. I am going to be moving to a new theme again because of a technical error but haven’t implemented that new theme yet, so my site was rather dry. From it, I realized that the appearance of the site was much better than the previous one I had, but my users (my two sisters) were generally confused about what my site was about. I tried to avoid doing most of the explaining, but it turned out that I needed to explain it to them after a while, so they could understand what I was trying to do.

User testing is so incredibly helpful, and I hope to do more of it in the coming weeks. I learned that I need to be very clear and straightforward because having a site on Valentine’s Day is already a bit different and it is isn’t obvious WHAT kind of information I am trying to convey. I got some good feedback of making sure I clearly, explicitly spell out what I’m trying to do in a sentence or two somewhere on the landing page.

I also received feedback on the new idea I’ve been working with on calling my site something like: Valentine’s Day: Jekyl & Hyde, to capture both the authentic sentimentality and value of the holiday but also the darker sides such as its imperialistic spread to other countries and how St. Valentine’s name has been co-opted.

Until Next Time I’ll be Swimming in the V-Day Love,

Fern

Hello ______________ (Fill in Your Own Name in Your Head Here),

So I’ve always known I’m a perfectionist, but I think it was really only in this week that I saw how much of a paralyzing problem it can be.  I almost didn’t want to go to class because I was so ashamed that I didn’t have a complete rough draft of my site content ready. I felt behind. Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, I was encouraged by professors to still share what I have and not let that discourage me from coming to class. Suzanne, one my professors, encouraged me to embrace the unfinished, the partial, the not-quite-there yet and to still put my work out there. Her words, calling me to resist the urge toward perfection, have stuck with me ever since, and I hope they always will. In that moment when I read them, they struck a chord with me somewhere inside. “You’re not perfect, Fern, and you don’t have to be.” Wouldn’t life be so much better if I just took off those ridiculously-heavy shoulder-straps of perfectionism (that I have placed on myself btw)… and just took a breath, did what I could, and kept trying to better?

I don’t even know what more I could really ask of myself or anyone else.

It turned out that going to class this week was one of the best decisions ever. I got really good feedback on a lot things I was hung up over like my site name and how to arrange the content better, and it definitely wouldn’t have happened had Suzanne not uplifted me with her words and encouraged me to embrace myself and my work where I and it stood and to keep going. Thank you Suzanne and to people like her, from miserable perfectionists all around the world in need of taking off those shoulder-straps.

So all in all, some hard but necessary lessons learned this week. If I could just learn to inhabit the idea that I’m imperfect, flawed, and unfinished— and thus my work, reflecting me, will be that too, then I would really alleviate a lot of unnecessary stress in my life.

Until Next Time When I’ll Still Be Resisting Perfectionism,

Fern

Hello ENG306,

As I write this reflection, it has just hit me that I completely forgot to tweet for today! Wow, I guess I’ll begin with reevaluating my social media strategy. I now have a new Twitter @Fernthinks where I tweet about my project and engage with @dayofvalentine, my initial Twitter account that tossed me into an existential identity crisis for a week. I noticed that I either kind of tweet a bunch at once when I get on Twitter, or I just forget to get on for days (despite having the app on my phone and being logged into both of my accounts). My new strategy: I’m going to put alerts in my phone reminding me to Tweet and I’m going to try to make it a habit to come up with content for the Tweet before each class. This is because I have also realized that when I get ready to post something….ah! I never know what to post sometimes, and it feels like I’m just tweeting for the sake of not looking like an inactive user.

This week, we did a lot of prototyping and some user experience testing on Monday. I’ve found myself struggling with balancing the FORM/DESIGN component and the CONTENT part of the site. While I’ve been tampering a lot with my site and how I want it to look, I have not been dedicating NEARLY as much time to writing thorough, precise, clean paragraphs of content. I guess it’s just been harder for me to do it given I am not writing a paper. However, I like the challenges and new territory of digital scholarship and I’m looking forward to this writing intensive weekend I am about to have.

Cheers to that~

Until next time to the three people who have made it down here,

I am only more and more convinced no one is reading these minus my professors,

but I’ll sign it off anyways,

Sincerely,

Fern

Hello ENG306!

This week was a tumultuous one…probably most obviously evidenced by the fact that my reflection post is coming in a little later than usual. The week was a challenging one in many ways— we had a CSS workshop, we built our first prototype, we continued our social media posting. On all three fronts, I experienced major challenges and difficulties. However, I’m hoping that this next week will be a little better because I’ve gotten my “feet wet” with challenging concepts.

I really loved playing around with CSS animations and realizing that learning a bit of short code could enable me to have really effects on my website; however, I still struggled in doing the homework as well as the activities during the workshop. However, it strikes me that this is probably a good thing. Struggling with new concepts reminded me again of the learning curve, feelings of discomfort, and general “stuck” feeling that comes along with growing and getting better at something.

I also met with Sundi to discuss the anxiety I was facing around my social media. I’d like to dedicate the rest of my reflection post to this major challenge I’m having now. Okay, disclaimer: I haven’t been posting MWF like I planned to. The first Wednesday I simply missed because I forgot, but then after that, I just have come into a state of slight paralysis despite my helpful conversation with Sundi. In my social media (and my website), I am taking on the voice of St. Valentine to narrate the holiday legacy that has grown out of him, in his name. While this started out as a light, helpful way to narrate a historical narrative (or so I thought), I actually began to take the task of impersonating a saint very seriously. I mean it wasn’t easy for me to post when I had no idea what a saint would be saying in this day and age, and I felt utterly unqualified to say anything. I’m no saint (clearly) and I don’t even know how to sound like one. Sundi helped me come up with a great solution: Fern gets on social media also! All of these thoughts I was (and still am) having in my head, I could then bring out into my conversations between St. Valentine (on Twitter) and Fern (on Twitter). I set out with great ambition to do that and then just kept thinking about it…as in I was still feeling weird about my prototype and how to do this whole thing of narrating from the voice of Saint.

After being lost in my haunting thoughts, I had another helpful conversation with a mentor in Germany who’s really good at imagining what a person would sound like today. He gave me some pointers and helped me get a sense of how I could go about having St. Valentine narrate his own holiday— so that has brought me here. And I am now going to finally get out of my head and onto Twitter to make that account.

And hey, on the bright side of things, I guess silence for a couple days isn’t that bad on a social media account of a saint either, if it was purposeful (which it was more the result of my paralysis). I am optimistic of a good week ahead! Seeds are being planted in the garden of our digital sites now, let’s see the flowers that spring out of them.

Until Next Time (Next Week Really) Eng306,

Sincerely,

Ikra