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.
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.
One thing I didn’t really get into in posting this before is that now that my kids are 11 and 9, I’ve been thinking a lot more about how and when I write about them online. I still Tweet about funny things they say and do once in a while, but I’m not a full-time family blogger and as they’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to be a lot more careful about letting their stories be their own and not for public consumption.
Like a lot of longtime bloggers, I was absolutely horrified by a recent piece on the Washington Post by a blogger who has chosen to go another way. For this piece, I ran the final draft by my kids for approval before I sent it to an editor. The thing is, maybe even that’s not enough. Can a 9 year old really give approval to have her photo and a story that involves her run online and in print where thousands of people will likely see it? I think on some level my kids understand what it means to have a photo of them on Instagram or to get comments on Facebook about something. But I wonder and worry sometimes about this larger kind of exposure, the kind that lives permanently online, searchable in archives. I think it’s up to every writer to figure out how not to hurt the people around them that they write about. But it’s getting absolutely trickier; I’m finding myself having more conversations with my kids about what is OK and not OK to post online and who will see it.
In this case, the feedback on the article was really positive and my kids were happy with seeing it published. Which was a huge relief.
“He’s blogging again? I thought blogging was dead.”
One of the predictions I made for myself toward the tail end of 2018 was that as the year wound down, things were going to get really quiet and really slow.
This was going to be my first holiday without a full-time job since… before college? Wow. That’s weird to even wrap my brain around.
I’ve been extremely lucky with freelance assignments and my ongoing gig on the radio thanks to Texas Mutual, but around October, it wasn’t certain that my contract for that work would be renewed for another year and how busy I’d be in November and December. I figured things would slow down to the point of worry; that I’d be stressed about money going into that shopping season and that everybody would stop answering their emails and I’d be left with an extended, unproductive hiatus.
That really didn’t happen. My contract was re-upped for another year of Tech Minutes, so I was working on scripts for that through the holidays. I’m still doing weekly segments for “Texas Standard.” And I’ve found a really nice home for weird, pop-culture article ideas on Book + Film Globe, thanks to the wonderful writer-turned-benevolent-editor Neal Pollack.
I also got involved in a few others things I’ll list below. This was a very different holiday season than years past, and with all the shifts and changes, it was nice to have some steady work going, but not be so swamped that I couldn’t take some time off to enjoy a little travel, our first real Christmas tree ever (I really gotta recycle this thing soon), and to catch up on some movies and books.
It was just last week I was saying how grateful I’ve been for how things are going and I keep feeling the need to reiterate it. It’s only because of the people who care about me and those who’ve been kind enough to keep me writing and making stuff that I’m able to sit here comfortably on a January afternoon and say that things are just fine, great, in fact.
So here’s what I’ve been working on that’s out in the world already:
Originally, the idea with Book + Film for me was just to do the occasional movie or book review, but given that I don’t go to the movies that often, it’s been refreshing to be able to write stuff about TV and other things that don’t quite fit neatly in a box. My most recent article is a review of Jack Black’s new video-gaming YouTube channel, Jablinksi Games, and I got to have a lot of fun with it. And bonus: free curse words! I feel so giddy and unrestrained!
Right before Christmas, the Statesman / 512tech ran a piece I wrote on holiday tech purging. You could also use it for post-holidays spring cleaning. This is one of those articles that has a little do as I say, not as I do. I don’t always follow my own rules for eliminating clutter, but I swear I am trying to sell/donate/trash as much old technology as I can. I feel like it would be a lot easier if Marie Kondo would just come to my house and do it for me.
I’m still doing more pieces for the newspaper; a family column about taking my kids to see Paul McCartney in concert is running this Sunday (update: it’s been posted online!) and I have another one about what to do with digital family photos publishing sometime in the future.
Speaking of newspapers, I was quoted in a New York Times piece about the changing tech culture of Austin. It dovetails nicely with something else I’m working on, so I had already been thinking a lot about what we lose in a city this size when housing prices soar and it gets too expensive for a lot of people to stay.
I really should be wearing a costume for these things.
Also wearing the Omarstradamus seer headdress, I appeared on the TWiT TV’s Tech News Weekly to discuss what I expect for 2019. Two words: Folding phones! It’s gonna happen!
The other very cool development was that my brother Pablo and I revived our long-in-hiatus comic “Space Monkeys!” for a couple of new strips.
