Terribly Happy

10 years ago, I went to my 10-year reunion and it never even occurred to me that I was already writing on this site at the time and that of course I documented it. I sometimes forget I have this whole diary thing that dates back to 2000.

But in a way, I’m glad I didn’t read what I wrote before I flew to Oklahoma City on Saturday for a super-quick round-trip 20-year reunion. I’m glad that the fog of parent brain and 10 years passed made me go into it with no expectations other than that at least two good friends of mine would be there and that I really wanted to see them.

Because it turned out to be a weird night in a lot of little, wonderful ways.

I can’t imagine there is anyone who goes to a 1o- or 20-year reunion and doesn’t find it a little strange, unless you live in the place you went to school and are in close contact with all the people who came up with you. I imagine reunions have always been a little weird, a mix of the people you remember clearly, the people you remember but never really spent much time with even when you were in close daily proximity and then the people who unfortunately completely left your brain and don’t return in memory even when the older version of them is standing right there in front of you.

And then there’s the Facebook effect. I’m pretty sure a lot of people didn’t come to the reunion specifically because they feel they already get the nostalgia/curiosity hit they need from The Social Network and that a $400 plane ticket and accommodations aren’t going to add much to their mental picture of how their peers ended up.

I went alone. My wife has no interest in going to her reunion and had much, much less interest in going to mine and I completely agree with that decision. Unless you’re into people-watching and hearing second-hand stories of glorious old inside jokes, it’s just an uncomfortable thing to be the spouse at these things unless your relationship is new and you’re still in the figuring-out-your-mate stage where everything is a window into their past and personality. If you’ve been with something for 15+ years, it becomes more of the same shit that you’ve heard hundreds of times, more like.

The reunion did make me more aware than ever of the strange things constant online contact (again, mostly Facebook) have done to us. There were people at the reunion who spoke as if they interest nearly every day and the people that I do actually talk to on Facebook seemed like people I’d seen around within the last few months, not 10 whole years. When the night was winding down and people were saying their goodbyes, it wasn’t, “I’ll see you in 5 or 10 years,” it was, “I’ll post some pics and tag you” or “I’ll let you know on Monday what I find out.”

The people who want to stay in touch are still in touch. Even the people we didn’t really want to be in touch with necessarily all the time we’re still talking to.

Me, Marcus, Candace and Jeremy

I’m not saying that’s good or bad; for me it’s nice in a lot of ways and only negative once in a blue moon. But it is different, it is weird and I’m not sure that my generation has figured out what to do with it beyond simply ignoring it and moving on.

I did have a good time, though. It took place in a strange and awesome building in downtown Oklahoma City (I went to school in nearby Midwest City) at some eccentric rich person’s house. I mean rich like having the kind of money where you say, “Screw it, I’m putting cars in the living room and getting poker playing dog throw pillows. And putting a DJ on the rooftop!” It completely blew away our 10-year reunion, which was in a boring ballroom that nobody remembers.

I’m glad I went, the expense was worth it and at the end of the night, I had gotten to spend (not enough) time with some very close friends I never get to see. Sometimes just a few minutes of that is worth the money and the trouble.

Some photos and Tweets from that night:

This was, no joke, the entrance to my 20-year reunion. It turns out it’s a freight elevator to an amazingly eccentric rich person’s house. Bruce Wayne, maybe.

Marcus and dog mentioned in Tweet below

Nope, nothing weird about this!

What do I tell people at my reunion? "I'm now a pirate / scissor maker / foot specialist / Druid / Pawn Star / billionaire / mixologist?"

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 22, 2013

Me at the reunion entrance: "As you can see by my Versa rental car, I exceeded all expectations."

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

Me at the reunion a dozen times tonight, I bet: "Yes, I had long hair. Yes, I cut it after high school. No, I didn't keep it. Who are you?"

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

"Didn't you used to be a lot younger?" #reunionquestions

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

The entrance to my high school reunion. Not even joking. http://t.co/Zc70x0YImR

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

Look at that handsome devil! Not yet beaten down by life #reunion http://t.co/DfPh3SBfBl

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

This reunion's got everything. Vintage cars. My friend Marcus. A dog statue… http://t.co/TkRXrwrB9k

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

I swear I'm not making this #reunion up. http://t.co/1c5F0HDwG9

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

"You look exactly the same!" "You totally don't!" #reunion

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

If you have the chance to have your next #reunion at an eccentric rich person's house and have lots of booze there, YOU SHOULD DO THAT.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

My 20-year reunion was so nostalgic that when I woke up this morning, I was in a band called Ace of Bass.

