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.
I’ve seen the world / I’ve kissed all the pretty girls / I’ve said my goodbyes” – The Unicorns
I don’t think it’s unusual to be good at beginnings, OK at middles and not-so-great at endings. Rarely do I struggle with first words, but saying goodbye or ending on the right note or not knowing when to stop is often my undoing.
Since last time, I was looking forward to getting through to the other side of several things, of finishing off a set of assignments so I could get back to things being normal (which is not really a thing, this “normal” time, but I mean relatively speaking). I was looking ahead to South by Southwest Interactive being over in mid-March. I was looking forward to wrapping up the last few episodes of The Walking Dead Season Four and the last season of How I Met Your Mother for Previously.TV as both shows sprinted to the finish. (Who could have know that of the two, HIMYM would have the more controversial, darker conclusion?)
My birthday was coming and I was kind of looking forward to just getting past that and saying goodbye to 38 without giving it as much thought as I did last year, when I felt time rushing at me and very little of what I wanted to accomplish completed. It’s different this year. The two things I wanted most to bring into the world last year have both come to be. Instead of approaching this birthday with dread that so much was left to do, I was able to look back and feel a little more on-track. That was nice. But it was still kind of a so-long to an age and a time.
I didn’t know that there would be a lot more goodbyes than I was anticipating. I didn’t know, for example, that Television Without Pity, my online home for so many years for writing about gay alien superheroes, among other wonderful things, was going to be shut down. For the last few years, I hadn’t been recapping, only working on videos with my brother (which, unfortunately, appear to have not survived the death of TWOP online; maybe we can get them back up somehow) and doing a once-a-year tech gift guide. But it was still the place from which so many wonderful things sprang, where I found a big hunk of my online voice and where I made a lot of good friends. That news stung. You begin to take for granted that things don’t last forever when something like that looms so large you can’t imagine it gone. For a while, it looked as if all the recaps, all those years of work from so many writers, were just going to disappear. It took me a few days to remember that, oh yeah, Pablo and I did more than 100 videos for them as well. Where were those going to go?
I had those things in my head rolling around as SXSW receded into memory and the stuff with TWOP was getting so much attention recently and occupying my thoughts. Then I got a call from my wife. She found our cat, Rico, near our front door. He was gone, suddenly, this sweet, bold, cat who was the active adventurer of our three (then two, now one).
Not to make this the Dead Cat Journal, but I feel like this just happened, like I just buried a beloved friend. It was almost two years ago, but it hit hard. Cosa was a few years older, crankier, filled with strife and struggle. Rico was a happy cat, fun and carefree and completely independent. He seemed ever young and immortal.
My daughter is about to complete first grade. My brother and I decided to take a short break from our Space Monkeys! comic for about two months to work on some other stuff and recharge our batteries. This month, I celebrated my 10-year wedding anniversary, which like a lot of things with us, always seems to fall in the middle of the week with a celebration planned later. We ended up making up for it with a fun weekend trip to Austin (away from the kids). These three things aren’t real conclusions, but they are at least commas in the action, pauses to reflect in a stream of activity.
I don’t really know what to make of all the actual endings, though. I know that the things I care about most continue. I don’t know what to do for Rico’s brother, Diego, but I hope to make him a happy cat who doesn’t grieve for long. Our Shots podcast continues, and it’s been fun and rewarding in so many ways. But that, too, is due for a turn: my co-host Tolly is soon to have a baby, so there’ll be a lot of tap dancing and filling-in with guest-hosts while she’s gone, but that’s not the same as a conclusion, but another pause in the conversation.
TWOP certainly continues in spirit (and then some) at Previously, which in one of those weird, perfectly apt course-corrections of the universe, received a flood of traffic and new forum activity after the TWOP announcement.
Except for the situation with Rico, which is just sad (it took us a while to finally tell the girls and they were crushed for only a few seconds before asking if they could get new pets), the other goodbyes seem like opportunities to reevaluate, to use some of the free time (and vacation time) to figure out what other things I want to be doing and bringing ahead with me and what things I want to leave in the past.
Most of the things I’ve been happiest with have bubbled up from restless energy and, after several months of working at full speed, I’m looking forward to feeling a little bored and then breaking out of that.
The end of TWoP
A last message at TelevisionWithoutPity.com
My online life really started with Television Without Pity. So much happened in the more than 13 years I wrote for them. I spent years with Smallville. I met so many of my favorite people. I made videos with my brother, more than 100 of them. And even toward the end, when I was really just doing a holiday tech gift guide for them annually, it still felt like home, a place I’d always want to come back to and check in with, a place I knew I could always go back to if I wanted to.
The archives will be preserved, at least for the recaps. The site went dark in early April and the forums will shut down after May 31.
Previously.tv
Part of the weirdness of TWOP shutting down has been that the site’s original creators, who went on to create Previously.tv, suddenly have this huge influx of new forum posters (the forums, as luck would have it, had just gone live a few weeks before the TWOP announcement) and of displaced writers, a lot of whom have a new place to pitch their ideas.
