I haven’t done a lot of personal writing this year due to … a lot of things. Just some personal ennui, and a general fatigue with journalism, and a sudden interest in stock trading of all things.
But I sometimes do miss the kind of writing I was doing on Medium the last couple of years after I left the newspaper. I got to be more myself in my writing than I ever had before and then I just stopped when leadership changed over there and I stopped getting paid for assignments.
Well, whether I’m getting paid or not (decidedly not in this case), I still like to share, so here’s something I wrote over there, completely on my own, about what it’s been like to be a marching band dad. Hope you enjoy it.
Thank you for your interest in the property at 129666 Paimon Lane. We’re thrilled to have this gorgeous house on the market after a lengthy delay and I’m happy to address the questions your client has sent since we met at the open house last week. I’ll answer them in order:
The house is not currently zoned for a school district. It was previously in the Salt Lake City School District, but the zoning was redrawn a few months ago with the property just out of the boundary. If this is a problem, we can petition the school district, but in the meantime, I’m happy to provide a list of private tutors and private schools in the area. This might be a good opportunity to consider home-schooling as an option!
I’m embarrassed about the dense trail of ants in the hallway your client walked into at the open house. We contacted pest control immediately and I am enclosing a receipt for that work. The swarm of flies was also cleared from the attic.
Since the open house, all markings and candle wax pools have been removed from the interior of the treehouse, as we discussed. The religious group that was using it for small gatherings has since relocated to its own church and did a thorough job cleaning.
On the matter of the 1/12-scale miniature houses and dioramas your client asked about: good news! Any undamaged works left in the house by artist Annie Graham will be included with the home. Since her disappearance, the art gallery she was working with dropped its request for the pieces, and they will remain on the property with the exception of “Charlie Decapitated,” “Quicksand House,” and “Family On Fire,” all of which are still being held as evidence by the sheriff’s department.
There are no longer any bleached, naked people lining the bushes alongside the house. We have asked those individuals to leave informing them that heads would roll if they stuck around, and so far, they have respected the request.
We were unable to remove the leather-bound notebook from inside the fireplace. It’s stuck pretty firmly in there! Please consider this a conversation / art piece.
The looping symbol that is carved throughout the house and on some of the remaining furniture is obscure, but we believe it’s Gaelic for, “Good luck and good fortune!”
The welcome mat at the front door is included with the house. Very fortunate that “Charles” is your client’s name as well!
If
there are any other questions about the home, the treehouse, or the surrounding
property, please don’t hesitate to contact my office. This unique, rustic
property is a steal and I’d appreciate it if you could convince this family to
buy the house! I haven’t slept in weeks.
The dreaded Schlitterbahn Submerged Sidewalk Dragon, who was not a fan of the last season of Game of Thrones
For a lot of years, especially since I moved to New Braunfels in 2004, summer has felt like I wave I’m trying to catch. The place I live has a lot of rivers and trails and one gargantuan water park, plus I’m short-driving-distance away from even more summer fun in Austin, Corpus Christi and lots of other place.
By the end of the summer, I’d always be regretful that I didn’t do more, that I allowed myself to be stuck in air-conditioned offices and commuting to work instead of taking more vacation or burning a mental-health sick day or two just to go swimming or get some sun. By September, I would always have this low-grade bummer feeling (“depression” would be too strong a word for it) that summer was gone and I let it get away.
Last summer was very different. A bunch of things in my life changed very quickly in the span of a couple of months from around June through September and summer became something really different, a way for me to cope with what was happening, and for me to remind myself that the sun, the water, the beach, that these things weren’t going to go away just because this time of transition was so scary and new.
I traveled a lot last summer, I got season passes for the water park, I tubed and went to South Padre Island, I tried not to get sunburned under the blazing Texas sun and mostly succeeded. When I didn’t, aloe vera.
This summer, one year after all of that, I’m trying to continue that appreciation with more visits to the water park, some yard work, several vacations that are booked. I had some financial stress the end of last year where I got really anxious about how I was going to make it through the holidays and this year, but it turns out the IRS doesn’t want all of my freelance money and that I am able to afford to not be afraid to do any real vacationing.
I still have no proper job (I still get confused on forms where “Unemployed” is an option, but “Self-employed” is not), but things have been busy with lots of freelance writing, ongoing radio stuff, and some really weird things that have fallen into my laptop’s lap that I would classify as “Miscellaneous income.” I helped a website do some online instruction for its users. I ghost-wrote a band’s biography. Someone I admire asked me to help them put together an application for an award program. All of these were not completely in my wheelhouse, but I enjoyed doing them and it was supplemental to some bigger-picture stuff I’m working on as well as continuing to contribute when I can to the Statesman and Austin360.
