• Cosa

    I'll be over here. Sulking.

    I was so sure that I’d documented her origins here at some point that I was genuinely shocked when I went back through the archives and couldn’t find it.

    It makes sense. By 2000, when this site started, Cosa was fully integrated into my life as a guy living alone in Austin with a cat. She curled up on my bed often at night, she greeted visitors (even visitors who came over all the time) with a swipe of the claw and a long hiss. She earned a reputation among everyone who met her as a mean little fierce black cat, a creepy little “thing,” which is exactly what her name means in Spanish.

    But before that, on a hot August day, she was a tiny little puff of fur I found abandoned in a cardboard box. She was on the curb in front of a friend’s house, the sun beating down on her little mewling body. The person who left her had left a tiny bowl of milk-gone-rancid and there were ants in the box.

    We took her to a pet store and had her examined, fed her with a bottle, got her cleaned up and just like that, I was a first-time cat owner. When the vet was examining her, she clawed and resisted and was called “feisty,” which would stick. Even then, overheated and bitty and left for dead, she was a fighter who didn’t suffer fools.

    Cosa in the late ’90s. Alternacat.

    She mellowed a tiny bit when she got fixed, then she mellowed out a lot more when I got married, moved to New Braunfels and we adopted two sibling cats, Diego and Rico. We expected fights and turf wars and if I remember correctly, there was a little bit of that, but to our surprise, as she was entering cat middle age, Cosa accepted these little guys into her home. She wasn’t a snuggly mother, but she at least tolerated these new cats and over time, even followed them on their rounds on occasion. She got used to our kids, too, and in the last few years, enjoyed being petted by Lilly and Carolina.

    She was never their favorite. Even at 13 and 14 years old, she was still a bit crusty and unfriendly to anyone but me. It never changed that she hated being touched anywhere on her belly or tail. Her purrs of contentment when she was being petted on the head or ears could easily turn into a bite. She and the boys often scared away dogs that wandered into our front yard by standing their ground and hissing like monsters.

    It was a good little cat family of indoor/outdoor cats who pretty much came and went as they pleased. But they never left the short radius around our house, wandering further than one or two houses down only when we went for our own walks and Cosa or the other cats tagged along behind us.

    She didn’t whine or demand to be let in or our all the time like Diego. She wasn’t active and adorable and tiger-like the way Rico was. But she was my cat, the only cat I ever owned on my own, and over the years I’d ignored all suggestions to get rid of her, give her away, find a nicer cat.

    The morning it happened didn’t seem unusual. Except. The night before, I’d heard some dog yapping over Carolina’s baby monitor before I went to bed, way too late as usual. Around 1 a.m., there was barking I mistook for Carolina waking up crying at first. When I realized it was dogs, I ignored it and went to sleep. All our neighbors have dogs. Barking is a given.

    The note

    As I collected the girls for daycare the next morning, we opened the front door and I found an orange door sign lying on the entryway. As I loaded Lilly and Carolina into the car and tried to get them strapped in, I read the note. It was from Animal Control. It said, “Deceased cat” with a description of an “OSH” with black fur. “PLEASE CALL IMMEDIATELY,” it read. They had picked up a dead cat in our yard. I needed to call.

    “It finally happened,” I thought. “She keeled over of old age and a neighbor spotted her lying dead in the yard.”

    It didn’t occur to me that if this were true, a neighbor would have rung our doorbell to have us take care of the body ourselves. I just thought, “Oh no, Cosa died. She’s gone.”

    Then I found a note with more detailed information under the wiper of my car’s windshield. It said:

    The other side of the paper just said that animal control had knocked on my door and that nobody had answered. I had no idea what time that was; I felt a jolt in my stomach wondering if this had gone down the night before, when I’d heard the dogs barking and ignored it.

    I looked at this paper and the orange animal control form, back and forth, trying to resolve them, wondering if there might be some kind of mistake. And the girls. They were waiting patiently in their car seats for me to take them to school as this horrible thing was unfolding.

    I ran in quickly to check the garage and see if the other cats were inside.  I found Rico near the door and put him inside, but Diego wasn’t around.