All of this happened on my last week of writing about Season Four of The Walking Dead and the week of the last episode ever of How I Met Your Mother.
It was also the same week that I got to be a guest on my favorite podcast, Extra Hot Great, in a first-ever Skype-remote third-coast extravaganza! We of course talked about those two shows and a lot more and I came THIS CLOSE (fingers squeezed together) to winning game time and then completely choked on my own hubris and exhaustion. Not to spoil it. I won’t tell you who DID win, so go listen to it.
Walking Dead Season Four, Episode 14: The one where THEY WENT THERE with Lizzie and Mika. Boy did this one bum me out for days. I think this might be the most disturbing episode of the whole series so far.
A half-season that started off kinda slow and got good and crazy toward the end.
And now for that other show that’s not quite as good at killing off characters:
How I Met Your Mother, Season Nine, Episode 19: The one where they hint that something in Ted and The Mother’s future might be VERY WRONG OH NO WHY DIDN’T WE KNOW BETTER THAN TO STOP WATCHING RIGHT THEN AND THERE!?
How I Met Your Mother, Season Nine, Episode 21: Ted and The Mother’s first date, the actual wedding and Gary Blauman in a weird and random episode that should have flagged us to the misery ahead.
How I Met Your Mother, Season Nine, Episode 23/24: The finale. Holy moley did they miscalculate on this one and how much people would hate what they saw in the last few minutes. I’m not even going to spoil it or go into it, just Google, “How I Met Your Mother biffed ending” or “HIMYM wtf?” or “HIMYM what the shit went wrong!?” and you’ll get an idea. Or better yet, read what I wrote. I think I was surprisingly kind in my write-up given that I watched every single episode of the show and felt the ending completely negated a lot of what came before. But it’s over. And we never have to speak of it again.
I plan to come back for the next season of Walking Dead because those Particles are super fun to do, and hope to write some other stuff here and there this summer. Go check out Previously if you haven’t already. There’s so much great stuff posted all the time.
Statesman stuff (non-SXSW)
Stuff I have been writing since March for the Statesman that didn’t involve South by Southwest Interactive or Statesman Shots:
And most recently, a story about sleep technology and the ways that they don’t really help me in terms of volume of sleep. More an essay with what I hope are some insights about how tech both helps and hurts on the sleep front.
And in a nice break from all the tech stuff, I got to write a few reviews for the Moontower Comedy Festival. One was a review of Maria Bamford, whom I’d never seen live and who, I thought, was revelatory.
It’s been more than a month, so I won’t rehash everything about SXSW Interactive. It’s the busiest work time of the year for me and, this many years later, I still throw myself fully into the thing even as it expands in both directions (starting earlier, ending later as it bleeds into SXSW Music).
This year, one of the interesting things was that Fast Company did an oral history of Interactive and I was one of dozens of people they interviewed about the fest. I’m quoted in a fun wrap-up they did and in the full e-book they released before the festival (iBooks version; Kindle version).
That sort of set the tone of the festival a bit; a lot of it seemed to be spent looking back on how the fest feels now compared to its early years and looking ahead wondering if the tremendous growth has damaged its future.
I probably missed one or two things, but honestly, at this point, who the fuck cares? If you even came close to making it through that list, you care a lot more about my coverage of the fest at this point than I do nearly two months later. It feels like a fever dream, honestly. A really fun one.
The George Takei story
Here is the story that goes with that video, in brief.
During SXSW I got offered an interview with George Takei, who was in town promoting a new online show he was working on called Takei’s Take. He was also doing a panel that I was going to have to miss and we kept going back and forth on whether we could schedule something or not.
After lots of wrangling and dealing with downtown traffic congestion, I was able to make it out for a very short window we had with him and one of our new videographers met me there. As we got ready to sit down on the rooftop of a building pretty far away from all the SXSW action, I told our videographer pretty much everything I knew about Takei, from random Star Trek trivia to how much I’d learned about him from his years as an announcer on The Howard Stern Show. Who knew how he’d be in “Real life,” but on that show, at least, he was an extremely good sport, a guy comfortable enough to talk about his personal life, his penis preference, life with his husband Brad and, on an unexpectedly poignant radio documentary on Stern’s network, his time as a child in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II.
We sat down with George finally, who was as warm, welcoming, sharp and gregarious as one would hope. The video is the bulk of the conversation and I think he was pleased to get questions about the musical he’s working on. And I’m pretty damned sure nobody else interviewing him that day got him to sing. (Around the 9:30 mark) I’m adding a line to my resume’s list of skills that says, “Got serenaded by George Takei.”
Here’s what is not in the video: I asked George if he’s sick of people coming up and doing impressions of his voice and he said not at all, he finds it flattering. He may have been acting polite and secretly despises it but when I intoned in my best Takei voice the word, “Musculature,” he gave out a hearty laugh that didn’t seem faked.
But the best part was after the interview when I was handed a small temporary tattoo of George Takei’s face and I told him, “I know just where to put this!”
And, very naughty, he purred, “Oh, and where would that be?!”
So I fired back, “Wouldn’t you like to know!”
And of course, he said, “Oh MYYYY!” with perfect timing.
We both laughed and he went off to get his stuff to leave. Then a few seconds later, as he was passing on his way out with a small entourage, we said goodbyes and I called out after him, “You BEHAVE, George!” He left with that delightful guffaw ringing in the Austin air.
And that’s my George Takei story. I don’t think it could have gone any more perfectly.
Shots
I don’t know what to add since last time about Statesman Shots, the podcast that Tolly Moseley and I started, except to say that I’m so in love with the show it’s really become my favorite thing about my job right now and the thing I look forward to working on most every week.
It’s still a baby podcast, a small show with a small audience as it’s only a few months old. We’re cheap; we haven’t spent much money at all on the show (just time and staff resources and some freelance money) and there’s been no marketing of it at all outside of our editorial department.
That makes me a little nervous, but I also know that we’re putting out a really great show every week and that the people who have found it and have listened to it (or watched the videos) seem to get what we’re doing and enjoy it.
I think it’s hard to convey, especially over social media and other short-form places, how much we’re packing into each episode, how wide-ranging the discussions are and how much ground we cover in about an hour.
My big new year’s thing for 2014 was “Outside,” of getting out of my head and into the world a little more.
I still spend a lot of time at home and in the office, but with “Shots” I feel a lot more connected to the community and for an hour each week (and during all the prep time and post-recording discussion that goes on), I feel like I’m getting to put out there stuff that’s on my mind and to connect with smart, entertaining people. It’s a real gift and I can only hope that the love and care we’re putting into it and the fun we’re having comes across and transfers well.
Here’s all the episodes we’ve done since last time I blogged, two long months ago, with a little behind the scenes.
Episode 7: Dale Roe on Austin comedy — We didn’t have any videos this week because of a massive memory card failure, but it was still a great pre-SXSW episode with a lot of discussion about comedy. And I got to do my Hank Hill voice.
Alyssa Vidales, who shoots and records our stuff and edits it beautifully, took this photo:
Episode 8 with Peter Blackstock and guest co-host Addie Broyles — I had to miss this recording because of SXSW, but Tolly did a great job taking the reigns with fill-in co-host Addie Broyles to talk about SXSW Music, robots and the future of food. Little did we know how crazy SXSW Music would actually be.
Episode 9 with Statesman music/entertainment editor Sharon Chapman — Sharon is incredibly busy and had to have been super exhausted right after SXSW Music weekend when we recorded, but she was kind enough to join us to talk about the tragic accident that happened that weekend. It was a very heavy topic to discuss, but Sharon was a great guest and her pop culture savvy is evident through the whole episode.
Episode 10 with fitness writer Pam LeBlanc — This turned out to be a really fun one. Pam is one of those people who completely loves her job and her enthusiasm for getting out there and trying new things and experiencing what Central Texas has to offer is inspiring. We recorded this right as I was deciding to take up a new personal training program that has turned out really well. I was getting really tired of feeling like my body and my lack of exercise were getting out of control. I loved the discussions we had about camps in this episode.
Episode 11 with happiness expert (and UT McCombs School of business professor) Raj Raghunathan — this was our first big risk in having on a guest we’d never actually met before. We went back and forth on whether this was a good idea and it turned out great. Two things convinced us we should try it: we couldn’t resist the idea of having a happiness expert speak with us and Prof. Raghunathan’s videos online showed he was a good speaker with personality who wouldn’t freeze up on camera. He was a really entertaining guest.
Episode 12 with Brian Gaar — It would probably embarrass Brian to hear this, but we were actually very nervous about it because Brian is becoming a very successful and respected stand-up comic and Twitter superstar. We began to think there was no way he’d bother with our goofy podcast even though I’ve known him as the guy in the newsroom I geek out with over new Nintendo releases. So we held off on asking him on for a while because of this. Moontower Comedy Fest presented a good opportunity and Brian didn’t hesitate for a moment to say yes. Once we knew he was on board, we knew he’s be great on the show and he did not disappoint. I finally got to see Brian perform live and it was a huge treat. He has a new comedy album you should check out.
Episode 13 with Matthew Odam on Austin food culture — This is another one we held off on for a while, but mostly for logistics. As a restaurant critic, Matthew doesn’t prominently show his face in print or on video, living in a state of pseudo-anonymity on the public scene. Since we shoot video with each episode, we had to figure out how to have him on without showing his face. We ended up shooting him from over the shoulder but at one point, we even considered pixellating him. In the end, we thought it would be too distracting to do it that way. I love the “Name Tolly’s Baby” segment, which is one of the first videos I feel really gelled visually with what we do, along with the one about dream desks.
Episode 14 with Nancy Flores on several Latino entertainment festivals and other topics — Nancy was proposed as a guest from the very beginning and said she was interested, so it was just a matter of figuring out the best week to have her come in. With two big Latin-American-themed festivals coming up, the timing was good. Also, and this is delicate to discuss, I feel strongly we need to have a pretty diverse roster of guests on the show and up to this point we hadn’t discussed at all much related to being Latino in Austin. (And I take the blame for that since it’s not something I don’t always feel qualified to discuss as I float between being connected/disconnected to that part of my cultural makeup). (The first video also tells the story of my bummer birthday flat tire fiasco.)
Episode 15 with screenwriter and blogger Lauren Modery on hipsterism and more — this was another case of a news event taking over the discussion and working out, timing-wise. A well-known local blogger died in a pedestrian/drunk driving accident and it was someone Lauren knew. We were able to take up a discussion that had been happening all weekend on Twitter and in local blogs and try to put it in a larger context. On a story I worked on about podcasts, I had watched Lauren get interviewed, so it was in the back of my mind that we should have a different conversation than the one she’d already had with someone else.
Episode 16 with nonprofits guru (and fun pal) David J. Neff — Tolly and I both know and have worked with David on stuff and knew he would get our vibe quickly and keep up. I give David a hard time online a lot because he’s silly that way, but he’s actually one of the smartest, get-shit-done do-gooders I know in Austin. Whenever I feel a social group needs to get together for something, Dave is always near the top of my invite list. Shots was no exception. Of all the videos we’ve done, I think the zombie survival one below is my favorite so far.
If you’re not into all these videos and don’t want to go through all the blog entries, you can grab the audio of these episodes directly from iTunes and/or SoundCloud. Please subscribe, please download, please rate the show. We really need your support!
We’re also on Facebook and Twitter, ready to talk with you about pretty much anything.
Space Monkeys
Our monkeys took a multi-week hiatus during and after South by Southwest as both Pablo and I were so busy in March. Then we got back on track, but decided, two months later, to take a real official break until early July. So here are the last comics till then!
The monkeys returned after SXSW with a comic about Titanfall, which we had both been playing. We actually worked up a SXSW-related comic, but by the time it would have been finished, too much time had passed and it seemed like it wasn’t going to work.
There was also a comic based on the shitstorm that followed the finale of How I Met Your Mother. I’m not exaggerating. I believe actual shit flew in the air in a storm of bad feelings from fans.
Probably my favorite picture of the girls right now:
And one more, how I felt after SXSW concluded, taken at the Museum of the Weird, on a day when I get to hang out with Rob and Schuyler, two of my favorite people.
Super resemblance, right?
There’s more, there’s always so much more, but I’ve been working on this blog entry for two months, the longest I’ve ever let one slide, and it’s time to put it to bed and, I hope, come back more often and much shorter.
Sorry for so much, but it was a pretty eventful two months, right? I always feel like I should be doing more even when the evidence suggests I’m already dong way too much, and I’ve been in one of those strange moods pretty much this whole year, trying to decide on one more thing I could be doing that would be fun and challenging and special. I’m still working on last year’s thing and trying to get that out somehow, but I don’t want to just stall and not move forward. I have an idea or two and now that this blog post is done, don’t really have an excuse not to tackle it.
That’s probably why it took two months. Nothing like working hard as a means of procrastination.
Recording with Gary Dinges in Episode 3 of the new podcast. “Statesman Shots” photos by Ralph Barrera
Last time, I said I would tell you when this big podcasting project went live.
It did! And I didn’t.
Part of it was that things just got really busy. Like cray-cray-biz-bay. I’ve been busier than a one-legged man in a kickboxing match, but not as a fighter because that would be really unfair, more like a referee having to hop back and forth. Still! Very busy. And it’s not even South by Southwest Interactive yet, but that’s coming. Like next week, already!
But I think the real reason I didn’t rush on here and post a shorty just to let you know the first new podcast was posted was that it still didn’t feel real. We recorded a pilot episode in November and as of the last writing, we had recorded our first official, “Real” episode, but even when it was up two days later and we sat back and admired how our little project had become a real reality, it still hadn’t sunk in that this was something we were going to continue doing every week.
Our blog had just launched, we weren’t on iTunes yet (that happened the following week), we were still trying to figure out what to do with Twitter and Facebook and there hasn’t been a moment of recording that I haven’t been paranoid that something would go horribly wrong, equipment-wise, and we’d be left without a podcast at all.
But as of this date, four weeks later, I’m thrilled to report, with a sense of finality and much-boosted self confidence that yes it happened. It is happening. IF this was a movie, it would be The Happening (but with a better ending). This idea we had in freakin’ mid-2012 and that we formalized into a proposal at the end of that year and that Tolly Moseley and I spent the better part of another year trying to make a reality now feels like a real gig. And now it’s a ton of work, real work, week after week on top of my regular work, but it’s work that I’m so happy to do and so thrilled to have some control over that it’s changed the whole dynamic for me of what it is to get my stuff done.
(If you want to hear Tolly’s take on our little adventure, please read her recent post. While I’m dealing with balancing a commute and kids, Tolly is in pregnancy land and handling it all with grace and good humor.)
It’s one of those be careful what you wish for things, but I think I wished really well this time. I partnered up with someone who in unfailingly positive and gung-ho about every aspect of what we’re doing and who has built a reputation in town for years as being kind and generous; we’re seeing a lot of that good karma come back our way. (Aside: a big lesson I’ve learned through this has been the difference between working with naysayers versus can-do’ers; it can really tip the scales from failure, delay and unwanted compromise to success and excitement). We knew from the beginning what we wanted to do and never gave up that it would happen one way or another.
So enough of me talking it up. It’s called “Statesman Shots.” It is a podcast, a weekly discussion with me, Tolly (who I knew as a witty and thoughtful writer on Austin Eavesdropper) and a different guest each time, many of them drawn from the talented folks I work with at the Austin American-Statesman. Back in November, we spoke to Joe Gross, one of the most pop-culture savvy people I know. For our first new episode, we agreed Addie Broyles, our prolific and high-profile food writer, would be the perfect person to join us.
The podcast is on a blog that we’re starting to update with non-podcast stuff as well. Like I said, we got on iTunes which was a huge deal. We got on Twitter and Facebook. And, the part we weren’t anticipating was that we’d be pair up with some video wizards, Tina Phan and Alyssa Vidales, who have not only been producing our audio, but who’ve been knocking out videos every week to go with the podcasts. They could easily just be shorter versions of the podcast, but they’ve gone above-and-beyond to make them more visually interesting and to give the videos their own personality.
If this sounds like a big old ad, it maybe should. I’m in love with this project; it’s something that feels like it simply couldn’t exist if Tolly and I hadn’t dreamed it up and willed it into existence over a very long period of time. My kind editors have been great in supporting the project, but also just letting us run with it and shaping it to the things we think would be most fun and interesting to talk about.
This week, we hit six episodes. A lot could change and we’re only now starting to get a little bit of feedback from our tiny starting base of people paying attention. But I haven’t felt this confident in a project I’ve worked on in a while. In fact, for years, I avoided anything that smacked of leadership or project management. I became an editor at a really young age and did it for enough years to realize I was very unhappy as a manager. So I went back to being a creative/worker bee and felt much more fulfilled. I was thrilled to not be in charge of anything but my own work.
But this is different. It’s a passion project and I’m throwing myself into it all the way.
Mostly, I hope you like it. I hope that it’s not just Tolly and me who have this crazy notion that Austin needs a show like this done in this way with guests coming on to blow us away with their expertise.
I’m thrilled with how it’s going and what I’m probably happiest working on right now.
There’s like 10 or more videos by now, at least one or two for each episode, but here’s two of my favorites:
When it was announced that Comcast is going to be buying Time Warner Cable, I Tweeted some stuff about it and that caught the attention of a producer I know at the local Fox 7 station. So they invited me to come on the air and answer questions about it! I will admit that my butt clenched up when they started asking, “You posted some Tweets last night…” I mean, shit, that could be anything! But it went well, I think, except for me spilling water in the green room (which was not actually green; the room, not the water) and how after the segment I tried to go up and hug and high five everyone but they were getting ready for the next segment and shooing me out. Here’s the interview:
And probably my favorite of the bunch, a comic about kites that turned out really, really nicely. Ironically, the Zilker Park Kite Festival, which inspired the comic, was delayed for bad weather.
Other stuff
As I’m wrapping this post up, Teatro Vivo’s new show, “The Mexcentrics in Pulga Time Machine” just closed its three week run. It was a really interesting writing process on this one, in some ways very different from last year’s “Pulga Nation”. We had a lot less time to write it and we ended up combining a new storyline with some of the stuff we liked from the first, very short show. We saw it last week and really enjoyed it. Here’s some photos from after the show:
South by Southwest Interactive starts Friday, so my whole next two weeks are pretty wrapped up in that. I’ll have plenty of updates from that to share, but probably not till long after it’s all over. Pretty much all the action for me will be on the Digital Savant blog.
The girls are doing pretty great. Took Lilly to see Wicked, which they’ve been obsessed over since Frozen started to wear off. She had a pretty great time:
I’m starting writing this at the very end of 2013 (local time) and it won’t be finished until 2014.
I don’t really do resolutions or Best Of lists here or anything more reflective than what’s in my memory. I don’t go back and read old blog entries or skim what I wrote over the year on this site the way I do with year-end stuff I do for work. Maybe I should. Maybe there are weird personal patterns to be discovered, things that would be painfully obvious about repeated habits if I only put in the study time.
But right now I’m less reflective about what happened in 2013 (which was a mixed bag for sure, but I got out pretty well unscathed compared to lots of my friends and co-workers) than just trying to figure out how to start ’14.
I spent a lot of 2012 in a weird, spiraling kind of panic. Not a mid-life crisis, I don’t think, but definitely hearing the ticking clock of aging more loudly and realizing I wasn’t happy with what I was doing with my writing. I got really lucky; the only way I’ve found to dig out of a hole like that is to get busy with something new you’re excited about. It turned out I had three things start to form at the end of last year. The relaunch of Space Monkeys! (both the website and the comic, rebuilt and relaunched on Jan. 1, 2013). An idea for a novel that I thought I could actually finish this time (it was completed in June). And a podcast that Tolly Mosely and I wanted to do together.
