In my early twenties, I had a web log, or what those kids called it back then, a blog.
The blog was called “little, yellow, different.” The phrase was a slogan for 90’s pain medication Nuprin.
It was also called out in the 1992 SNL movie Wayne’s World. Mike Wong, a friend in college, called me that once when we were playing video games, and it always stuck, I guess.
Publishing any sort of content on the internet just wasn’t a thing back then. Folks had homepages, welcoming you to the World Wide Web, with animated gifs reminding people that the page was under construction. But then, someone had allowed the ability to update their web sites with the push of a button. It seemed neat, and I was really into designing web pages, so I gave blogging a shot. I wrote about the sandwich I had for lunch. I published my many quarter-life crises. I’d take notes about my near-daily interactions with mom, then parrot everything back to the internet, maybe given a lot of space when it came to the translating.
Blogging did a lot of good things for me back in the day. It helped my writing skills, gave me a venue to talk about things and people in my life. It was crowdsourced therapy. It shot my self-esteem through the roof - suddenly I wasn’t the weird tubby Asian guy; I was the weird tubby Asian guy who wrote funny things. I was okay with this.
A couple of years passed, and with it the popularity to my website. My father learned about the blog’s existence thanks to the growing demand of Google and vanity searches, and after every post, I would get long Microsoft Word documents from Dad in poorly-written English: what you are doing is wrong, basically. I’m disappointed in you. Blogging would become too stressful to maintain, and I moved on to other things. Besides, by that point, the hottest thing was to tweet, or vine, or stream yourself playing Pokemon.
I’m older now, in my early 40s. I moved to Miami seven years ago. I’m a little battered and bruised for the wear, and as of this very moment I’m on a sabbatical, trying to figure out what it’s all about. Life, happiness, that stuff. And I’ve missed the spontaneity of sitting down and writing about anything that was on my mind. I tried writing on Medium.com, but now that the website is a bunch of self-help articles and listicles, maybe a personal newsletter is in order. God knows I still have plenty of things to write about. Like my parents, who still do funny things; they’re just, like, funny with a side of “oh my god, you’re getting frailer and could die at any minute.”
For a hot second, I was going to be pretentious and call this newsletter something like “minuscule, xanthous, and incommensurable.” But it was pretty apparent that no one would memorize that. Also, that sounds contentious as fuck, the same way food writers tell their readers their pasta water “should taste like the ocean.” Okay pal, whatever, just say you just added a lot of salt. So the original name - little, yellow, different - it is.
Oh, and I’ll probably set up a subscriber-only model. Looking back, I should have sold out early and often.