Lots of changes, but summer still feels the same to me as it did when I was a kid: big and inviting, with days that stretch out like yellow-orange taffy, but then gone too quickly, just a lingering taste on the tongue when it’s gone.
Whataburger is being sold, too, and it’s a little weird, but not unexpected or unusual, that these iconic Texas brands are going through these changes.
Schlitterbahn is in the town I call home and Whataburger is probably the fast-food restaurants I’ve eaten most in my life (I worked there in high school, so that throws the curve a little).
I know people who are freaking out because they love these brands and feel ownership of them as longtime customers, and I’m wary of change too. I also have friends who’ve made snide comments about them, dismissing their value, or implying that they did something wrong to deserve succumbing to market forces.
Not to tie myself to these corporate events too much, but I still get asked sometimes why I left the Statesman last year, how I could walk away from a dream gig at a place that appreciated my work, why I would basically succumb to market force to sell out my own voice at a big outlet to stay home and write articles for smaller outlets and do things like write bios for musicians and not be part of the media scene in the way that I had been doing for a really long time.
Apart from all the personal considerations that I won’t get into and a very pragmatic look at the situation, a big part of it was simply feeling that it was time for a change, a big one, and that staying in the gear that I’d been in was no longer good for me. It just felt like it was enough of that and time now for something else. Maybe I would have been laid off a few months later, maybe I would have stayed another 20+ years, but I stopped wanting that job to define my whole life, and wanted to know if it wasn’t too late to be something else besides a newspaper writer dabbling in a bunch of other things.
What if the dabbling is the thing?
Which is to say that even though there was some very cynical, ledger-based decision making for those companies and their family owners, I also get the immense relief that comes with walking away, with starting fresh, with not being in charge of the thing that you’ve been in charge of and mindful for and tied to whether it soars or sinks. It is nice, I’m finding, to make your own fortune and luck for a while. It’s nice to reset.
That’s what summer feels like to me now, too.
Like a good time for change.
By The Way
A while back, this would have been February, I got approached by The Washington Post about a travel project they were working, something really ambitious that involved local city guides from 50 different cities.
I agreed to work on a guide to Austin and spent the a big chunk of March and April revisiting old haunts, checking out some new ones and putting together a guide of old and new Austin restaurants, hotels, entertainment destinations and more for what ended up being called “By The Way” and which launched on June 18. The guide seemed like an easy enough assignment at first, but once I got started realized it was going to take a lot of legwork, double-checking, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, tons of design, editing and photography talent.
The Austin guide is up and I’m so impressed with how it turned out and feeling good about what I got to include. Photographer Ilana Panich-Linsman did such an amazing job, and I got to work with my former co-worker Ponch Garcia, who did some copy editing on the Austin guide. By The Way has a really great Instagram account and I’ve been enjoying learning about all these other cities that were covered around the world. The postcards, Instagram stories and logos created for these guides are so wonderful. They also have a weekly newsletter for By The Way worth subscribing to.
It’s my first Washington Post byline, which has me bursting with joy. I’m so glad I can finally talk about it — keeping it a secret these last couple of months was really, really tough.
I got paid AND I got a badge!
ATX TV Festival
Great screening of my favorite new show, HBO’s Los Espookys.
A lot of the writing I’ve been doing lately has been focused on entertainment, including some book, TV and movie reviews.
For the last couple of years, I’ve had to miss the great ATX Television Festival due to travel and other obligations. This year, I had a chance to attend three of the four days and do some coverage for Austin360 of the fest. I wrote about a panel on inclusion and access, the new Comedy Central series Alternatino with Arturo Castro (which is great, watch it!), an upcoming animated Amazon series called Undone with animation from Austin, and a script reading of Wannabes, which is in production.
For the site Primetimer, which has taken the place of the much-beloved Previously.tv, I got to write up Los Espookys, which is a fantastic new HBO Spanish-language comedy you should seek out. The first episode is free online.
The Alternatino with Arturo Castro screening at ATX TV Fest.
I’ve got your tech topics from Texas Standard! It’s been a busy couple of weeks with some actual tech news; summer is usually pretty slow in the tech industry, but there’s been no shortage of interesting things to talk about. Since the last time I posted, we’ve covered:
Change is trauma, I guess, or at least a shock to the system you can’t really gauge without some perspective.
