Rereading At mercatino one year later
This blog comes from writing, which in my path led me from describing photo albums to talk about me. Progressively it has become my primary form of expression, means of information and way to do truth. My blog is about my experience in collecting.
My business began a long time ago and takes place mainly at Mercatino di Via Armorari; it is about the sale of small and popular collectibles, mass-produced. If I had been able, the best way to manage my items and earn something would have been, over the years, to create one or more catalogs, price lists, a database, or even better a website, in which I could also tell. I made do on this form that took me, with the intention of writing a few pages on what I knew, because my prediction was a decrease or cessation of what I was doing, which should have been a hobby. Although unlikely, a story could be a way out to close it. I wrote in Italian and translated into English, in order not to remain a stranger to this important foreign language.
I started my blog describing the objects with which I kicked off my little business, top up cards and phone cards. Time wanted it to coincide with my father’s advanced illness, with whom I have always done it. The first and fundamental page was published a few days before his death. My writing has become, thus, the memory of so many years with my best friend, which I never forget and always I go to find.
One year later
In mid-September 2016, a year after the publication of my blog, returning in Milan, my city, from the long summer vacation, that as usual I spend in Barzio, a beautiful mountain village in Valsassina, in my brother’s house, I reread it, because it’s a good idea to look at your work after a long time. In that time I had improved me in reading and writing, doing constant exercise by writing a blog about my walks on Grignone on the side of Pasturo. I thought it would be enough a month, making small changes. In my head I was thinking about my next tasks, fix some programming code that adds content to the pages I write from external data files, watch again my photos, studying a best arrangement in folders, and rereading and correcting my photos albums’ captions. Never perspective turned out to be so wrong!
Rereading At mercatino one year later, it seemed completely inadequate to speak about cards, with bad names and information, and none with reference to the source, many redundant. The form appears mediocre, the introduction is absent and definitions are missing. But, because the spark appeared to me still good, and phone cards and refill cards were soldiers and my companions of many years of battles, and always alive, I decided to rewrite all my articles. The other drastic solution would be to delete them, and I would already have done it if there had not been there my image and that of my father.
My lab
I say here about the tools of my work and where it was done, in an environment that requires tranquility.
I wrote this story with a computer, using Sublime Text 2, a sophisticated text editor for code, markup language, and prose. It’s a really simple and fluid software, I’ve never had a problem.
I wrote mainly with my desktop computer from the living room of my apartment, with back pain, because of which I lay down on the couch from time to time waiting for it to diminish and I can resume my work, and the sore butt leaning on my office chair with armrests; also the belly and stomach have their weight, blocking or delaying what I’m doing.
On Thursday morning, I composed with my laptop computer from the tables of Esselunga’s Atlantic Bar not far from home, where dad went every day to have breakfast and play sudoku; I accompanied him during his last month and a half, when he was suffering and needed assistance. I seem to see him still in front of me, looking at me in front of my computer. I finished it the following summer at Barzio, on the solid wood table covered by a sunflowers carpet in the living room.
The work redone
I have devoted to this second version many hours a day for many months, really committing myself, not only the head and the heart, but also nerves and muscles. I was supported by the conviction that it would be better to improve what I had already done, which it would come back, rather than undertaking new things, and that it would be a good exercise. It consoled me that the new draft of the articles seemed to me better written; however, at each subsequent rereading the good vote became sufficient, and then, often the sufficient one insufficient, and so to get better again. My belief and the satisfaction of the result, although partial, did not let me down to the ever-present and new difficulties, such as the necessary explanations and the number of topics that became more and more. I am reminded those points that made me fear that it was not possible to continue and I would have given up everything.
The first time at the end of October, describing TIM ricariche, I exceeded the temptation to leave
for the complexity, and perhaps the uselessness of my job, dividing this topic into four pages, which made it affordable. Then, it was the difficult page Collecting, and it returned several times during the translation of articles in English, which usually involved rewriting in Italian. The months went by, autumn gave way to winter and new year, and new pages were by partition, subdivision into two or even more of the existing ones, while other pages were created for untreated arguments, as definitions.
At the beginning of spring, when I thought I was close to the end, it missed in fact a few articles to translate, I realized that I did not say about payphone, forgot Chiama Gratis and Carta Azienda by Telecom Italia, which I collected together with my father, and, above all, the telephone, its history and telecommunications. As soon as I start, I realize I have not even said about the form of my blog and where I have posted it.
To fill this gap, in a month, I wrote, in the Italian draft, layout and text formatting, hyperlinks, style of citing sources, summary and other articles. These pages will not see the light, because the blog has its purpose, which requires limitation, and because it has already spread too far. There will be no also Telephone, that comes from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, “far” and φωνή, phōnē, “voice”, meaning together “distant voice”, and its history with the first patent by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876.
My last study turned out, however, to be particularly profitable. Finally, I added, the page sections, that redesigned them and made readable with pauses, and adjusted the citation style.
Post on Tumblr
I posted At mercatino on Tumblr, the social networking website, which only in the end I found out to be a microblogging platform, while my story went in the opposite dimension, with long pages, linked together, and with so many references. Most of them are phone cards on Colnect, while others, by citing the source and enriching the reader, avoid plagiarism. The number of posts is, by now 60 (and in Italian 61)!!
My two-language page management was not the best because it requires several copy-paste operations to add the link, from English to Italian in Al mercatino or vice versa; it is easy to make mistakes and each one makes me nervous.
Finally and at last, I understood that the addition of every page on the internet is always laborious, because the links to its web address must be managed. It becomes a published content, and efforts will focus on it for it to be adequate and eventually update it, slowing down and taking time out of any future activity, that could be more important.
My riflection
It emerges that, telling an activity of over 20 years in a blog – that my mother, who saw me writing in front of the computer all this time, calls the researches – is too demanding, there are indeed too many topics. The idea is confusing and zero economic gain: I do not believe, in fact, selling any more cards for what I’m writing, and the blog is not even advertising to my business, which probably would not even have to be.
And you think that phone cards and mobile phone top-up cards were only a part of the starting project, which included talking about landscape postcards, thematic postcards, advertising postcards, in particular those distributed in public places in special containers, such as Promocard postcards, tram tickets, stickers and more. Likewise, I would have created countless articles with the definition and study of the object, searched and cited sources, summarizing the story of the publication, possibly in multiple pages when the dimension became over-sized, identifying common groups and templates as the logo and written to back, rejoiced in the presence of numbers, which allow an ordering, listed images, most of all those that remain carved into my memory, praised Absolut postcards and those that depict Internazionale players, saying some anecdote and sale. And since I think it is enough in this form of story how much it is done for phone cards and refill cards, it is enough for the rest what is written on the main page.
Conclusion
My treatise on phone cards and top-up cards is now new in this second version. Until the end, it was changed the first page, the most autobiographical. As a matter of fact, the section our Sunday morning and part of its content is of the last day; maybe, because there was, it was necessary to have written all the other pages. Also this and last it is relevant.
I understand that, for Italians, it is finally written in Italian and sometimes it sounds good, more in the latest articles than in the early ones. In English, it is less worse than the first version. One has always to be grateful and give praise to God when it is allowed to correct and improve; then it is right to stop.
There will not be Rereading At mercatino two years later, nor will there be any more posts and nor will be At mercatino 2. Being public, when I deem it appropriate if it were inadequate, there may be, instead, changes. My blog according to Google Analytics is read by a few.
Meanwhile, I continue to go at mercatino, alone, dad from above always watches as guardian angel.