This has been a rough lead-up to Christmas — we lost Diego to kidney failure this week. He seemed perfectly fine just a few days ago and then, after a long night of treatment, didn’t make it. He was the last of our three original kitties, the one the girls grew up with the longest and were most attached to.

It hurts to come home and not see him wander out of the shrubs to greet us or resting in his pink chair inside at night or to know he won’t be following us around the neighborhood the next time we trick or treat. Love your pets (and your people), they can be gone before you know it.

Panning for gold in the backyard of your brain for online riches

Is this still a thing?

Are we still blogging?

Or what was once online journaling? Has it passed on to a new generation, a group of up-and-coming writers who are still writing about their lives on top of the Tweets, Instagrams, Snapchats, podcastings that also serve as to give them voices above the din?

Or is the din the point?

I have a friend, Tolly. We do a podcast together that’s really become my main creative outlet for the last two years, the place where I get to be myself and talk in a very similar way that I once would have blogged here. We both have let our blogs lie asleep for six months or more (for me, my 40th birthday back in April appeared to be the excuse to just stop), and we both recently said to each other, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great to blog again?”

We do. We blog a lot. Just not in our home spaces.

And it frankly shocked me that in 2015, I wrote two blog posts here. Two. That’s it. And one of them was short, and just marking time, and searching for a reason to keep at it that, obviously, never came.

Is anyone out there anymore? Listening? Reading?

It sure doesn’t feel like it. It’s felt beside the point and a drag and that’s why I stopped. It didn’t feel joyful, or spontaneous, or like an outlet anymore, it felt like an obligation, a thing to do that had to be done, a void to throw the most personal stuff that was never going to get seen anyway. (Or, if seen, to be misinterpreted and twisted, as has happened before. At least on social media, you can come right back with a response and turn it into a conversation. An ugly comment on a blog post feels like a drive-by water-ballooning. You’ll probably never see that hateful balloon thrower ever again.)

This is a test, I think. A preview, maybe, or just a call out to say, this still exists. It’s still a thing, at least for tonight.

To the right of this, there’s a blogroll, what we used to pull together to link to the sites that we liked to read, the ones we’d exchange links with, to shout-out friends and people we admired. So many of them are either gone, dumped in digital graves, or simply suspended in time, stopped a year ago or two years ago or more.

Is it the end? I don’t really know. The 15th anniversary of this site’s birth came and went in October and I didn’t even notice. Once upon a time I would have celebrated it like an actual birthday, making a big hoopla for the anniversary. Now, I wonder if it matters, even to me as more than just a repository of old stuff, a filing cabinet of old ideas and passions and words that every year seem a little more like a foreign language or musings out of a different brain.

I think I tried, in 2015, to stick to my word of the year “Cohesion,” my goal of aligning my home, work and online selves more closely to each other, by just cutting out the things that weren’t working, or adding value, or bringing me satisfaction anymore. The things that I figured I could get back to someday, but that for the time being were just dragging and pulling and weighing on me. This year, my word is “Joyful,” to enjoy more moments as they’re happening, to seek out the stuff that makes me happy and fulfilled rather than just the stuff I feel I ought be doing out of habit or obligation. And I think I’m very careful judging whether this thing that I worked very hard to build into something a very long time ago, still fits into the equation.

I think a lot of bloggers who’ve stopped are doing the same if they’re considering keeping at it at all.

Flip a coin, maybe? Send out a distress signal? Nuke it and start anew?

I don’t know, honestly. But I hope it’s not another seven or eight months before an answer presents itself.

This will be short because it kind of has to be.

My word for 2015 is “Cohesion.”

Last year it was “Outside,” part of a goal of getting outside of my own head and being a greater part of the external world around me. That happened, to a large degree. I helped get a podcast launched that now puts me across a table from a great friend and a different guest every week and the conversations we have are wonderful and perspective-changing for me.

I haven’t gotten to travel as much as I’d like, though there was a surprise trip to New York City in the summer and more road trips than we were ever comfortable taking in the past with the kids. I got outside, though a big chunk of my time is still spent inside, nose to my phone, reading or connecting or Tweeting. That’s a habit I’m having a hard time breaking, though a lot of vacation time in December got me out of my usual habits.