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) June 23, 2013

Work stuff and monkey stuff

I was on vacation for a week when the Digital Savant column and Micro didn’t run, but it’s been nearly a full month since I’ve updated, so here’s what I’ve had in the paper in the interim:

Colin Anawaty, left, and Jason Bornhorst are co-founders of Filament Labs. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman

I wrote a column about how complaining on social media about a product or service doesn’t always reward you with a happy ending (though it does work for some people). Last week’s column was about whether health- and fitness-related apps can really change your habits and make you a better, happier person. A MyStatesman account is required to view that article, but I also wrote a free blog post with supplemental information on the topic.

This week’s column was about civic hackathons and the impact they’re making on the Austin community. Like the last one, it’s on MyStatesman, but I’ve been told a few times via Twitter by readers that it’s also available elsewhere on the web. I have nothing to do with that if that’s the case.

The Micros recently were about movie-related apps Anything After and RunPee, a definition of the digital locker concept UltraViolet, what to do with old VHS movie tapes  and an explainer of Google+ Hangouts. We’ll be doing a Hangout on Tuesday to coincide with a column that runs that day in the paper. (Info on that in the Hangouts Micro.)

I kept busy with a few other stories and blog posts: there was a story about Austin tech guy Whurley and his UnGrounded innovation flight to London; a story about the Win8 version of the ACL Access app and Dell’s involvement with that; a post about coping with the end of Google Reader; a post about an Austin-made orthodontics app called Mighty Brace (which will run next week as a “Raising Austin” column in expanded form); and a short story about family mobile company Famigo.

Space Monkeys! has rolled along with a new comic about parking problems and, because Pablo and I were both traveling, two vacation-themed sketches over the last two weeks, one themed to Costa Rica, the other themed to my Disney World trip.

A bit’a meta 

Wow, that’s a lot for having been on vacation. Speaking of which, I wrote a huge chunk of blog about my Disney World trip, which happened before my reunion, but this blog post is already far too long so I’m splitting it into two blog entries.

The good news is that it’s already written, but I’m saving it for next week to time it to my next column, which ties directly in with that trip.

Sorry for the long break. It’s just been busy-as-crazy around here and I’m excited that I’m very close (days close) to finishing up a huge writing project that I’ve been working on since December. It’s been a lot of that and very little blogging here, but that ratio should change soon as I get done. Hope to tell you more about that in just a bit.

In 2001, I bought a house. It was a crazy time. 9/11 had just happened and we were all exposed tooth nerves walking around trying to Make Sense of It All with no idea of what the future might be. We did strange things.

I was only 26. I had a very great editor who told me, “The interest rates are insane. It’s never going to be like this again. You need to buy a house.”

A very tiny picture taken a very long time ago.

So I did. I’m really impressionable that way.

The house was not very large and it was not very new, but I didn’t know that then, I just knew that this incredible home with a gigantic backyard perfect for parties was suddenly mine and all I had to do was not go totally broke paying to move in. After that, things would be fine. And then they were.

I didn’t stay long in that house. Just a few years later, I got married and we moved further south and we kept the house as a rental property, managed by a company that made sure all we had to do was stay paid up. It got stressful when we’d lose tenants, but things always worked out and I always maintained that all the expenses helped us on our income taxes. (We found out later that it really didn’t, but it was nice to have that illusion for so long as we were losing money.)

We thought about selling the house. Many, many times. There were times when we were paying double mortgage and had fetuses growing in bellies (OK, just the one belly) and my wife was all, “WHY DO WE STILL HAVE THIS MONEY PIT!?” and I would remind her that the actual movie The Money Pit had a happy ending and she wouldn’t talk to me for the rest of the night.

Good times.

Then the housing crash hit. I don’t know if you heard about it. Fucking dire wolves attacked the housing market and chewed it up, ruining it for everyone! Yes, they were supposed to be extinct. That’s why everyone was so surprised. Well, except for economists who predicted the housing collapse in books like, The Fucking Dire Wolves Are Coming! and Paradise Lost: The Housing Market is About to Be Chewed Up BY FUCKING DIRE WOLVES, WHY WON’T YOU LISTEN?!

Every time the subject of selling the house came up, I would raise my hands diagonally at about a 45-degree angle and say, “The housing market. What are you gonna do? It’s a terrible time to sell. Dire wolves.”

Part of my reluctance to sell it was that I had always fantasized about moving back to Austin and maybe expanding the house. The yard is so enormous that wouldn’t be impossible. But the neighborhood we lived in never really got into renovation and expansion projects and at some point in our stay in New Braunfels, my wife decided we should die here.

Usually when your wife tells you you’re going to die somewhere, it’s pretty ominous and you should probably not be anywhere near that spot from then on. But the conversation was actually quite pleasant. It went like so:

Rebecca: After this, we should build one more house in New Braunfels and then that’s it.

Omar: What do you mean “That’s it?”

Rebecca: That would be our last house. That’s where we’d retire.

Omar: You mean that’s where we’ll die?

Rebecca: You first.

The thing is, I actually found all that comforting. We have a plan. That’s a little story I trot out whenever someone asks me why I’m not trying to get a job in New York or D.C.. I tell them it’s because I already know where I’m growing old and they back away slowly and then go subtweet about it.

Did I mention we are selling a house?

I took you on that detour to get you to here, where I am in the middle of trying to fix up a house to sell right before we take a big family trip, which is like trying to ride a roller coaster while painting a house, which incidentally is something that costs close to $3,000, I just learned.

I was never a big DIYer when I lived in that house. I’m still not. I barely have time to write my own blog posts. So it was with dismay that we saw how dated the fixtures and ceiling fans look and other bits of wear and tear that accumulated in the time since I lived there.

The yard is still spectacular. The back patio, with its Saltillo tile and tin roof, is still wonderful and I miss it a lot. The backyard has so many trees and so much shade that it was always 10 to 20 degrees cooler than everywhere else in the summer. We visited the house recently in the middle of a rainstorm and I imagined myself sitting there with my cup of coffee in the morning using my laptop back when Wi-Fi was a new and wondrous thing of no wires.

I am buying ceiling fans at Lowe’s and talking about paint swatches and remodeling bathrooms (by proxy; we have people) and fixing fences and yards. We’re making a house beautiful for people we don’t know yet, picking out items for a place we’ll never live, trying to make it nice but not so nice that it’ll impose our style on someone who might find it crappy. It’s a weird, tricky balance, trying to spend enough to make the house desirable but not spending so much that we defeat the purpose of selling.

So that’s what’s been on my mind. I miss the house but I’m also eager to be rid of it. In the years since we moved out, we’ve replaced a roof and a furnace, put in new carpet, made endless small plumbing repairs and gotten stressed about house issues for a place we don’t even live. We don’t need it anymore and we haven’t needed it for a while. But letting go of something you love that you think you could love again is never easy. Now I just hope someone loves it just as much as I once did.

Other new things happening

I have a new editor at work, which is exciting and fun.

I mentioned a family vacation. I’ll have a lot more to say about that soon. It involves a whole world of Disney stuff. You can probably guess.

I’m still painting miniatures, this time a set for my brother while I await my Zombicide stuff to arrive in the fall.

I am so cool.

Also, I am now buying comic books on eBay, so instead of having a midlife crisis where I buy sports cars and unsuccessfully solicit blowjobs from waitresses, I seem to be going the other way, continuing to do things I stopped doing as a teenager before there was such a bay as eBay.

And lastly, my older daughter finished kindergarten, which seems unreal and far too soon, but then again, she’s worked really hard this year and come a long way and is thrilled to be going to first grade. She did great.

Work stuff and monkeys

Of course, I have articles to share.

I wrote a meditative column about whether our use of technology is making us speak less. I’m not sure there’s a definitive conclusion there, but certainly the ways we use our voices is changing, at least.

And this week’s column was about our changing TV viewing habits, a column prompted by the debut of Arrested Development’s fourth season on Netflix. I also did a bonus blog with a few more thoughts on the subject.

There were also new Digital Savant Micro features on the Xbox One and on Gmail’s new tab-focused design changes.

A note on some of those MyStatesman.com stories. Our paywall goes up soon for reals as our free preview ends. That means links I post here to articles will often require a subscription to read. Blog posts won’t be affected, but most of my weekly stuff that runs in the newspaper will.

Separately on the blog, I wrote about a cool civic tech expo, a plastic surgeon live Tweeting a procedure, and an Austin-made app for the website A Beautiful Mess.

Our favorite monkeys in space were mystified by “Shelfies,” panicking at the disco, and engaged in a discussion about TV binge-viewing.

Give our monkeys a Facebook like or a Twitter follow, would you?

And that’s it! Please hope for me that the house sells so I can stop buying hardware and embarrassing myself.

This seems like a good transition time, what with all the graduations and weddings and new jobs and people up and moving across the country that I’m seeing.

Add to that the birthdays and the births, the deaths and the cancers; right now feels like the opposite of those increasingly few times when you go a few days wondering if anything’s happening. Boredom doesn’t really feel like an option anymore if I’m paying attention. It’s just this incoming stream of stuff, stuff, stuff and it’s sometimes tough to allocate the appropriate amount of attention and care and congrats +/- sympathy when it’s so much at once. The extreme emotions can cancel each other out and you’re just left with a feeling where you’re not sure in which direction to aim your being and be present. Sometimes, unfortunately, it ends up being not in any one in particular.

