No Longer

A series of events in the last two days led me to spend the last hour looking for a font that resembled my handwriting.

First, it was that I decided to tweak the layout of my blogger page. I didn't actually change the layout, but just the colour scheme and the banner. Since the last time that I revamped the layout of my page, the templates on this site has changed so much that it has deterred me from even wanting to figure out what's going on. While re-making the banner, I realized that none of the stock fonts available on my applications do anything for me. Nevertheless, I just picked one that didnt offend my palate and got the task over with.

Second, I was rummaging through a super old photobucket account for an old picture I took in 2004, and I came across a jpg that I uploaded for an old online journal. The image had some words "written" in a font Nick had found for me back in the old days that closely resembled my handwriting. Here's a sample of the font:

The slight slant to the left and the connecting "num" with the sharp turns are signatures of my penmanship, which likely no longer exists since I find it hard to recall when the last time I had hand-written. Okay, I lie...I still take notes on pen and paper but the quality of my writing, both from a physical aspect and a content aspect, has significantly declined over the years.

Anyway, after a long and unfruitful search, I still could not find that font. I can't remember the name of the font, nor do I have access to my old computer any more (not something one would think of to back-up when getting rid of an old machine).

What I want to document here though, is not so much my depression on the inability to retrieve an old momentum, but its process that made me realize all the things that are no longer--from the most evident sign of resignation from learning new template features to the more obscure veracity that, due to the availability of fonts, it's actually a lot harder to find a specific font nowadays in comparison to 10 years ago.

Back then, if Nick told me he had found a font that looks like my writing, I could have easily went on the three sites that allowed free font download, looked up three pages available for script fonts and found it easily. Today, there are hundreds of sites dedicated to font downloading, and the category for "script-handwritten" alone has over 90 pages of font with 10 fonts on each page. 900 fonts based on handwriting on a site. 900.

It's been about five years since I graduated from undergrad and almost 3 years since I graduated from my MA; it doesn't seem all that long. But, at our generation, the speed in which life is changing makes these numbers feel like double. To say I am behind on the times and that I don't understand kids today is not that far of a stretch any more--and it's quite scary to hear about kids growing up with a completely difference sense of culture than we had. But what perhaps scares me the most is actually the inability to go back to the way we were. Not so much in the cultural sense, but in the personal sense.

I often tell myself that I need to go back to writing. Although it's quite past the time for me to "cultivate" my "aptitude" to become something, whatever it could have been,  it is still in some ways a distinguishment of a self that has been eroded by life.

Just like the ability to sit in front of the computer for hours working solely on the look and feel of a web page, my ability to sit in front of the computer for hours working on a piece of writing is no longer realistic. Too many variables in life has caused me to have abandon the "hobbies" I used to have at a point in my life--and, for the most part, for good reasons. The technology has changed, I have less free time, I have more responsibilities, I have seen more, heard more, know more, and therefore have more clutters in my brain,  and maybe I've even developed ADD due to the amount of moving pictures I have interacted with. The reality is that whether those are good or bad reasons, they are nonetheless reasons. To pursue something in the past, especially lifestyle-oriented, is an insurmountable task. That's like going backwards in time and erasing the growth that you've achieved between time. If I were to spend as much time in front of a blog writing my heart out, I would be back to being a 21 year-old who isn't doing that much else with her life and has not learned that sometimes there are things that can't be said out loud.

That is not to say, of course, that what I enjoyed doing is no longer possible to do now, but the question that need to be figured out is whether or not that task needs to be changed to better fit my lifestyle today.

I never have answers any more. Just more questions.
It's a sign of maturity, right?

*Edit: I managed to find a font that's close, but not the original one yet!
**Edit: Here's a sample of my writing: