Take II

So this is my second online journal.

The first one, also called The Purple of Life, lived at http://strass.diary-x.com. Diary-X crashed and burned rather spectacularly in February 2006 and has gone to the great server cemetery in the sky, where it maintains a death grip on about one-third of the entries I wrote between March 2002 and December 2005. The other two-thirds, luckily, were cached on Yahoo and preserved on the Internet Wayback Machine, for which I am profoundly grateful. You see, in almost four years of writing, I had never bothered to back up my online journal. And yes, I’ve learned my lesson. (If you’re looking for my recovered Diary-X archives, I’m planning to place them on this new site. I just need to figure out how to organize them.)

I’ve landed at Blogger for a few reasons: one, it’s easy to post entries and photos here, and two, it’s a reliable site that’s been around for awhile and only seems to be improving. I don’t know much about coding and html, and frankly, I’m not all that interested in learning. So the simplicity of the site is a plus. And actually, I don’t intend to post entries in a “blog” format—you won’t find quippy two-line entries about what I ate for lunch or my reaction to the latest episode of The Daily Show. I’m not looking to amass hundreds of comments from readers, although of course I’d love to hear from you! My plan is to keep my old format of long-ish, essay-ish, journal-ish pieces of writing. (But I do hope to write more frequently than once a month—sadly, I was pretty lazy about posting during my last few months at Diary-X.)

If you’re brand-new to The Purple of Life, you should know that purple isn’t my favorite color. The expression actually comes from an amazingly wise woman and writer who taught creative nonfiction workshops at my alma mater. I adored Nancy N. and her work. She wrote about dying silk to make her own wedding dress and about riding a train through wintertime Russia and about life-changing notes left on kitchen tables, and I sort of worshipped her, truth be told. Soon after I graduated from college, she sent me an email that ended with this guidance: “Hold on to the purple in your life.” And I knew exactly what she meant, even though I’d never heard the expression before. That purple is the richness, the shadow, the mystery, the beauty and the bruises, the deep, dark, dusky places of life. It’s a candle in an Advent wreath, a juicy summer plum, a Kool-Aid mustache above a child’s lip, a queen’s velvet robe, the color that I wished my bedroom was when I was young. It’s what I find when I remember to keep my eyes open, and it’s what I want to write about.