Your body re-forms a lot of its own cells constantly as you move along in this world and in a decade you’re mostly not even physically the same parts. And I can imagine that a sudden change of environment, a big swing of emotions and priorities and goals must speed that along, the stress-shedding of even more skin and bone and follicle.
Last year was all about change, the “Bulldoze” year, this year was “Foundation,” building on new ground and starting new things.
It’s late April and there’s a bit of a lull right now. South by Southwest took up a lot of my energy in March (more on that below) and the weeks leading up to that and as soon as that was done, I dived into a big project for a publication I’ve always wanted to write for that I hope to post about here really soon. That took me into early April, then I had to finish up my taxes, which were incredibly complicated and weird for 2018, and then I was in the middle of some home appraisal stuff, preparation for a whole other project that I’m excited about and now it’s now and I’m taking a deep breath and resting a little bit and seeing where I am.
Everything from like Halloween to Easter is a big blur, preparing from one holiday to the next, traveling a lot, spending as much time as I can with my kids now that I’m not rushing home from an office after 6 p.m. every night against traffic.
I got past the bit where I was stressing out about money every day. Even after I knew that a contract I signed for 2019 was going to keep me financially OK, I was still worried about Christmas gifts, the costs of all these house things that needed repairing or improving, the ridiculous cost of having basic health coverage as a freelancer, and this looming fear that whatever I owed on my taxes for what turned out to be a windfall year (minus putting a down payment on a new house) was going to wipe me out.
now it’s now and I’m taking a deep breath and resting a little bit and seeing where I am
That didn’t happen, but I still have that nagging need to hustle, to keep accepting assignments that only pay $50-$100 just to keep income flowing instead of wasting time, just to cover dinners and dental visits, to hedge against some future costly emergency. Not every day anymore, but often enough that I can’t sit still for very long.
There are days that are incredibly relaxed, when there is nothing due and no place to be when I can work on the shed/guest house that came with this house with my dad, putting up particle board and using saws and drills. Those are days when I can catch up on movies I missed when my life was too busy (shoutout “Civil War”), or to just go the gym and not feel rushed to get it all done in 45 minutes.
But it’s not without problems. I get bent out of shape chasing invoices that don’t get paid for a long time, I always feel like I should be writing more, even when there’s no assignment in front of me, I have that fear of disappearing and being forgotten because I’m not pushing stuff out there like I used to.
When I went freelance last year one of the first things I put on my to-do list was “Make business cards.” I played around with some designs on the Kinko’s website and wasn’t really happy with any of them. My brother, who’s much better at design than me, agreed they weren’t great and I just kind of put it aside. Truth be told, I don’t get asked for a business card very often, but the few times I did at interviews it was always that awkward, “Oh, I don’t have them yet, working on it…” and I wanted something to hand out, even if it was a happy face on a piece of lunchmeat (how great would that card be? But you’d have to keep them in a mini fridge you always carried around.).
So after SXSW I used a coupon code I got from a very good Moo booth at the event where they gave out lots of samples of their stuff. I threw something together that I ended up really happy with. Sure, the fonts are all over the place and the photo could be sharper (it’s a picture of a picture), but it reflects me more than some simple modern design. They came so beautifully packaged in little ornate boxes that I felt spoiled, like I was treating myself to something I really didn’t deserve. Moo really makes lovely stuff, you should give them a try if you need cards or other printed stuff.
The only thing on it I really wonder if I should have done differently is the title. “Technology Culture Reporter.” Is that what I still am, more than 20 years since I started using that title? Aren’t I doing a lot more than that? Is there room for me to list all those things? It it better not to pigeonhole myself at all?
Maybe by the next round of cards, I’ll be something completely different.
South by Southwest 2019
Photo from me at the Henry Winkler acting workshop panel. He was magic.
A month ago, it was South by Southwest, maybe, I don’t know, the 15th or 16th time I’ve gone (there were a few years in the early 2000s where my main job wasn’t so tech focused so I skipped some).
I always thought that if I left my job at the Statesman, that would be the end of me being obsessed with SXSW every year and running around covering stuff. But a month before, I got asked to contribute as a freelancer for Austin360 and the Statesman’s business desk and to get badged up and so there I was, back in the mix. But it was really different this year in a lot of great ways.