Cohesion.

Here’s the thing: I’m doing fine, everything’s great, but writing-wise, I feel like I’m kind of a mess. I did a lot of writing in 2014, maybe too much and not all of it as high a quality as I would have liked. I wrote a lot of things in a rush, I wrote a lot of other things antsy and not wanting to be sitting and just feeling my attention drifting constantly.  I don’t have the patience to sit and write for hours like I used to and that’s caused all kind of problems with bigger projects.

Mostly, I’ve let my work stuff affect stuff I should be working on at home and stuff I’m working on at home distract me from getting enough rest to focus and adequately tackle my weekly workload. I perform well under pressure, but that’s been requiring constant panicked pressure, and of course that gets exhausting.

This blog is a good example of the breakdown of that cohesion. It used to be essays and personal reflections and over the last few years, it’s become a dumping ground for links to all my work projects and writing elsewhere.  And since the last few posts, I literally wrote so much stuff for work and did so many podcasts that I couldn’t physically even list them all here. Even a bulleted list of all that stuff seemed too overwhelming and I spend several weeks of vacation just dancing around the idea of doing that instead of actually doing it.

And I’m kind of glad. I shouldn’t have spent my free time stressing like that. And maybe I’ll get to that now that I’m getting back into work mode, but what if I don’t? Would it be the end of the world if I didn’t deliver those blog posts to the only person who really cares about them at this point, me? Why am I such a demanding boss to myself? Can I give me a raise or something?

Bottom line is that I’ve had work/life balance issues, and not because of anyone but myself. My workplace is incredibly supportive and lenient about my work hours, work-from-home days and how I meet my deadlines. So much so that I’ve become my own worst critic, calling myself out for stuff that seems fine to everyone else and feeling guilty for not pushing myself harder on personal writing (like this blog).

So for 2015, starting from this first day of the year, I want to have better cohesion of those separate parts of me. Of Work Omar¹ and Freelance Omar and Dad Omar, to make those guys work together instead of compartmentalizing and putting them at odds with each other. Am I the only one who feels like he’s wrangling different selves? Should I not have watched “The One I Love” right before bed?

There used to be a very clear line in my business between home writing and work writing and pretty organically, those lines have largely gone away. But I haven’t allowed myself to embrace that instead of creating more lines.

So, “Cohesion.” 2015.

That’s my word of the year.

And maybe I’ll get to those other catch-up blog posts, maybe not. I’ll let Complete Omar decide on that soon.

1

I hate when people refer to themselves in the third person. That’s Douche Omar talking, sorry.

Things went awry.

The plan with this blog, what it has come to, is me telling a little story, a mini-essay maybe and then launching into all the stuff I’ve been working on since the last blog post. This blog started back in 2000 (!) with the intent of just being the place to put all my online stuff so I wouldn’t have to go hunting around the web for it later.

It still serves that purpose, even after all the changes to the online world, from online journals to blogs to microblogs to whatever the Hell it is we’re calling what we do on sites like this these days. I still need a place to park all the things I want to be able to find later if I need to find them. And if I can entertain or Say Some Stuff along the way, all the better.

But this blog is not my main gig, not even close, and hasn’t been for a while. If I lost my job tomorrow, you can bet it would be my first rallying point of retreat. But I’ve been a bad combination of busy and lethargic, manic and exhausted, barely hanging on with some deadlines, way far behind on other important ones, and it’s easy to get paralyzed and discouraged and Why Bother/Who Cares? about it all. I don’t like that and this blog was making me feel that way because of a post I’ve been working on, quite literally, since September.

And it’s not even like a great blog post, not a “Wait till you read THIS shit!” masterwork manifesto. It’s just a blog post full of links and stuff I’ve been working on and cute photos and that sort of thing. But here’s the thing… that blog post kept growing. And growing. And every week, as I wrote more stuff and recorded more episodes of Statesman Shots, this work-in-progress blog post couldn’t keep up with the stuff I wanted to put in it.

So I feel behind. And further behind. It got to where it was basically Lucy and Ethel with the chocolates conveyor belt. I used to think that bit was kinda funny. Now it haunts every waking moment.

