At last, I have one! A new personal website and a new blog for a few occasional thoughts, in case anyone is interested… For a long time, I had been carrying the idea of setting up a modest personal website with some information about me and perhaps a story or experience worth commenting on. In the past I had websites too, back when I was so eagerly discovering and marvelling at the internet. I probably first registered the current address jakasubo.info some twenty years ago. Back then I spoke enthusiastically about all sorts of things, but it was more of a hobby than anything else.
So this time, I did not know for a long while exactly what I should talk about or present.
To be honest, I am not famous or important enough to need a website that reports on everything I do. I am simply Jaka… SSKJ, the Dictionary of Standard Slovenian, even gives “Jaka” as a name for an awkward or inept person, although I hope that is not the whole story. I know there is already plenty of similar content and no shortage of commentators. Still, I have gradually realised that I occasionally have something worth saying and that my experiences may be useful to someone else. I am interested in many things and approach them in my own way, often quietly and cautiously. Sometimes I do something for another person that others would not, and sometimes it is worth explaining how and why. I do not write for praise or criticism, but as a reminder that something can be both necessary and possible.
I have already noticed many strange situations, and they have shaken me, made me laugh, angered me—whatever the case may be. I began to discover that, in everything I do, I have a distinctive perspective that seems somewhat calmer than today’s general frenzy and nonsense, if you will, which nevertheless includes me too. But I do not want to run away from our time, because it is our time after all… I can only watch it and comment on it. I am slowly coming to understand this myself, and from time to time someone asks me about this or that, or asks for help. Or the other way around. I might have something to tell someone. Perhaps this time I really will have something to say.
Then it struck me once more. The essence of what I do and who I am is above all an unconscious tension between law and everyday life. Because of my mobility impairment, I often encounter the gap between what stands on paper and what happens in practice. What is, or what ought to be; what we are first promised—even in good faith—and what actually comes into being. Or simply between work and free time. In the end, I still cannot get to the pavement or to the physiotherapy that everyone apparently understands a disabled person needs. The word disabled is used deliberately here. So one day it became clear to me that I could write about this and occasionally explain a small part of my world to you. Again, not simply because I despise everything already done or because I want to point out mistakes with grim persistence. These are above all my notes about having done something differently and that being enough for me.
That is how yet another website of mine came into being—Jaka Šubic – between law and everyday life. This time, it is, I hope, a somewhat more serious project suited to my years, and perhaps one that will remain with us for a little longer.
So this website is intended as a brief personal introduction to me, but above all as an occasional discussion of everything that connects me with the world and the people around me. It is not merely a place where one person’s writings can be heard—things that go unsaid elsewhere—nor is it about someone being special and needing attention. I want to say that someone is not particularly special or insightful simply because they do a few modest things as I do. Only when we understand that something is not special or in need of special attention because it happens to all of us—only then will we be able to do special things together, things that are special because they are magnificent, not special merely because they may be achieved by someone whom, at that particular moment, we do not expect to find here.
That should be enough for a boring editorial to mark the opening of this website. The pages may not yet be completely finished and will still be taking on their final form and content, so I hope you will look around and not run away before we have woven something clever together!
Welcome and thank you!