I haven’t had any of those things listed above except a birthday last month. The only real transitions for me have been some relocating at work. We’re all changing desk locations due to a large-scale building renovation, not just me. I posted something about it online when I was moving my stuff into boxes to transport a few dozen feet and someone on Google+ assumed I’d lost my job. Funny thing, Google+ always feels a little disconnected like that.

The desk move wasn’t bad at all. We have new carpet, I purged a bunch of stuff and have a neat desk again (but for how long!?) and my new spot is a lot less isolated than my against-the-wall former work home.

The other move at work was more recent; we’re switching blog software, which was a big dreaded thing many of us were worried about that not seems like much less of a big deal in that it works and it not that difficult to use. The old blog and archives are up and we’re hoping there’ll be a solution to moving them over, but for now, the new blog home looks nicer and solves some of the quirky problems we had before (like not being able to use Chrome to blog with or our links showing up as garbled teases on Facebook) while introducing some new quirky problems that are not as visible to readers.

I wish I had some stories to tell you about the last few weeks, but they have been boring in the most happy way. I’ve been spending more time than usual at home with the kids and as frustrating as that can be in small moments (“No, Carolina, no, put the pen down, no, don’t write on the cabinets, stop, please, no, put down the pen, give me the pen, HERE, THE PEN, HAND ME THE PEN, STOP WRITING, OK, why are you crying, I’m sorry, here’s the pen back, NO STOP WRITING ON THE CABINETS!”) it is also kind of wonderful in hundreds of completely boring ways that amount to me watching my kids do their thing and just charm me and warm my heart.

Sometimes I post videos or photos when they do something particularly visual, but it doesn’t come close to capturing what it’s like when they really turn on the magic. Maybe they’re singing along to a song or making a little gesture I’ve never seen before or saying something random and hilarious (My wife: “Omar, get the stuff out of the car.” Lilly: “Yeah, OMAR, get the stuff out of the car!”).

There’s a trade-off, of course, there always is. I don’t think about moving my family to another city because that’s off the table. That’s something we decided pretty firmly once the kids were born. I don’t travel much away from the kids, maybe only once or twice a year. My going off to do stuff like working on videos or attending conferences (especially on weekends) or taking advantage of attending really cool stuff in Austin just doesn’t happen as much anymore. I miss an awful lot. I turn down a lot of things and beg off a lot on things that are not entirely unreasonable.

When they were much smaller, it was a lot harder to do that. I really did feel like I was exchanging my youth and Good Times for boring, frustrating babysitting. Now it’s really not hard to make those decisions. I think about what it’ll mean not to be able to tell them goodnight myself or how being away for an entire weekend means I can’t take them to the park or the zoo or Schlitterbahn, or the Jumpy Place or even just the Donut Palace on a Saturday morning (their new favorite hangout) and how I would feel if my dad was always gone.

Wanting to be here and having to be here can be two very different things, but sometimes they go together and you feel like you’re spending your time well.

Work and other stuff

I mentioned earlier that I moved to a new blog for Digital Savant. Here’s the link for the new blog and the address for the old blog where the archives are still housed for anything older than last week.

Last week’s column was a big review piece featuring four smart phones, the BlackBerry Z10 (the one without the physical keyboard), the HTC One, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Nokia Lumia 920.

It was a little crazy having four extra cell phones in the house. If I had them turned on at the same time, one Twitter reply or email would set them all chiming at once, which begins to make you feel like a hamster responding to the ring of a bell.

This week’s column was a roundup of travel apps. I don’t travel a lot, so I relied on the wisdom of my friends and co-workers who do. It turns out they had great suggestions and I plan to use some of these apps when we go on a big family trip this summer.

The Digital Savant Micro for the last two weeks included one about Adobe’s Creative Cloud (their subscription service) and “Rougelike,” a genre of computer role-playing games I’d only heard about recently even though they’ve been around a while. I also did one recently about gesture recognition, like the air swiping you find (but which doesn’t work very well) on the Galaxy S4 phone.

Lastly, this has nothing to do with me, but my former wonderful bosses who founded Television Without Pity have gotten back together to launch a brand-new TV site, Previously.TV. Just a week after it went live, it’s already got some must-read regular features and if you know what the original TWOP was like, you won’t be surprised by the sharp writing and the gorgeous site design.

Postscript

This seems to keep happening: I write a blog post (like the one above), sit on it a day to add images and fine tune it, and then something happens that seems to render everything I wrote less important (or beside the point, at least).

Tonight, it’s the horrifying tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, a place where I still have friends and just up the road from where I lived for years in Norman and in Midwest City. I watched the awful dark clouds churn at work on a live video feed and when I saw what it looked like, I knew it was going to be bad.  Even without seeing where it was touching ground and what damage it was doing, it looked like the end of the world. It wasn’t going to be anything but devastating.

This happened before after I’d moved away, in 1999, and for months I heard stories about the devastation and the loss. The 1999 tornado apparently passed less than a half mile from where my family lived when we were there.

Tonight, the death toll in Oklahoma is at 51 and many of those are children. There’s nothing I can say or offer. As with the 1999 storm and even further back to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, I feel the same helpless sorrow.  It somehow makes it a little better to know that Oklahomans will respond the way they always have to these horrible events. They will respond with strength and grace and they will rebuild. It’s also a little worse to know that. Why should the people of Oklahoma, some of the finest people I’ve ever met, have to suffer through this again.

If I think about it too much, it just makes me hurt and hurt. Right now, it’s just heartbreak. I’m waiting and hoping they find more of those kids.

Please help if you can.

This week, I’ve been thinking about audiences. What it means to have one, what it’s like to not have one at all and whether it should matter either way when you’re writing.

For a long time, when I was working with LCP, I was writing and performing. Sometimes I was performing in things I didn’t write, but a lot of times, I was writing stuff for myself that I knew nobody would bother with if I didn’t do it myself and push to get it in a show.

I don’t really miss performing. I mean, I do, but not the being on stage in front of a bunch of strangers part. If I really wanted to do that more, I would agree to more speaking engagements or make an effort to hit some open-mic comedy nights. The performing part, though, the feeling of connecting with an audience and being heard — honestly, I get that from writing for the paper, from posting here and over at Space Monkeys! (where the audience since we relaunched this year is tiny, but suddenly growing and gaining traction). I never wanted to do stand-up comedy (the touring, the empty rooms, the clawing your way up always struck me as sad). But I’ve always had a need to connect with people with words, no matter the medium.

And, not to sound ridiculous, but I get the same Dopamine hit from social media, specifically Tweeting. The few times that I’ve gotten retweeted 50 or 100+ times just for tapping out something fleeting that crossed my brain has often felt as good as when I used to put on ridiculous costumes and project the shit out of some jokes on stage on a Saturday night. That probably sounds silly but I would have probably given up on Twitter ages ago if there weren’t some truth to that. It’s less risky physically; I don’t have to worry that I’m going to walk on stage with the wrong hat on or flub a line. On the other hand, Tweeting something stupid could get me fired. So it’s not without a similar element of danger.

I’ve been writing a couple of things for a while now that have not seen an audience yet and it requires so much more motivation to keep the energy going when you know that what you’re writing it’s not going to get read for a really long time, if at all. You have to believe in some way that somebody’s going to see it even if it’s just a future version of yourself.  Sometimes the idea that it needs to get out there and reach someone in some form is enough motivation to knock another three or four pages out late at night when I just want to go to sleep.

Recently, a creative person I greatly admire showed me a piece of art they worked on that, for dumb reasons that are specific to their industry, will probably not be seen by anyone outside of the very small group of people who worked on it and a few close friends.  Maybe forever. What I saw was complete. It was fantastic. It was something I’d post on Twitter and share with the world if I could. But it’s not out there and, realistically, might never be.

If I made something really good, something I believed in and poured my heart into and I couldn’t share it… that would really break my heart, I think. It’s happened to me before, but not really with anything as big and complete and audience-ready.

I didn’t know whether to feel lucky to be one of the few people who got to enjoy this wonderful little thing or to be sad for everyone who won’t.

I thought about all that a lot over the weekend as I helped cover the Moontower Comedy Festival. It brought back all of those years in the sketch troupe trying to build an audience, touring around the country, worrying constantly about whether the stuff we thought was funny was going to work for an audience and stressing over reviews and box office. Sometimes that audience was small but made up for it in big laughs. Other times the size of the audience was huge and scary and organic; it made the nerves sharper and the performances bigger. I don’t know how long we would have stuck it out if there had been no laughs and no people to see us. It wouldn’t have been 10-15 years, that’s for sure.  Now I’m in it again, on a much different scale, but it’s exciting to see a new group of people (much younger people for the most part) learning those ropes. It makes me happy seeing that.

It’s a little weird to be a writer who has different-sized audiences for different things I work on. I know when I write a comic that there’s a sliver of people who will see it. I know when I write for the paper that the print and online audience is made up of a lot of people I’ll never see or hear from. We know they’re there, but in terms of feedback, they’re invisible to me. And then there’s the social media audience where you get more immediate feedback, but that’s not always how it happens. Sometimes I’ll run into someone who follows me on Twitter or is a Facebook friend and they’ll mention something I wrote months ago, a quick 140 characters that I forgot about five minutes after it was posted. And it reminds me that we can’t really know where our words go, how far they travel, who absorbed them.

Maybe in the future we’ll know exactly that information. It’ll all be quantifiable and you’ll never have to wonder if you touched or made laugh more people than you imagined. That idea is amazing, terrifying and a little sad all at the same time.

Here are the Moontower Comedy and Oddity Festival reviews I wrote in my wild week of going out and seeing comedy stuff. (Actually, it was only two nights, but it feels like a wild and crazy time any time I get out of the house past 8 p.m.)

The fantastic: Dana Carvey made me all nostalgic and warm; Godfrey completely blew me away and Chris Hardwick showed me he’s just as great a stand-up comic as he is a TV host and podcast nerd.

The pretty good: Amy Schumer did not blow the doors off the joint but she was appropriately filthy for a midnight slot; Fortune Feimster was new to me and totally charming.

The bad: I didn’t review this one, but it sounds like Janeane Garofalo was just not funny, which if you’ve listened to her on any podcasts in the last year or two sounds about right.

As an unexpected bonus to the festival, two days after it was over I got to see a live recording of one of my favorite podcasts, Professor Blastoff. Tig Notaro and Kyle Dunnigan are two of my most-adored comedians right now (they’re writing for Amy Schumer’s show on Comedy Central) and their guest was Doug Benson, who brought a mean streak to the usually jovial, light-hearted podcast. Something about the chemistry worked and it was just an incredibly fun time, especially for a Monday night. I bought a T-shirt.

Here are the recent work things I’ve been working on:

Two of the students I interviewed for my story, Laura Plascencio (left) and Michael Alvarez. Photo by Mark Matson for the American-Statesman

I wrote a Digital Savant column about the Globaloria video game design program, which has some future stars in the East Austin High School Prep program. Really enjoyed meeting those kids, talking to the teacher in the story and learning more about how the program works.

My column this week was a big wrap-up review story on Microsoft’s consumer products like the Surface tablets, Office 2013 and Office 365 plus their Windows Phone 8 software and Windows 8 itself. It was a lot of ground to cover, but I’ve been using these products for a while now and I think I got a good sense of what’s working and what needs work.

The recent Micro features were about paywalls (intentionally timed; it’s now behind a paywall) and a Micro defining “Oculus Rift,” basically a VR headset for gaming.

My next column is about my crippling Kickstarter addiction. You can read a preview/blog version here.

You may notice that the stories I’m linking to now take you “stubs,” incomplete versions of the stories that you can read in full on the new MyStatesman.com website. Here’s more info about that.

For now the site is free, you just have to register.

Since last we talked, our Space Monkeys! dealt with email overload (or did the opposite, actually), were horrified by sorority email profanity and played with Google Glass (now with time travel!).

Please check them out and if you have a sec, vote for the comic on TopWebComics if you would or at least throw us a Like on our Facebook page.

In case you’re wondering, my back feels a lot better, but that awful fiery spot still flares up once in a while (today, for instance). I’ve been using a heating pad and I still have some muscle relaxer left. It may be another trip to the doctor or at least a massage therapist soon.

A bigger pain in my back this week was that my WordPress theme somehow got corrupted so instead of finishing this blog entry last night, I was playing around with custom.css and function-what-have-you and other messy, bloody innards of this site trying to get it to look the way it did before with the theme re-installed.

It’s most of the way there, but menus/navigation are still missing and I haven’t cracked those weird WordPress nuts yet. If you’re a WordPress genius and want to help, let me know. I don’t want to stay up late again tinkering tonight.

I’m about to disappear into the hidey hole of South by Southwest Interactive, tomorrow in fact, which is not new. It’s become so routine, in fact, year after year that at my house we don’t even panic and scramble over it, we just know that those five days, Daddy is gone and we need a little extra help and planning.

But there’s some weirdness that this is the most public I’ll be all year, out from around 10 a.m. till probably 1 or 2 a.m. every night, meeting new people and seeing old friends. But at home, I’m just gone and disappeared. It’s like SXSW Interactive, for one week of the year, is a second family and I’m all Charles Kuralt up in there.

And then I’ll be so exhausted when it’s over I’ll stay home and miss all the Music fest stuff as I hibernate. My kids already think I’m some kind of bear, so perhaps this will comfort them.

ANYHOO!

Here’s all the stuff I’ve been working on the last few weeks. I’ve been writing and typing so much for so long lately that I truly feel my fingers might fall off and it was all I could do to round this up, but I know that if I don’t do it now, on the eve, it will have to wait till after the festival and the hole will be much, much deeper.

