Simplenote is a lightweight note-taking application made by Automattic. The first time I used it was about eight years ago, at a rave at the DC Armory. There was a group of deaf people there–hearing is not a requirement for raving, one can use different objects to feel the vibrations of the music. In this case, balloons. I had never seen people experience music this way though, and it permanently changed my perspective on what it means to feel music.
There was a guy there who started harassing them, knowing that they were deaf, trying to get them to move out of the way so he could make his way to the front of the show. I can’t stand this type of crap. If raves lower inhibitions, in my case it boosted my confidence, because I went up to him, shoved him and told him off–fully knowing that this person was much bigger than me and I was at the show alone.
Well, I didn’t expect the group to notice, but they did. They asked me to join their group at the front of the show. I don’t know any ASL, so I scrambled to figure out a way to communicate. Hey, what about that app my friend told me to try? I’ve refused to delete this note in Simplenote ever since:
While I am very much a hardass, I’m also a very sentimental person. I mean, I’m on version 32 of my blog! But I think there’s something in the memories I have, where Simplenote happened to be, that specific phase of my life, and now working at Automattic. I keep coming back to this theme of connecting the dots backwards on my career, and holding onto certain things about the earlier internet that I feel a sense of duty to preserve. Simplenote, like me, hasn’t really changed much since then, in the essence. We remain, compared to most others, subdued, but ready.