The Beginning

The beginning is important. Why you are starting something, what you plan to get out of it and how you are going to go about it, it's good to articulate these things to yourself. So should you ever start questioning yourself, you could come back to your notes and get a refresher.

About This Website

Every year I get hit with this urge to rebuild a small personal website. It's a lot of fun to work on and it's always intriguing to note what things you include and what you choose to leave out altogether. This time I wanted something that looked professional like those newspaper websites. I wanted to write things that I am mulling over and I wanted posts that jump straight into it without preamble. And so this blog was born.

I chose Rafah as the first name for the blog in late 2023. Rafah because when I was working on the first few posts there was a war on Gaza and seeing the news about the death toll and the scale of destruction was a huge source of anguish for me. I always liked the sound of that name so I chose it for my blog. But now a year later I want to experiment again. What was previously Rafah is now Xara.

Why is the name starting with an X and not a Z? I always like it when words like xylophone or xing have a z-sound and I wanted to play around with my name. Though frankly between you and me, the real answer is: because I can.