HTML, my secret love

Back in my freshman year of college (which was not so long ago) I took an IT 103 class: generic html, make a website, learn some nonsense about bytes and get overly familiar with Microsoft 2007. Needless to say, it was boring and I hated it.

Flash forward to now, my senior year, and I am in an Electronic Literature class, which requires a website. So I revamped the one I made for IT 103 and discovered my secret, well buried love of HTML.

I've been writing for quite some time--poems, essays, flash, nonfiction, fiction, etc. I made a chapbook and will shortly be making another. This kind of creation is satisfying but familiar. HTML is exotic. I can type seemingly nonsensical code (after all, what is an "a href," really?) and then, after some mystical magical uploading, that code becomes a link, a picture, a table, a button, color, anything really. It is not hard and there are countless books on the subject. Mine was by Kamalajeet Sanghera--a name I know by memory because it is so wonderfully odd. it was tedious at the time and the work I was posting on the web was dull and semi-low brow for me. The topic did not interest me and thus HTML slipped through my hands.

That is different now. Now I know the subtleties of tables and borders set to zero. I know how to bypass the need for templates and create links to nowhere just to be a smart ass. My pictures are links to other pictures which may very well link to a poem. I have embedded video and fiddled with creative commons. I have photo manip'd (however badly) and saw my codings and tags transform from gobbledygook to glory on a screen. I do not know java and am by no means an HTML master (if anything, I am an apprentice--this is as nerdy as I will get, I assure you) but I have rediscovered the glory of learning and creativity--of design and html ingenuity. Throughout my college career (which is rapidly coming to a close) I have lost my wonder. Quite frankly, I am not even sure this mysterious "wonder" survived elementary school. But it has reignited and I am awed by my education. Should someone ask me the one thing I learned in college, the one thing I took away from my four years, it will be recapturing my imagination--even if I had to harness it in HTML.

I am an English major with a minor in history, in love with an art that has a tenuous connection to my field at best. But this is fine, I have the whole world of electronic literature unfurling before me--a new media (well newish anyway) gaining a foothold among those who matter (those mysterious "those" who determine your curricula for instance). Perhaps, my primitive HTML skills will not go to waste.