Rather than continue to try to whip up this gigantic thing that has built up into an impossibility in my mind, I’m going to take the easier route and try to GTD this shit into submission.

The blog post, this gigantic thing I have been afraid to tackle in anything more than feeble late-night attempts, is going to be broken down into its core components. Will it be complete as I wanted? Who the fuck knows? Will it all make sense? MOST LIKELY NOT! Will I be a little saner doing it this way, spreading out the labor over a few nights? I sure hope so.

How will it be divvied up? I think tonight’s post, the first of four or five posts this week, is going to be the little mini-essay I was working on. That’s coming up here in a sec. And after that, I’ll probably do a post just about all the stuff I’ve been doing at my day job (exciting!) and about some news I want to share about some radio stuff I’ll be doing soon (also exciting!). I want to do a post about Statesman Shots because these blog posts have sort of been sort of serving as an episode guide in lieu of one on our actual blog/site.

What I said earlier about having a place to park all my stuff? One thing I have learned from being in a big media company that lives on the web is that you can’t trust that stuff will always be around. Things you worked so hard to get online have a way of just disappearing before you know it, and I’ve always taken it upon myself to catalog it all here, even if the links may one day rot and dry out.

I’d like to do a photos post because in these two months, everything from Halloween to Wurstfest to The Daily Show in Austin have happened.

And I hope that by the end of these few posts I figure out how I’m going to do this in the future (or if I’m going to) because clearly my current model is unsustainable.

But enough complaining. Here’s the thing I wrote a few weeks ago that now feels oddly distant, like some other dude wrote it and asked me to edit it. And I guess that’s really what it is; Past Omar is asking Present Omar to take the wheel and get this thing published.

So I’mma do that. And then post a bunch of other stuff in the next few days that has been building up.

That first post follows:

It’s hard to say where my head is these days because I’ve done such a good job distracting myself by being really busy.

I don’t do well with inactivity, and I know that’s a little bit of a problem, but I swear I sleep better, eat less and overall am less anxious when I’m busy with things I not only have to do, but want to be doing.

And some would call it overextending, but I rarely get in over my head with stuff when it comes to writing assignments. I may stress out a little, but I always remind myself that I’ve been here before, under the pile, typing my way out at full speed.

But despite the being busy, I’ve been a little out of sorts mostly by proxy. I have one friend whose marriage is very close to ending and I’ve been asked for advice on a subject I really am no help on except as a cautious voice of logic and safety. I have another friend who is leaving a job they are closely associated with and although there are happy faces put on the situation, I know there’s a lot more to the story and not all of it is good. And then another friend was hit with a sudden breakup. Maybe it’s the fall shifting into winter, but I was seeing a lot of sudden dissolution all around me.

I don’t like involving myself with other people’s dramas. I don’t seek it out and it certainly doesn’t give me a thrill like it might have in my 20s when other people’s personal lives were fodder for the imagination and got the writing wheels in motion. These days, I mostly just hurt for the people I care about and hate to see them going through bad stuff, especially when it’s past the point where anything can be fixed or salvaged and they must move on.

It’s different in that these are friends who specifically sought me out to talk (and trust me, it’s nobody you know so I’m not spilling any secrets here). As much as I worry that I could make things worse with bad counsel, I think I’m at least a good listener and that’s probably what’s needed most in all three situations.

These  situations, though, made me aware of how little interaction I typically have with friends about these kinds of things. When a friend gets divorced or engaged, I usually hear about it on Facebook. When a co-worker is going away, I learn in a staff email. I’m not really plugged in to gossip channels anymore, but more than that, I find I have very few friends who confide these kinds of things in me anymore. I’ve wondered if people think I’m too busy to listen (a valid concern) or that I’ve just drifted too far away from friends who once considered me a confidante.

It’s not like I stopped making friends when I turned 30 or something; I have new creative partners and friends who I discuss things with. I’m not a hermit, I don’t shut myself out from the world.

But I’m not too old to remember a time when it felt like I knew so much about the private lives of my friends and co-workers. Way more than I really wanted to know, but certainly enough to feel connected to the comings and goings of people’s lives. I wasn’t always so out of the loop.  Or maybe I was listening more intently back then.