#147. A Hundred Best Days (Saturday, May 23, 2020)

What was your best day…of realizing how special best days could be?

So far through these Best Days entries, I’m been very cautious about becoming too meta, limiting the self-references to only the few that earn them (#128, #67, #5, #3, #2, #1).

Well, the time has come to totally blow up that illusion. Because this is the story of how this unbelievable website started.

The first iteration came the summer after my first year at Duke. I had experienced some recent setbacks, and was feeling down and unproductive in my Durham dorm. So, I dug into the deepest throes of my memory to conjure up a list of the hundred best days of my life to that point, and decided that was something the world (i.e., my friends) needed to see. I knew even at the time I was onto something special. So I snagged the miraculously available 100bestdays.com domain name, learned about webhosting and WordPress, and got going.

My early site was a lot clunkier: it used the Aztec theme (cool to me at the time but a minor assault on the eyes), listed the entries in random order, and awkwardly tried to introduce each story by tying it to my ongoing 2013 life. I got to about twenty stories before summer ended, I got busy again, and I let the website sit there until the yearlong Bluehost service lapsed and I let 100bestdays.com go offline.

Still, my peer group had found it fascinating. And that response kept the idea alive in my mind over the next seven years.

Then, a generational pandemic hit. In one instant, I was forced to redefine the bounds of my life (#120)—from the wider world to my house and bedroom and wherever we could get to through my internet browser. I desperately needed an outlet. Somewhere to release my pent-up conversational energy, something (besides Magic, #84, #67) innovative that I could work toward as a meaningful goal in itself, but also something I could accomplish on my own without the support of friends and colleagues who had all physically dispersed.

And so, I recreate the site. By an even greater miracle, 100bestdays.com is still not taken. This time, I use the much cleaner Masonry template, and I decide to write each entry in order from one-hundred to one and to create a coherent narrative.

I start writing. And keep writing for the next month and a half. It’s a blissful re-engagement with the special moments from my early childhood and recent adulthood; at a time when positivity and the semblance of real life was the things most missing from my (and everybody else’s) life. It’s like I’ve been transported to an alternate world, eerily similar to one I’ve lost indefinitely, where I’m traveling to new cities, interacting with friends in person, facing critical points and achieving milestones. I’m living a complete life that I had once lived—but just enough differently that it feels brand new.

And I make that complete life part of the public record. Because that’s the only way.