    That was all the time I had. I got in the car and headed to the daycare before we were late.  As soon as the girls were there, I called Animal Control on my way to work to try to get an idea of what had happened.

    They were very sympathetic, but the news they get was not encouraging. They’d picked up a black cat that had been mauled by two dogs right in our yard. I asked several times if they were sure that was the only cat was killed and they thought it was just the one. They went into some detail about the dogs, saying they believed it was the same dogs that had been wandering around earlier in the week and which had been picked up, then claimed by their owner a day or two before Cosa was attacked. Cosa’s body had been picked up and taken before I’d even opened the front door.

    The woman on the phone asked if wanted Cosa destroyed or if I wanted to pick her up. I knew I wasn’t going to be home early enough from work to pick up Cosa on the way home and I was already running late for work.  I asked if I could pick her up the next day and they said that was fine. I hung up the phone and went to work, my day turned suddenly weird and horrible.

     The burial

    I was sad and shocked, but I didn’t cry, not all day. Even as I shared some brief details online about what had happened (and the weird, accusatory note that had truly disturbed me), I was too surprised to feel any grief yet.  I had filled in my wife on what had happened and even though she had never really been a fan of Cosa’s she was sorry for me and has had a lot more experience in her life dealing with pets that died.  (Cosa wasn’t my first pet, but she was my first cat and she lasted 14 years. Kind of amazing given she was a feral, fierce little thing when I found her.)

    That night, I came home late from a social event (where people I knew from online offered truly nice sympathies after seeing my shellshocked Tweets) and were able to find Diego.  He and Rico were both safe, but we noticed over the next few days that Diego didn’t want to go outside and seemed spooked, which would make a lot more sense once we knew the whole story.

    The next morning, I took the girls to school, ran some errands, then prepared myself for the task I was dreading.  I drove to the Animal Shelter to pick up Cosa. The Animal Shelter is in town and not far from where we live, but it’s on a dirt back road that makes it seem much further out and more isolated than anything near it.  It was already getting hot outside when I arrived.  As I waited in the cramped entrance area, I saw a tiny cat wandering around.  The cat came to me and meowed, looking up expectantly.  I scratched the kitten’s ears and it purred.  I suddenly felt much, much sadder as memories of Cosa that young overwhelmed me.

    They didn’t have any more details on the dogs, but after a lengthy wait, they brought out Cosa.  She was in a plastic bag, frozen, they said.  The bag was in a large cardboard box.  I didn’t stop to look inside and see if it was the right cat.  I knew.

    I asked if there was anything I needed to know about burying a cat.  Was it legal? Could I do it in my yard?  They told me it was fine and to bury her in the plastic bag. It would all decompose and it would be fine.

    I got a hoe and a shovel from the garage, went to the outer edge of the backyard and started digging.  Our soil is hard and rocky; it’s hard to dig very far down or plant anything, but I tried.  I sweated and dug and dug and only managed two or three feet, if that.

    That was when I forced myself to open the box, which I’d set down gently in the shade of one of our trees.  I pulled out the black plastic trash bag.  Inside it was a white kitchen trash bag and inside that was the body.

    She was frozen still, stiff, curled into a U.  Her teeth were bared, but her eyes were milky and indistinct.  I was thankful that she was in one piece.  I had expected pieces of cat, a dismembered mess.  But she was intact.  I didn’t find wounds on her, just a reddish abrasion on her belly. No pools of blood, no mess.  Maybe they washed her before they froze her.  I had no idea.  Later, my wife would wonder if the dogs had flung her around, snapping her neck rather than gutting her.

    I tried to avoid touching her with my hands, but in the end I wanted to know what her fur felt like.  I put a finger on her head and felt it was wet and cold.  Her once thick black coat seemed thin and sparse, her whole body appearing wet and the fur bunched together in places.

    I put her back in the plastic bag and placed her gentle into the hole.  I covered it in dirty and patted the rapidly drying dirt down in the hot sun.  I said goodbye to her as I put a large stone from our yard on top of the small grave, something the Animal Shelter worker had also suggested to keep the area from being disturbed by dogs, other cats or raccoons.

    I went inside, still not believing what was happening.

    The neighbor

    Later that day, after my wife got home, we went and spoke to the neighbor who’d left the note on our car.  The note had really rattled me and filled me with guilt and I had been dreading the encounter all day.  I was prepared to throw down and get angry and I waited for Rebecca to come with me because I knew she’d be much calmer than me should the conversation go south.

    She invited us into her house and was not at all what I expected.  She was kind and was truly shaken up and upset about what happened to Cosa.  She has cats of her own that she keeps indoors and she had to witness the whole mauling with no one to help.  She’d called 911 and Animal Control and had waited helplessly with nobody responding.  She told us she kept asking herself why we couldn’t hear what was going on and was beside herself when Animal Control finally arrived, too late to save Cosa.  Of course, she didn’t venture outside to try to stop it and I didn’t blame her. There was no way she could know whether the dogs would attack her, too.

    She told us a few other things we didn’t know.  The mauling happened at around 6 a.m., not late the night before like I thought.  That was a relief, in a way.  It meant it didn’t happen when I heard dogs outside and ignored them.  She also told us that Cosa put up a fight for at least 15 or 20 minute and that the dogs also went after Diego, who was outside and hiding under my car.  They apparently couldn’t reach Diego there and that was what saved him. For the next few days, Diego was completely spooked and didn’t want to leave the garage or go outside.

    We exchanged numbers and, under bizarre circumstances, made a new friend.  She expressed complete commitment to helping us do something about the dogs and warned us to keep an eye on our surviving cats. She also said the thing that we’d been worried about ourselves; that next time it could be one of our daughters playing outside in the yard who could get attacked by these loose dogs.

    She described the dogs to us in more detail so we’d know what to look for. We passed the descriptions on to Animal Control, but they told us that given our cats were also off a leash, it wasn’t exactly something we could to take to court. They just told us to watch out and to call the moment we saw the dogs return.

    Which, of course, they did.

    The dogs

     Friday night a week later.  I was in the living room with Carolina while Lilly was getting a bath.  My phone buzzed and I saw it was a local number. I almost didn’t pick up.  It was our neighbor.  She told me the dogs were back and that they were poking around my yard.

    We did the parenting thing where there was total confusion for about 30 seconds while I tried to explain to my wife what was happening while we wrangled the kids (one of whom was just-out-of-the-tub-naked and headed straight for the front door).

    I was able to squeeze past her and go outside and… there they were. Right at our front door, exactly as our neighbor had described them. A larger dog with a thick long coat and his smaller, sleek brown companion. As soon as they saw me, they backed out of our entryway and started poking around our front yard. As I followed them, I tried to fumble with my phone and call Animal Control, but I wasn’t sure which number was the right one in my cell phone history and as I Googled it, my phone died. I had to run back inside and grab my wife’s phone and while I was doing that, the dogs started heading back around our back yard (we don’t have a fence, a whole other issue that probably wouldn’t prevent our cats from getting out if we did).

    I let Animal Control know the situation, but they said they had no staff to come pick up the dogs at the moment. I hung up and focused on trying to get some decent photos of the dogs in case they suddenly took off. Not easy given it was quickly getting dark.

    Then it happened. They came around to the front yard, the two dogs, having made a complete circuit around our home. They saw Diego sitting near our neighbor’s side of the lawn and ran at him immediately. In two seconds, both dogs were on Diego and he was thrashing against them as they all but covered him with their much larger bodies.

    I ran.

    “NO! NOOOO! NOOOOOO!” I screamed like an insane person as I ran at them. Even as I got closer, the dogs showed no sign of letting Diego away. I ran for the collection of river rocks that line our house and grabbed the two biggest rocks I could find. “NOOOO!” I kept yelling as I threw a rock and missed completely. The dogs let Diego away and he darted off to the street.

    The dogs, meanwhile, nonchalantly walked off as I breathed heavily, holding one large rock in my hand, scared, fully prepared to bash one of the dogs in the skull if it came at me.

    My adrenaline was pumping and I had this horrible sensation knowing that at any moment, I could be killing a dog with a heavy rock I was holding. The feeling made me queasy. I tried to calm down as I followed the dogs out of our yard and down the street.

    I wondered how long I should follow. I wanted to see if the dogs went back home to try to find their owners, but something even better happened. The dogs continued to poke around the neighborhood as I followed. I took photos of the dogs and tried to get closer and closer. As I calmed down, I saw that the dogs seemed well-fed and healthy, not ragged stray dogs. They even were friendly to me, coming up and seeking attention and affection. I was still holding the rock, still cautious, but they didn’t appear to want to hurt me and they didn’t even bark.

    I was able to get close enough to the smaller dog to pet him and reach for his collar, taking a few blurry photos of his tags in the dark. There was a scrawled tag with a name and phone number. I called it.

    The woman who answered was shocked that her dogs were out and even more surprised and shocked when I told her I thought these were the dogs who had just killed our cat. “NO!” she said. She sounded credible. I wondered if she was lying and had already been told by Animal Control that her dogs were suspects. She told me that because of some fence construction, her dogs kept getting out and that she was at work. She asked me if there was anything she could do (apart from just picking them). I told her I didn’t know. I told her we were watching out for our cats and our kids and that we were all very upset.

    A while later, I had to stop following the dogs and just hope she was on the way as they traveled far away from our neighborhood. Animal Control called me back and I gave them an update. The woman called me back and said she was definitely on her way to get the dogs and that this wouldn’t happen again.

    And a week later, it hasn’t. We haven’t seen the dogs and our cats have been staying indoors much more often.

    It’s been such a weird few weeks of surprises and disruption. I haven’t been able to tell Lilly what happened yet, but I intend to. I don’t intend to tell her where Cosa now lies, but I do feel it’s important for her to know that he’s not coming back. I lost a pet around that age and for years wondered if the lost dog would come back home. I don’t want her pining for a cat that won’t ever be back.

    The place where I buried Cosa still had the large rock on it, but when I went to check it a few days later, I found the ground where I buried her spongy and unsettled. The bag or the body or both were probably gassy and expanding. I tried to pat the dirt down with my foot, but the loose, rubbery sensation of the ground that held her made me sad and horrified me a little and I’ve tried not to think about it much, letting time and the weather do their thing.

    But my eye goes back there now every time I see the backyard. I wonder if I made a mistake putting her there, if maybe I should have chosen a spot I wouldn’t see so often.

    On the other hand, I didn’t want her far away from us. I feel like we pushed her away for the last few years as we raised kids and tried to keep them safe from a mean cat. Even when they got old enough to play with Cosa, they never really did and my fantasy that one day the cats would return indoors and re-integrate to their old life of leisure never materialized. Cosa never got to come back and be a cat that slept in our bed and cuddled up against me as I watched TV or just hung out underfoot at my desk as I wrote late at night.

    And I think that’s what makes me the saddest of the whole situation. That I wasn’t there to protect her when she was literally fighting for her life. That I was the only person who really ever had any affection for her, and in the end, I didn’t even give her that often enough.

    Cosa’s gone and I never got to say goodbye or give her one last pat that she could feel. She didn’t get to finish her life peacefully, on a vet table, being told she was loved and being comforted to a final sleep. Instead, she fought alone, violently, and lost.

    She was abandoned when I found her and I can’t help feeling that in the end, too, she died abandoned.

  • The online writing presentation

    [slideshare id=13460422&doc=onameetingnew-120626121756-phpapp01]

    Monday night, I spoke at an Online News Association meetup with Tolly Moseley about secrets of online writing. The above Slideshare presentation amounts to the slides that we emailed back and forth until we were satisfied we had enough visual ammunition in case words should somehow stop falling out of our mouths (it turns out this will never be a danger).

    The session was good. It was a large crowd, it was downstairs from my work desk which made getting there supremely easy for me, and I brought two big bags of cheap candy (for eating) and a box of Kleenex (in case anyone should get emotionally overcome by our tall tales from the wilds of writing careers).

    Great questions were asked, an abundance of visual Powers were Pointed at and at the hour and a half mark, we had to stop when we could have easily gone on another few hours. As we were packing up, Tolly mentioned that she was going to put up a blog entry on Wednesday summing up the panel. She confirmed this later over email, remarking that the Twitter response was great; some of those attending had taken great online notes, posting tidbits that I didn’t even remember us talking about just seconds after it was over.