In terms of concrete goals accomplished, 2013 worked out really well. Once the novel was complete, I was able to let myself start doing some regular freelance again, something I really missed while I was head-down the first half of the year.
But as the year closed and I had some vacation time to rest up and slow down, I came to realize something. I spent a lot of this last year closing myself off.
I’m a bit isolated living outside of Austin anyway, but this year, I really retreated into myself more than I probably ever have. I worked from home more and I didn’t socialize as much. I missed lots of happy hours, stopped asking friends out to lunch and did a lot more communicating over social media and email than in person.
Some of it was intentional. I had a goal of writing every night from January to June no matter what. That didn’t always happen, but when I missed a night, I would try to make up for it the night after. That didn’t leave a lot of time for making plans to go out. I mean, I went out. I went to concerts and South by Southwest and some comedy shows. But each time I did that, at least from January to June, I associated it with having to pay a time-and-effort price later.
More often than not, I would sometimes see something on the events calendar I would have normally jumped at the chance to do and just say, “Nope.” Can’t do it. Not enough time or energy. Going out felt like a hassle much of the time. So I stayed home more.
I have some friends this year (on social media, of course) who’ve chosen a word for 2014. For some it’s a goal, for others it’s a theme like “Connect” or “Happy.”
Mine is just “Outside.” Not camping, God forbid, I mean just getting outside of my own head and having more real-life experiences and conversations.
It’s so much easier to never leave your desk, to just post stuff to Twitter like thousands of tiny notes in bottles that may or may not reach the right eyes. I’m becoming old enough that it’s becoming a real challenge to make new friends and maintain ties with old ones.
I just know that retreating further into my own headspace isn’t what I want to do with this new year.
I think the podcast may help. It’s something I think will be great fun and something I hope people will want to listen to because we plan to fill the guest chair with really smart, insightful people Tolly and I want to engage with in conversation. But I think one thing that’s been driving the effort on my end is having a place to talk about stuff, out loud, every week with other people in the same room.
That seems like a lot of hoops to jump just to yap my mouth, but maybe that’s just the age we’re living in.
I honestly don’t know what to expect next in 2014. The literary agent has the first few chapters of the novel and I’ll be emailing soon to see what the status is on that. I’m hopeful, but I won’t be devastated if I have to move on and figure out what to do next if the answer’s not what I’d like.
The podcast (fingers crossed) will begin regular production toward the end of January and we’ll be working very hard to get that on its feet.
I hope to keep writing for Previously and to do a little more freelancing elsewhere as well as some shorter-form stuff here. Blogging has become really difficult. I used to knock out three entries a week back in the day and now it takes me multiple days to do one. (Sometimes weeks. They grow if I don’t tend to them, like ragged fingernails.)
Honestly, this is the first year that I’ve looked at the blog (which I used to call a journal) and thought, “Maybe I won’t be doing this by the end of next year.” Maybe the blog will stop at some point. That seems to be the way things are going, right? Less blogging, more… I don’t know… other kinds of saying what’s on your mind.
This is all just about writing stuff and work. I haven’t even talked about the challenges of being a dad, which is wonderful and sometimes demoralizing. I sometimes wonder if I’m a good enough parent, if the kids are picking up bad habits and unhealthy emotions and whether there will ever be enough time to do it right or if we just put too much pressure on ourselves instead of having fun and being present.
I think I could do a lot better, but I also know that trapping myself in my head obsessing doesn’t help anybody. I think taking action outside my head, allowing myself to do stuff and make stuff instead of turning everything inward is the way to go.
So that’s what I’ll be doing. That’s really what I’m working on.
Statesman stuff
Because of my extended vacation, I haven’t had a whole lot written for work lately, but the week I was in the office, I did write a piece that ran on Christmas Eve about last-minute (and post-Christmas) stuff to do related to tech gifts. It’s probably too late to be much use for you, but probably worth keeping bookmarked somewhere for next year.
With some major WordPress help from a friend/professional, we were able to restore some functionality on the site we’d lost. Hundreds of blog posts related to the comics weren’t appearing on the site, so once they were gone from the home page, they were pretty much lost forever to anybody but us. We fixed that and one example of a blog post that I would have hated to lose is one in which I talk about our first year back doing the comic.
The comic has been the very definition of a passion project for me and my brother. We don’t make money on it and the audience is still pretty small, but we really do enjoy it and have found working together on it to be really rewarding.
We got some really great medical news about our older daughter. It’s not something I’ve ever written about publicly, but it’s something we’ve been dealing with for a few years that, unless something unanticipated happens, we’ll no longer have to worry about at all. This happened right before Christmas, good news of the sort that made presents seem redundant.
Carolina turned four. She had a birthday party earlier in the month, but for her actual birth day, we kept it pretty low key with bowling. It’s very easy to love and become attached to your first-born, but Carolina has developed her own personality and way of doing things that make her absolutely charming to everyone she meets. She’s chatting and funny and so loving, you almost forgive her when she breaks things and creates a constant little cloud of chaos at home. Almost.