Here’s the roundup and thank you for your patience. I’d like to write more essays here but the truth is that I feel like I’m spending lots and lots of time writing either for work or for the other projects I’ve mentioned that there’s barely anything left but fumes by the time I’m done. I’m hoping things will settle down in a few months because some of these things are winding down or eventually they’ll be completed.

Work stuff

I hadn’t written anything for CNN in a long while for lack of me pitching them any ideas, but they were kind enough to let me write about SXSW Interactive as I was already gathering intel for the Statesman and doing lots of interviews.

My article, which was actually written almost a week ago, was about whether the hype at SXSW Interactive is dying down and if the festival has peaked (and whether that’s a good thing.) Since the article was sent in, my email inbox has a’sploded and now, I fear, the hype is even bigger/worse than last year. Somehow I had forgotten that people like to knock on our door at the very last minute with news and information and that this always makes life harder for everybody. But I think there’s still some good insights about the fest from the people I interviewed.

For the Statesman, of course, things have been hugely busy leading up to the fest.

This Thursday, I did a big Life & Arts story on free official events at Interactive.

In a very strange series of events, I met Grumpy Cat, the Internet meme sensation and even took a photo and shot a Vine video (below).

Folks: #GrumpyCat. #SXSW vine.co/v/bHYv7VvlJE6

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) March 7, 2013

Emma Janzen and Tina Phan on our staff did a great video and I make a short appearance getting all cat-love on poor Grumpy Cat.

Further back, I did a Digital Savant column rounding up reviews of an Acer W700 Windows 8 tablet and the great Studio Ghibli-animated game Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. This week’s column was also about SXSW Interactive, a preview of the first two keynotes from adventurous entrepreneur Elon Musk and design guru Tina Roth Eisenberg.

The recent Micro features were “What is jailbreaking?” and “What is Google Glass?”

Speaking of Google Glass, I was on NPR’s On Point With Tom Ashbrook recently talking with Amber Case and Ben Chigier about wearable computers and user interfaces. It’s a full hour, but there was lots of great discussion and questions from readers. (An emailer told me I talk too fast and that they could not listen to me.

And from the random files, I interviewed LeVar Burton about a Holodeck project AMD is working on as well as Demand Media CTO Byron Reese about his upcoming SXSW presentation.

I also drew a very ugly picture of what the PlayStation 4 might look like.

Non-work stuff

The new sketch show that I helped write, Pulga Nation featuring the Mexcentrics, opened tonight.

It’s weird not being there for the opening and with the festival starting, not even being 100 percent sure I’ll be able to see the show. I caught a rehearsal the other night and all the nights spent in theaters rehearsing during the 10 years of Latino Comedy Project came flooding back and I remembered how much I missed it.

It’s a mix of people I’ve worked with for many, many years and new people. It’s exciting and fun and seeing words that I wrote up on a stage again, especially when the words are coming out of the mouth of my friend Patti, who makes me laugh always, has been a thrill. The show runs through Saturday. If you’re in Austin, please try to catch it.

Our Space Monkeys continue to thrive. Their Twitter account is starting to take off and the new comics, I think, have been really good. And we’ve been consistent, posting every week, no exceptions.

New comics include one about the horrible game Aliens: Colonial Marines, a strip about an evil Higgs boson particle and this week’s comic about Grumpy Cat (kind of a coincidence, that). I also did a surprise birthday ¡Pescados del Mar! comic for my brother, drawn in my own horrible scrawl.

And because I hate to leave the girls out, here’s a Vine I posted of them playing at a gymnastics center for the first time. Those children lost their damn mind having so much fun.

Jumpers vine.co/v/bgbTVP6dI3j

— Omar L. Gallaga (@omarg) February 23, 2013

I’ll be back after SXSW, post-hibernation.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been nose-to-the-grindstone writing stuff for work and for freelance that was almost exclusively tech-related. Even the fun, goofy stuff I wrote for CNN last year was all based in the real world, all of it structured as commentary or essay even if it wasn’t completely meant to be taken as super-serious.

Even when I was recapping TV and doing the movie trailer videos, those were grounded in the reality of what I was writing about. These weren’t universes I created, I was talking about them more like a reporter, telling you what they were about from an outsider’s perspective.

Now, outside of work, the bulk of my writing for the last few months has been fiction. I’m working on two things that I’m alternating between apart from writing comics about monkeys in space and just finished revisions on a sketch comedy show going up in March that I was able to work on with some close friends. Then there’s another thing that may or may not happen in the audio world, but fingers crossed because it would be a lot of fun, I think. If I’m not posting here (he said, looking at the date of the last entry), it’s because I’m doing those things most every night.