    What I expected would be a few short clips of warmed-over reminiscence was instead synthesized, powerfully, into a perfectly delicious 7-course goddamn feast (I’m not even counting the appetizer or dessert) baked with care by Tolly. Let me tell you something about Tolly: she does not say she’s going to do something and then not do it. Rather, she tells you she’s going to do something, to which you may reply, “Oh, that’s nice,” and then she doesn’t just do this something, she freakin’ WHALLOPS IT WITH A SHOVEL UNTIL THE THING IS DONE TO THE GREAT BEYOND WITH A QUICKNESS.

    I had never worked with Tolly before on anything more than social chit-chat, but it turns out that when you work with Tolly, you’d best come correct, because if you come incorrectly, shirking as one does when there’s no money or long-term business commitment involved, you will be shown How It Is Done. It’s a good lesson to learn.

  • Holograms and happy fans

    Holograms from Zebra Imaging. Photo by Laura Skelding / Austin American-Statesman.

     

    My cat Cosa, who was sort of a star of this blog back when it was an online journal, died. I want to tell you about that and I’ve been writing that inevitable post, but there were some more developments and drama this weekend and I’m going to need a little more time. But a proper eulogy to a great, angry cat is coming very soon.

    Instead, I’ll share what I’ve been working on the last few weeks. The first thing is really neat, something I was thrilled to share with people because my mind got blown as I was researching it and I felt like I really learned a thing or three. I did a column about “real” holograms (not the Tupac/Coachella type of holograms that are actually just a mirror and projection trick) produced by and Austin company called Zebra Imaging.

    Zebra’s been around so long that one of my long-time coworkers was like, “Oh, THEM? What are they up to? They’ve been around forever!” It seems that the Tupac buzz has been good for them and that they’re coming out a long period of doing military stuff primarily and expanding into a lot of other areas for their truly amazing visual technology. Good for them.

    Emerson Henriquez, a fan of Spill.com I met at their annual Spill Dot Con event. Photo by me.

    The other new column runs in Monday’s newspaper and it’s about two very unique and fervently followed Austin websites, Spill.com and RoosterTeeth.com, both of which post very popular videos online and lots of other content that have earned this lots of fans. The success has led to real-world conferences that are bringing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people together to celebrate their mutual love of the enjoyable things they put out into the world.

    I’ve known Korey and some of the other Spill.com folks since I moved to Austin in 1997 and although I’ve been so busy parenting and working that I never get to see them anymore, they were my first close friends in Austin. Korey also introduced me to Adrian Villegas and that led to the Latino Comedy Project, so there’s lots of memories and good times I associate with that bunch of very talented people.

    When I saw Korey and Martin, they looked at me like they were seeing a ghost (or at least a guy who hadn’t been around much at all for several years). I grew up thinking friends were the most important thing in life and it always makes me feel really guilty when I realize I haven’t tended to friendships like I should.

    But apart from that, I was glad I got to write an article about a site that we have really under-covered over the years as it’s gotten really popular. By the same token. the folks at Rooster Teeth are amazing people who have also been doing this online comedy/video thing for ages and have worked incredibly hard to earn the fans they have. It’s always a pleasure to let people know about it.

    I also got to see some neat tech at a Freescale event in San Antonio last week. There wasn’t much for me to write about, but I did take some snapshots. I also chatted with the Consumer ELectronics Association’s Jim Barry (really nice, knowledgable guy; I really enjoy speaking with him) for a piece that ended up running in the newspaper last week.

    And just yesterday, I attended an all-day conference called MomComAustin. It’s research for a writing project I’ve mentioned here before, as is a trip I’m taking to New York in August for BlogHer. I’m devoting a lot more of my limited free time to these things and what before felt like a very nebulous project is beginning to feel like real work, but in a good way. In a way that feels less like waiting and more like acting. I had great conversations, listened to some really good speakers and even though I was literally the only man registered to attend (a few women asked me what I thought of that or gave me a pat on the back for being there), everyone there was great and super helpful when I asked questions prix viagra ligne. I have lots of transcribing and organizing to do, but it feels great to have that information in hand instead of just making plans to get that information, you know? Any kind of incremental forward movement I can get I’m thrilled to get.