I spent a chunk of my vacation playing Super Mario 3D World, which is just fantastic, and went back to the PS4 to give Killzone: Shadow Fall another try. To my surprise, I liked it a lot more the second time around. It’s a very mediocre game that looks great on the new hardware, but sometimes a mediocre game with lots of eye candy is exactly what you’re in the mood to play.
Our Alamo Drafthouse movie theater finally opened! We went and saw American Hustle and though my wife wasn’t wowed by the food (mine was good), the movie experience was fantastic. The remodeling they did of that formerly crappy theater is remarkable and having it so close by makes me want to go see movies all the time.
I caught up on the entire run so far of Saga. It’s brilliant. Go read it. You can get back issues on Comixology for only $1.99 each or just grab the trade paperbacks that’ll get you up to issue 12. (They’re at issue 17 now.) I’m now reading Doctor Sleep, which is also great.
I think I worry about stuff a lot less than some of the people in my life, but I do worry. Worrying can be useful. It can be one more ingredient in the rocket fuel that makes you get off your ass and do things. It’s a powerful motivator if you don’t let it overwhelm and paralyze you.
I think I do a good job masking my worry, especially around my kids or on social media, where I don’t really let myself indulge in much angst.
But I worry. Not all the time and sometimes not even very often. It’s rare that I lose sleep, lying awake, thinking about the stuff that has to happen and the things that aren’t happening. But once in a while, maybe once a month, those nights do happen and those worries do get the better of me.
What do I worry about? Things that other parents worry about. Things that are specific to my job. Things that are specific to my personality and my own unrealistic goals for myself.
But I can be more specific.
Stream-of-consciousness mode ON:
I worry that I don’t spend enough time with my kids. That they spend more time at school and daycare than they do with their parents and that this time that we have with them at this age is going to be gone soon and we will have lost that part of their childhood forever.
I worry that I haven’t been a good enough parent and that, especially with Lilly, who had to suffer us figuring out how to be parents the first time, that we’ve somehow damaged her emotionally.
I worry that so much change has happened at work that I no longer fit in there. That I haven’t adapted as well as I should have and that the changes coming are going to make things worse for me. I worry that I’ve stayed there too long, but I also worry about what life would be like if I left. I worry that I’m not doing my best work and that people are being kind by not telling me so.
I worry that the thing I spent the last year writing is unpublishable. I worry that even if I self-publish and promote the crap out of it, no one will want to read it. That it will be this foolish thing that only I care passionately about, so much so that I couldn’t see how terrible it was as I was writing and editing it.
I worry that I’ve recently taken on too many things at once, but also that I haven’t taken on enough and have allowed myself to get lazy and complacent with age.
I worry about my parents. That I also don’t spend enough time with them and that at any moment their health could deteriorate. And the health and well being of other relatives and friends who are going through pain or divorce or job transitions.
I worry about an upcoming deadline that I feel unprepared to meet and a story that feels too big for me to tell properly. I worry that I won’t do the story justice and that everyone will be disappointed with what I write and that I will have screwed up a story that, when I describe it to people, all agree is an amazing story.
I worry that my commute is a huge waste of time and that it’s ruining my health.
I worry that I spent too many years writing for other people instead of writing for myself or creating new things and that it’s too late for me to change course on that.
I worry that I missed an important window when I should have struck while the iron was hot and that instead of focusing on what was in front of me I should have been planning ahead and seizing the moment.
I worry that I haven’t given close friends much attention in a long while and that they must think I don’t care.
I worry that I don’t sleep enough and that many of my other worries stem from that.
I worry that the things I care about and that I’ve worked toward won’t matter in a couple of years, culturally, and that I’ll suddenly feel a generational shift that will signal that I am too old to be relevant.
I worry that the technologies that I advocated for years are actually messing up everyone’s lives, or at least making people more obsessive.
I don’t worry about actual zombies (or zombies falling from the ceiling), but I do worry about whether we’re overdoing it on zombie culture.
I worry that putting all this in a blog is a bad idea, but I worry more that not posting it would be something like being dishonest. I’ve tried not to go back and re-read and second guess myself. In an hour I may feel differently and some of these worries won’t even apply anymore. But when I wrote them, I was feeling them.
I worry about running in circles.
I’m sure there’s more, but I worry that’s all I can think of right now. The nice thing is that I don’t worry about all of these things at any one time. I mean, except for when I’m rounding them up for a blog post and seeing them all together. Then it’s really shitty, let me tell you.
I mentioned last time that I was doing some writing for the fantastic TV website Previously.tv. What I didn’t mention was that I’ll be regularly covering not one but two TV shows, How I Met Your Mother and (wait for it…) The Walking Dead!
Screenshot: CBS
HIMYM will be run through the Show-O-Matic and you can already find my first three write-ups for the third, fourth and fifth episodes of the final season.