For one thing, I didn’t spend a couple of months planning and prepping and writing lots of previews and exhausting myself so much that by the time SXSW starts, I’m already burned out on the whole thing. It was nice coming in fresh, doing the things I was assigned to do (or other assignments I picked up for other publications on top of my initial list) and then spend the rest of my time actually enjoying SXSW.
Ironically, I managed to get sick the day it all started with what we call the “SXSW Crud,” but a week earlier than usual, so I soldiered on with boxes of Kleenex and a very phlegmy cough, but managed to make it through.
Working with the Statesman team did give me the opportunity to go back and sit in on some planning meetings and to visit the newsroom again, something I hadn’t done since around October. I’ve been telling people that I don’t really miss the newsroom or the act of committing daily newspaper journalism, that what I’ve really missed are the people I worked with and the feeling that comes from being part of a large team working together to make something bigger than any one of us.
That’s true; I miss the social part of my job, being able to look up from my computer monitor and seeing friendly faces of people I respect and admire.
But when I visited, I didn’t expect the warm wave of nostalgia I got from just riding the elevator, the one I’d ridden thousands of times before. The little warm fuzzy from being recognized and greeted at the security desk, the temperature of the conference room and the scuff of the conference room chair on my legs. I was in that newsroom for more years than I’ve ever lived in any home in my life, and that’s probably going to remain true for a really, really long time.
I don’t miss being there every day, but the thought that in a few years it may not exist — that the staff will move to an unfamiliar place as the building is razed or built out into something else — fills me with a lot of sadness. But I guess I’m learning how important it is to make new homes, to find new places you love, and to be out in the world more.
I’m trying to explore more, to be less tied to locations and rooms, to feel as comfortable in wide open spaces than in bulb-lit interiors. It doesn’t always come natural for me.
Coverage of Priscilla Chan’s talk with CNN’s Poppy Harlow. As I say in the piece, there were no bombshells from Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, but I thought she did a great job once she stopped reading from her prepared remarks and spoke off-the-cuff about her very significant life experiences and the work the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation is trying to accomplish.
I haven’t seen Good Omens, which hits Amazon in May, but I enjoyed Neil Gaiman’s panel, particularly the advice he gave for writers. “Finish.” Much more important even than starting.
I was never a big Trevor Noah fan; I stopped recording/watching The Daily Show when he took over. But I was very impressed with Noah and crew at their SXSW panel and the Trump Twitter Presidential Library exhibit was a huge highlight for me at SXSW. Here’s the write-up of the panel I did for Austin360.
I covered a panel (twice!) about how reporters are covering rural areas, particularly those considered “Trump country.” The consensus on the panel was that national media needs to do better on this.
In the lead-up to SXSW, I also got asked to double up on some panels and write different versions for the journalism organization Poynter. This was a much bigger challenge than I was expecting! South by Southwest is exhausting enough and when you find the time to sit and write something, it’s a small miracle, but then to start over and try to write the same thing again, the thing you just pretty much said what you wanted to say about, from a different angle… well, that was tougher than I thought it might be.
We told her how much we loved “Russian Doll” and she was nice enough to take a pic with us.
It wasn’t all work, though. I still got to have fun and hang out. Thanks to Jeana, who was not as shy as the rest of our group, I got to meet Natasha Lyonne at an afterparty for a premiere of “Booksmart” where Santigold played and Olivia Wilde celebrated a birthday.
There was lots more, but like every SXSW, it has already started to fade and compress and feel like one long fevery dream where everything happened all at once.
South by South Rest
Here’s the rest of other things I’ve been working on since February.
For the aforementioned Book + Film, I did a review of Rooster Teeth’s Austin-made anime gen:LOCK which I really enjoyed. I finished off the season after this review was published and I thought it finished strong and left me wanting more. I also reviewed another Austin-made creation, Battle Angel: Alita, which I liked a lot less. Comment writers noted that I don’t seem familiar with the source material, and boy howdy is that true. I had major problems with the film version.
I should also note that I’m still doing daily audio segments for Tech Minute Texas; the site has been updated with 30 more segments, so we’re up to 130 total and I’ve got more coming.
I was warned, repeatedly, that freelance life was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, particularly in regards to working with editors and with getting paid.
Five months into my post-job life, I am finding that’s not only true, it’s fuckahellatrue, like so true it makes all other reality a fiction. You know that movie The Truth About Cats and Dogs? This freelance stuff is more true than even that film, my apologies to Janeane Garofalo, just speaking my truth.