    Last thing I’ll mention for now is that tomorrow night I’m speaking at an ONA (Online News Association) Austin event about online writing with the incredibly talented and gracious Austin Eavesdropper Tolly Moseley. Tolly is someone I always enjoy chatting with when I run into her (I think we both have a bewildered, wide-eyes approach to writing and meeting other people, though I’m probably much crankier) and it was great of Rob Quigley, who is organizing this talk, to pair us up. We have some very entertaining, potentially embarrassing slides and stories to share.

  • Optimistic

    Here are the new things first, then I’ll get into the rest.

    Last week’s Digital Savant column was a guide for retweeting. My editor mentioned at one point that she liked how careful I was about not retweeting things that weren’t confirmed and suggested I do a full-on rant about people who are more careless. The piece on reckless retweeters maybe wasn’t so much a rant as some helpful suggestions from someone who’s been annoyed for a long time, but it did earn me a new nickname in the newsroom: “Cranky Omar.” I’ll take it!

    On Thursday, I had a “Coffee with…” feature in the paper about Amanda Lepre, a musician who writes videogame-inspired songs and who is the frontwoman for the videogame cover band Descendants of Erdrick. She was a fun interview and it was great to get a story about her into the paper. I took the photo that ran with the story with my tiny Canon camera.

    Leetleweelie, my Diablo III Witch Doctor.

    And since I’m not sure when I’ll update next, here’s the next column, which runs on Monday. It’s about how my videogaming habits are changing as I get older. It was a chance to drop mentions of Diablo III and the word “escrow” in the same column.

    I’ve been brain-dumping a lot here on the blog because really, where else can I do that without it being weird and uncomfortable? It still sometimes feels a little strange to me that I get paid at work now to frequently write in the first-person for the column and that, based on emails from new readers in other cities where it now appears, things seem to be working out OK on that front.

    But here, at least, I can say things like “I feel tired and old!” Or, “shitbag!” Or tell you a whole graphic and embarrassing story involving a vasectomy (which I won’t, don’t worry).

    This used to be a blog (or, rather, an online journal back when I was updating three times a week rain or shine or blocked) where I wrote long diary essays or made funny lists or created complex conceits about hunger-striking pets or sold plastic goods. Now it’s sort of where the website started — a place to let people know about stuff I’m working on elsewhere. Because all my time and energy is going to work, to an ongoing writing project that I’m working on with my friend Tracy and whatever freelance stuff pops up for Kirkus Reviews, CNN and elsewhere.

    That’s not a bad thing, it just means that when I come back here and sit down to write a catch-up entry, it means I usually have a lot of pent-up thoughts and emotions that didn’t end up anywhere else and that I still need to share (or overshare).

    Like the thought that this week I was really having a hard time with some writing, so much so that I wrote Tracy a long, desperate writer’s-blocky email saying, basically, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” And then that night, I went home and cleared my head and wrote and then everything magically seemed better. I went to bed and slept well, woke up and went to work, had time to hit the gym and everything seemed 150 percent better than it did just 24 hours before. And the rest of the week and into the weekend has been beautiful, wonderful, filled with just cool family stuff, pleasant surprises on Twitter and in emails, and just a flurry of sudden activity, doing things I’d been putting off a while like donating a bunch of stuff to Goodwill and ordering some stuff online that I’d been on the fence about buying.

    I’m just finding that I feel like a big set of dials and controls, all these variables that turn into a great machine when the variables are correct. They include exercise, sleeping enough, not being lazy when the opportunity presents itself and having enough time to not feel overwhelmed with it all. When the settings are off for too long, I start to crash and get wiggy and it all starts to affect my outlook and attitude in general.

    It’s weird because I thought that by 37, I’d already gotten well past that and figured out my emotional equilibrium. And for the most part, I think I’m pretty even-keel, but lately I’ve been measuring my worth more in word counts and time spent with the kids and the ability to not let unexpected disappointments throw me off and put me into bad moods.

