I was always obsessed as a kid—with the wrong things. Or maybe just things that didn’t fit neatly into conversations, things people didn’t really know how to respond to. Facts that got met with a blank stare or a quick subject change. I wanted to talk about HTML. I wanted to talk about how computers work, why I love animals, and how fonts can make you feel something.
Sometimes I even irritated myself.
It wasn’t that I thought no one would listen. It’s more that I’ve always had interests most people don’t really like, and… that’s okay. I’m learning that it’s okay. My brain’s always been loud with connections no one else can see. I cared so much about things other people just didn’t notice. Still do.
Even today—a plug-in on my WordPress site just stopped working. Gone. No warning. One minute everything’s fine, the next minute the site looks like it got into a bar fight with a 2006 MySpace page. No one around me really cared, and I didn’t expect them to. I don’t have many friends who worry about broken widgets or whether my footer aligns perfectly on mobile.
But I do.
It matters to me.
I want to talk about font types. My favorites. My enemies. Comic Sans, for example—it was originally created for a cartoon speech bubble, and now it’s somehow hosting serious conversations on public posters. Who signed off on that? Who looked at Comic Sans and said, “Yes, this is exactly the tone we need for our child custody flyer”?
And kerning. Sweet code above, the kerning. Have you seen when an “L” gets smashed too close to a “C”? It’s like watching two coworkers awkwardly bump into each other in a hallway. It feels wrong. And I see it everywhere.
And here’s the part no one expects: I love the Wingdings font. I know. I know it’s basically unusable for normal people. But there’s something magical about it—how it speaks in a language no one speaks, how it insists on symbols in a world obsessed with words. It’s weird and unapologetic and doesn’t need to explain itself. I kind of admire that.
I’ve always had this urge to share things—facts about animals, like how octopuses have neurons in their arms and crows remember faces, and elephants come back to grieve their dead. These details live in me like roommates. I carry them everywhere, even when no one’s asking.
Sometimes life’s like a plug-in: one moment everything’s humming along, and the next, something you relied on just stops working. No reason. No alert. Just silence and a blank space where something used to be.
But you refresh. You debug. You get back into the code.
Because even if no one else is on that level… I am.
And I think, finally, that might be enough.