The rhythm is what has been throwing me off, the sense that deadlines are much more fluid, that the time between the time I turn something in and the time that it’s published can stretch and stretch (to months, even), that I can get paid for something I wrote within two or three days, or two or three months.
These are not novel concerns, these aren’t new issues, every freelancer I know is a choir in no need of preaching to on this. But for me, someone who spent 21 years adhering to schedules and budgets and deadlines and calendars, it has sent me into an existential time dread. Someone who cares about me deeply recently pointed out that I seem to have lost all sense of time, and that’s not inaccurate. Sometimes the weekdays just fly by because I have no deadline to wake up early, no deadline to get assignments done and plenty of “Overwatch” and “Apex Legends” to play.
Not that I’m wasting my days doing nothing (my Netflix viewing is up like 80 percent, though, make of that what you will), but I’m working in shorter bursts, not sitting at my desk soaked in the monitor glow all day. I don’t keep up with Twitter as much as when it was in my face for 8-10 hours a day. I answer emails on the go, sometimes I’m not even at home or in Texas when I do.
I had a week recently where it felt like nobody was responding to emails I’d sent and pitches I’d made, where I didn’t have any urgent writing pending apart from some long-term deadlines I’m in the middle of, and I didn’t even have any thoughts worth Tweeting. There began to be a sense that I was disappearing, that I was losing the thread of myself and what I was supposed to be doing outside the normal family/house/pet obligations. It was a weird displaced feeling, but not completely unwelcome. At the height of my time at the Statesman, when I was putting out stories and podcasts on top of all the freelance stuff I was doing, I sometimes got tired of hearing my own voice, got tired of being the carnival barker peddling my own warez all the time. I wanted quiet, I wanted to stop talking, I wanted to retreat into myself for a little while and be still.
And now I’m getting some doses of that and… it’s an adjustment. Be careful what you wish for, right?
But then that quiet is broken up by responses and publishing and money in the mail, and suddenly I’m back into it. It was just temporary. And now I’m talking again.
I woke up this morning determined to get going early, to make this week count. And to my surprise, I saw that a story I’ve been working on since last year was suddenly published.
Breaker Magazine is a New York online publication that pushed out lots of news and culture stories about the blockchain and Bitcoin scenes. I got hooked up with them last summer by a mutual friend and in the fall, I started working on a profile of Jimmy Song, an Austinite who was making waves in that world with some very strong (and often brutal) opinions. I met up with him and found him to be super nice and easy to chat with, a contrast to his sometimes spiky online hot takes, and a fascinating subject.
The story went through some significant edits and a major rewrite, resulting in more rounds of interviewing. I’m so pleased with the result; it’s been a long time since I went through a process like that, the kind of edit where you begin to question your own self-worth as a writer, but I was so lucky to have editors who could see the finish line and what the story could be.
I think Jimmy is something more people in Austin’s tech scene should know about.
Elsewhere in the Omar-verse, I’ve been keeping busy writing culture reviews for Book + Film Globe and additional stories for the Statesman.
The great Natasha Lyonne. Credit: Netflix, yo
I did a review of the excellent Netflix series “Russian Doll.” Honestly, I could have written another 5,000 words about the nuances and greatness of this show, but it was written the weekend the series debuted and I was trying really trying hard to keep any spoilers out of it because it really is something best viewed fresh. The review seems to have resonated with people who were unsure about investing time in the show. A Facebook friend wrote, ” I literally went from zero to 100% in terms of interest in this series,” so that was nice to hear.
In other Netflix-related writing, I reviewed the last bunch of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” episodes for Book + Film Globe. I had given up on the show early in Season Three, but decided to catch up over the holidays and I’m glad I did. Despite some of its faults (and I get why people started to turn away from the series), I think it ended well and that the stuff it was good at (dense joke writing, absurdist characters) vastly outweighed the problematic. If you fell off, too, I really think it’s worth finishing.
Things are pretty good! It looks like I’ll be covering South by Southwest again for the Statesman next month and I have some other projects and pitches in the pipeline. Thanks to everybody who’s been supportive.
If you’ve made it this far, all three of you, I want to ask — would you be interested in an email newsletter of stuff like this and some additional writing/recommendations/multimedia?
I’ve been mulling doing that (and maybe cross posting it here). I definitely wouldn’t charge for it, at least not until I felt it was something worth paying for, and maybe even then I’d just do it as as additional content.
Some of my favorite online writers have been doing really interesting stuff with their email newsletters and I wonder if that would give me incentive to update more often.