    The stuff that puts me in a good mood lately tends to put me in a really good mood, so much so that I have trouble putting it into words. So I’ll just show it in a photo from Lilly’s dance recital. Apart from the star herself, my favorite bit is how her sister looks like her publicist, asking people to hold off on questions until after all the pictures have been taken.

    Recital

    I think I’m actively seeking more things to be inspired by. Whether it’s movies or books or just being outside and enjoying some fresh air or having great conversations.

    It’s really easy to get jaded because there’s so much good stuff around us right now that we don’t even have time to get to most of it. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking things are mediocre because the base level of the stuff you’re exposed to constantly is so high that you start to expect and demand that everything you plug into resonates at that level.

    So I’m trying to promise myself that I’ll enjoy the things that are great. Because I’m finding there’s no shortage of that around me. Noticing and appreciating it all in the moment is the bigger challenge.

  • At the word jam

    True story: I wrote an article, the column that has my face on it and runs in the paper on Mondays, that was part two of an occasional series we’ll do defining tech terms that are either confusing or that aren’t easily explained in the barrage of tech-related marketing that’s thrown at us every day.

    This second Digital Savant glossary includes words like “Airprint” and “animated GIF,” things that are common parlance to geeks and Internet bottom-dwellers like us, but that I get asked about by readers in emails and blog comments all the time. (I had to go and research, “3-D printer” to make sure I knew exactly what those are and, holy mac-n-cheese, that’s amazing! And a future source of legal problems, surely.)

    Soon after the column ran, someone who reads my stuff regularly told me, “I read your piece. Didn’t understand a word of it.”

    I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or what, but before I had time to let out, “But… that was… kind of… the point… of…” the moment had passed and I was left to go deflate.

    It was one of those, “Now why am I doing this again?” moments, which I’ve seemed to have a lot of lately. Weird bursts of deflated, defeated lack of purpose and paralysis mixed with (often Twitter-driven) bouts of self-congratulatory confidence and frenzied catch-up activity. Is this what it’s like to start going bi-polar? Is there a take-home urine test for that or something? A Facebook quiz?

    Anyhoo! The other thing I wrote this week that was in the paper was a preview of the new season of Red vs. Blue, which afforded me the opportunity to virtually chat with the folks over at Rooster Teeth, who are inspiring like a lot of people in Austin who just keep putting out high levels of creative stuff over a very long period of time until the Internet has no choice but to notice and to follow raptly. Anyone who has a modicum of interest in the Austin film scene or Internet video in general should be standing on their chairs and applauding that crew for what they’ve done.

    Interrupted…

    Everything up to this point I wrote last night. And in the middle of writing and previewing the post, the site went down. The entire host of the site went down. I waited a few minutes and the site, WordPress, everything… still down.  The editing page was still in the browser, so I copy/pasted the text into Google Docs and went to bed.

    Which led me to… maybe I wasn’t supposed to write this?  Or I needed to take another look? Or I just need a new webhost?

    Or perhaps just some perspective.  This has been a spectacularly up and down week.  My wife and I had a great three-day weekend that included a pool party, lots of eating out, lots of time having fun with the kids and then, boom, a weird stomach ailment that felled us both right as Memorial Day was ending.

    At the AT&T Spursachampionatorium

    Then I recovered enough to go to an NBA game in San Antonio and that was a blast even as I was struggling to climb up stairs to our seats and trying hard not to bring back on the headache that had been plaguing me all day.  The game and its screaming, dancing, San Antonio-puro-pienche-people crowd was, weirdly, restorative.  Even as I tried not to move too much, I was totally digging the scene and the great game and feeling very much at home.  It was wonderful.

    A friend mentioned a piece that ran on this site a while back in an article she wrote for Bitch Magazine about people asking you to do work for free.

    And then, today, I did a Skype session with some students visiting my alma mater in Oklahoma, journalists from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. It was very similar to a session I did last year for the same event and just like last time, they asked incredibly insightful questions about everything from blogging to curating content to the future of social media to how to handle news in a country where broadband Internet just isn’t spreading to people fast enough.  I actually had answers and insight and stories and even a few funny bits of experience to share.  The comments they posted immediately after the session to Facebook, the friend requests I got and the personal thanks some of them sent (again, immediately after; they’re young and super-quick) made me feel like I’d actually helped them figure some things out.