It’s really different writing the fiction things. Fun and freeing and putting me in a mindset that I’d neglected for a long while. It’s fun to float between worlds like this and, being that I never got into drugs or heavy drinking, the only way I really know how to do it.

Real real life has been kind of sweet lately. The kids have gone from pitiless marauders of the fall to more manageable sweethearts of the spring. We booked a big family trip for later this year. I’ve gotten to see and catch up with more friends in the last month and a half than the previous six months combined, which was one of my big New Year’s not-so-much-a-resolution-but-just-something-I-want-to-do things. But, like you, I deal with toxic people sometimes or walk away in a stupor due to layers of bureaucracy or hear about something on Twitter that is so dumb, so asinine that I can’t help but talk about it like everyone else.

Real life is beautiful and magic, but it’s also random and mundane, sometimes at the same time and finding beauty and magic in all that is the challenge. (And, really, why we write.)

I wouldn’t call it an escape hatch, exactly, but more like a really diverting puzzle that you’re continually trying to solve. When pieces lock together, it’s so satisfying that it makes all the other stuff so much easier to deal with.

Work stuff

Busy couple of weeks leading into some insanely busy of weeks coming in March for South by Southwest Interactive.

Two pieces I wrote after the whole Total Frat Move thing got a really nice response.

First, I was lucky enough to catch a Tweet in passing last month from a woman named Vicki Flaugher, who was getting ready to shut down her account and give up social media. It was completely by chance that I was about to write a column on that very idea and when I asked if she’d chat with me, she was open and honest about why she needs to take a break from Twitter, Facebook and everything else.

The column got a good response from other people who feel overwhelmed by their daily online rituals. Vicki ended up writing a follow-up piece for Bulldog Reporter where she said some very kind words.

Another column that got some positive response (and one negative Letter to the Editor) was one I wrote about the challenges of raising girls in a tech-heavy house when sometimes I just want them to go play outside or put down the iPad. My wife, who usually reads or sees most photos or text I’m going to put online about our family in advance, didn’t get a chance to read this one before it got published and I was scared to death that she was going to tell me she didn’t agree with my point of view or that she thought I was overestimating the amount of thought we’ve given it. It turns out, to my relief, that she liked the story and so did other folks in our family who were thrilled to see a photo of Lilly and Carolina in the paper. (I cropped it so you can barely tell, but Carolina on the left there is lifting her shirt and sticking out her belly in an obvious homage to Tracy Morgan.)

Photo by Ricardo B. Brazziell / American-Statesman

I did a roundup of places to play video games and tabletop games in Austin. It was a lot of work putting it together, but as part of my research, I got to spend an afternoon playing video games at Pinballz and that was an incredible amount of fun.

Last week, the column was a roundup of South by Southwest Interactive 2013 stuff we know so far. In about three weeks, the fest returns and I’m going to be covering it again. I’m trying to stay positive and not get too overwhelmed, but it’s pretty much taking over everything right now and I’m riding that wave.

Photo by me for the American-Statesman

And the new column that just went up is about the ongoing influence of SimCity, which will have a new version out next month. I spoke to some Austin students who used SimCity 4 Deluxe to build a city 150 years in the future. Then they built a physical model of that city and are taking it to Washington D.C. to compete in a Future City competition.

Wow, seeing that list all put together just made me really, really exhausted. Excuse me while I go take a small nap before SXSW Interactive starts.

Other stuff

I mentioned last time that the monkeys from space that we do comics about started a Twitter account.

The comic is chugging along. We did one about zombies and another about that cute little Iranian monkey that was blasted the fuck into space against his will. And we did one about poop, which with us is kind of a given.

This weekend, my wife went on a business-related trip (the business in this case is Zumba, but that’s a story for another blog entry, maybe, perhaps) so I watched the girls on my own, which was terrifying at first and then pretty OK in the end. We theorized on the phone about whether the girls behave better when one of us isn’t around because they’re not competing for the attention of two parents at the same time or if maybe having one parent out of town freaked them out just enough to be obedient. Whatever happened, this weekend was not the crazy, Mr. Mom comedy of hijinks I thought it would be. In fact, it was kind of wonderful.

The big mistake I made was watching Eraserhead for the first time on Hulu, which put a bunch of Criterion Collection movies out for free (free if you don’t mind annoying, tone-shattering commercials every 10 minutes). I’m a huge David Lynch fan and this was the only movie of his that I hadn’t watched all the way through.

Well, that was a big mistake. Not because the movie is bad (it’s brilliant) and not because I didn’t like it (I found it incredibly disturbing yet weirdly relatable), but… well… mewling tiny worm baby and terrified father. It did not exactly set the best tone for me for the weekend.

But then we went to the bounce castle warehouse and the kids ran around for three hours while I sat and read and all was well.