Here are two elusive things.
In 1996-1997, I was taught a primary-level cross-disciplinary curriculum for “gifted” (cringe) students in a small pull-out program. The curriculum implements a frame story that may involve several children traveling to a distant land (it may have been another country, or perhaps an imaginary dimension) and meeting a girl named Zara who wore a Claddagh ring. The program included an audio-cassette reading of the story and several accompanying songs, which may have centered around common aphorisms like “look before you leap.”
Despite all of the *waves hand* “work” from the past year-ish, I haven’t always felt so keen on remembering things. But this is a memory I’ve been missing for a long time. I’ve been writing about it for twenty years. I reminisced in AIM conversations about it that I have saved to this day.
I didn’t start searching for it in earnest until a few months ago, and now I am apparently attempting to make up lost time and opportunity with my frenzy. I sought out and contacted the instructor who taught this to me so many years ago. I paid for scanned records from the school archives. I have been searching through conference proceedings and educator periodicals from the early 1990’s.
If you see some wild-keyboarded poster out there begging and yapping about stupid Zara and her ring, I apologize. It’s me, and I don’t have a problem at all.*
Once, probably in 2003 or 2004, I was clicking around on personal websites and found an incredible art project that combined images and pop-up windows and hidden links in image maps and secret text in the status bar and IN THE SOURCE CODE with a nonlinear, abstract/poetic story, or perhaps collection of essays, or whatever they were.
I’ve since come across several websites that do similar incredible and wacky things (wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, cubertown.neocities.org, lhohq.info), but never that one. I don’t remember anything about the url (other than sometimes even the filenames contained poetic text that built upon itself in nesting folders), the creator, the name, or even what it was about.
I’ve thought about it many times over the years and have always hoped to create something as wild and involved and wonderful. Now I want to do all of those tricks and pretend they’re mine, but they never were. Certainly I could never make a standard early-00’s alert window seem so beautiful.
I can’t remember how I found it. Was it through a graphics tutorial website – something like “Touchstone”– and what the fuck was that URL?– or maybe through link exchanges like Provance? Or a message board like fu.CK? Did I just spend a whole lifetime sitting inside, opening commenter link after hostee link after affiliate blog, quietly spectating an ever-shifting community, until I found it?
These memories are too vague to be helpful, but I’ve been trying so hard to regain them, pacing desperately amidst their foggy edges. What are all of the things I will never find, and how do I describe them and my search? Maybe it’s a trick– the harder I look, the more I try to focus on my memory to pull more things out, the fuzzier and fuzzier things become. Grasping harder only pushes them away.