    Weird, wonderful week.

    And then I just got interrupted again. Diaper failure causes 2-year-old’s crib to be soaked in urine, requires immediate sheet and clothing changes. She was a trouper, smiling the whole time and cheering me on as I lifted up her crib mattress and “Daddy fix it.”

    The thing that’s hovering over what’s been a fitful couple of weeks is that a friend and I finally figured out what we need to be doing with a writing thing we’ve been working on for a long while and now we’re at the actual doing point and it’s scaring me.  There’s so much information we’ve collected and conversations we’ve had and things that we want to say and my brain can’t seem to hold and process and filter-distill and dispense it to my satisfaction. And that’s freaking me out. It’s making me think I need to print out pages and put things in an accordion folder and search-cloud-tag-up material and put stickers on papers and that I’m going to sit right back down with everything organized and still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.

    So that’s what’s really troubling me. Because, except for stomach bugs that come and go, most everything else has been pretty awesome lately.

  • The Social

    Facebook went public last week. You might have heard about it. They sold some stock or something.

    In the big lead-up to the big let-down, I wrote a piece for CNN.com about why I’m staying on Facebook and why people should just accept that the kingdom of Zuckerberg is just a fact of life and that people should just get used to it.

    Of course, every time Facebook has shown vulnerability or made a bad decision in the past, they’ve found a way to sidestep criticism and come roaring back. This stock market thing shows a much deeper, perhaps more fundamental weakness in the company that we really haven’t seen before.

    And since was a column that was meant to be a little contrarian in the first place, I find myself wondering if it’s going to be a piece of writing that I’ll come to regret in a few short years. We’ll see, won’t we? I certainly was anticipating the flurry of negative comments this time around and was able to enjoy them from backstage, twirling my mustache and saying to myself, “Job well done, villain.”

    What I wasn’t expecting was for CNN to slap it on the front page center with my name out there for the world to see. That was pretty amazing-cool, but also terrifying at the same time. I felt like I’d been called out by my own words, made to stand before a crowd and justify my opinion. Lucky for me, I have a lot of opinions about Facebook, even if they’re not even always consistent or right.

    Dustin Maxey (right) and his friend Larin Frederick, talk about “GroupWink,” a group dating app Maxey is planning to launch this summer. Photo by Julia Robinson for the Austin American-Statesman

    Another big piece I wrote that ran this week was in the Statesman and it was about ambient/serendipity apps like “Highlight” that pair you up with people nearby, social network-like, even when you’re not actively using them. The piece evolved into an article about the line between convenient and creepy and how future apps are going to have to overcome that label.

    I had some great conversations in the interviews I did for the article and as usual it was just a lot of material that needed to be condensed into one good-sized story. I hope it didn’t lose too much in that process and that it made enough sense to people who don’t follow this kind of tech.

    I’ve had a weird thing lately, just the last few days, where I’m getting a little tired and bored with the whole social media thing. It’s not that I’m not posting; I still do that. But I’ve also found myself not posting a lot when in the past I would have responded to something or had a thought I wanted to share. Some of it may be that I’ve been writing so much about social media lately that I’m a little burned out on thinking about it, but some of it is also that I know that if I respond to certain posts that I’m going to get into a whole conversation with someone and of late, I’ve been so pressed for time that I’d rather just not even get into it, you know?

    A guy I know, Loren Feldman, is working on a documentary about social media and I’m dying to see how it turns out because he and I have a very similar view on a lot of what’s going on, only he’s able to say a lot of the things I can’t in ways that I don’t. We both feel the bubble is close to bursting and that in a few short years, people will have moved on to something else, even if it’s just faster/more efficient ways of doing what we’re doing now.

    Or it could just be that I get bored of hearing my own voice (typed, rather, and online) and that I get the sense a lot of other people are chirping along with very little to say, too, at times. It gets boring sometimes, doesn’t it? That can’t just be me that feels it, right?

    Another theory: summer is here (we get it early in New Braunfels) and I’d rather just be outside, swimming or tubing. That’s probably it, honestly.

    Schlitterbahn is pretty empty today. More water for us!