For The Walking Dead, I’m doing “Particles,” which are an extremely challenging and cool way of recapping a show. They’re told in short stories, often with photos/screen grabs. The one for the season premiere was an awful lot of work, but I attribute that to the learning curve of adjusting to a new way of doing something. I’m hoping I’ll be a lot faster as it as I keep learning. I’m thrilled with the way that one turned out and can’t wait to do more.
Space Monkeys!
We did a comic and blog post about Gravity (with a guest appearance by Sandra Bullock).
We fixed most of the website issues we were having, but we still haven’t fixed the problem of old blog posts not appearing with comic posts. I’ll let you know when we figure that WordPress conundrum out.
Everything else
I went to ACL Fest, but only for one day before it got rained the Hell out. I didn’t take photos like last year but I did shoot a Vine video of my brother attempting to eat a “Tiffwich”:
Due to worky obligations I also missed the Atoms for Peace show. My brother and his friend Graham were second row. Lesson: BEING OLD SUCKS.
I did get to see the Wild Child album release party, which for me trumped anything on the ACL lineup. We got warpainted by singer Kelsey:
At the same time that The Cure were playing ACL Fest, our water heater sprang some leaks. Lots of things got wet, much garage organizing was done and long story short, I found a bunch of old photos. I may post some of them. They are kind of hilarious.
Despite my worrying above, the girls are doing great. They got to go on a bunch of carnival rides and ride ponies at the county fair, which if you’re a nearly 4-year-old or 6-year-old is pretty much the ultimate.
I had a whole post planned out, but I had a sudden thought that I have to share before I go into all that.
I live in a neighborhood/housing area where a lot of people have turned their garages into second living areas. They’ve mounted a TV on the wall, put a couch up in there and instead of parking their car or giant truck in there, like you would in a garage, they sit out there in the evenings and watch baseball games or boxing or presidential debates or whatever the Hell.
It was one or two houses when we first moved here, and over the years it’s become A Thing, with probably about a dozen nearby, including our neighbors right across the street.
I’ve been trying to articulate for a while — years, honestly — why this would even bother me. And for a long time, I thought it was because I was a little jealous. Why can’t I watch TV in my cat-litter-smelling, funky, dirty, humid garage like these Manly Men who live near me? Why do we have to have half our garage full of bins and junk and the other half occupied by a car? Why can’t I have a damn man cave (or a cave that opens up into direct sunlight and is well-ventilated as caves are, I guess).
Then I realized, it’s not that I’m jealous, it’s that I’m embarrassed. When I go outside, I feel like I’m walking past a stranger’s living room as they watch whatever they watch. Which, to me, is kind of mortifying. I barely like people in my own house to know what I’m watching on TV, much less total strangers walking by on the street.
I hate feeling like I’m interrupting something, even when I’m not, and I really just don’t care to know what my neighbors are watching. It’s baseball 90 percent of the time, which is as boring as things get. I know I’m in the minority here. I know nobody else cares about my obsession with garage living rooms. Just let me vent a little here.
As I’ve said before, CNN seems to really like it when I pitch them weird, out-there ideas and this one hit the sweet spot between silly and relevant, I think.
What I didn’t really think about when I pitched the idea what how much work it was going to take to get the language of an actual peace treaty correct. For several days, I hit the pediawikis, researching the wording of different kinds of peace accords dating back several hundred years. The result is a hybrid of different treaty types, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. It turns out I can broker peace if I really work at it!
This week’s column started out being about wearable computers (fitness sensors, sleep monitors, that sort of thing), and then ended up being about how sensors are turning our tech from bulky to wearable to completely invisible. A professor from UT’s iSchool gave me some insight that gave the column a little more weight, I thought. In it, I mention a sleep monitor that I tried out. I got it at the BlogHer conference and, seriously, if you want to look like a total dork while unconscious, try the Zeo. But it did give me some insight into how badly I was sleeping at the time and made me adjust my habits a little bit.
The SXSW story ran on the front page of the paper and the Zynga thing made some national headlines. Lots of busy time at work.
Other crazy things that happened recently:
I went to Austin City Limits Fest, which was wonderful, and I took a bunch of photos, but I want to post those separately and I’m not done editing the images, so I’ll post that sometime over the weekend.
Had my first parent-teacher conference for Lilly at her kindergarten. She’s very shy at school, not shy at home, is what it came down to. At least she’s well-mannered and behaved in the classroom, which is more than we could ask for.
I also did a creativity conference for work on design thinking that was really great and forced me to tackle problems and ideas in a different way. Honestly, I can’t even tell you what changed because I’m still figuring it out, but I had a few “A-ha” moments that I need to work through and integrate into my life a bit more.
My editor, who I mention a lot in talking about my stories and columns, has taken a job at UT-Austin and next week will be her last in our office. I’m sort of numbing my brain to not have to think about it because as awesome as it is for her, I can’t even imagine doing my job without her guidance and great ideas, so it’s going to be an adjustment, to put it mildly.
And that’s it. I’ve had lots to think about and process and reflect on, but to be quite honest, the changing weather has just made me very sleepy and most nights I just want to crawl into bed instead of staying up late and writing. Hoping I catch up on sleep soon and get a second wind before winter freezes me all up.
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