I’m actually the assistant on this job, helping another writer and editor liven up a client’s employee newsletter. The blog in question is pretty much done—I just have to move it over to the client’s server. And then the real fun begins.
Category Archives: General Miscellany
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Today I am reading a book
And then I’m going to write a press release about it. What are you doing today?
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Google has become a lumbering behemoth of slowness
It has reached a point where, when I need to search for something, about half the time I can type “bing.com” in the location bar and get my answer long before Google even begins to rouse itself to deliver a response.
I know: On a scale of 1 to “This actually counts as a problem,” complaints about slow internet service don’t even rate. I’m just saying I’m glad there’s another major search engine out there. (Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to conceive of saying something nice about Microsoft. Huh. Strange bedfellows.)
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Briefly
Black Gate posted a review I wrote for their print edition last year.
Family Business magazine mentions an award-winning story of mine that appeared last year. (There’s a link to the full story, but you have to be a subscriber to read it.)
And if you’re looking for something to read, this interview with a Daily News crime reporter by Paul Hiebert over at the Awl is really, really good stuff.
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Ack
So much to do today. This week. In the brief span of years God has allotted me. Ack.
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This is not a very good blog
I won’t deny it: This is not a very good blog. It veers wildly from overly, obsequiously professional (and, I think, boring) to randomly goofy (but probably not in an entertaining enough way to justify any clients it might cost me).
Well, I’m working on it.
Here’s something I think is true about the blog medium: It’s as much about practice as it is about professionalism. This is simply inherent to blogging—the cost of entry is so low, the compensation so minimal, and the window of time you can expect your audience to spend on your blog so short, that it just doesn’t make sense to polish and edit and revise blog posts. At least not the same way you’d polish and edit and revise a newspaper or magazine article.
And while that doesn’t mean you should just put out crap, it does mean that the only way to improve is by doing it, by blogging often and in public, so you can figure out what works.
It can be hard, because, yeah, it’s embarrassing when you’ve blogged something you wish were better-written, or when someone calls you out for not knowing something. It dismays me to think of all the stuff I’ve posted online that makes me sound like a total (as opposed to a partial) fool. I kind of wish I could wipe it all out and start fresh and sound like a genius from square one.
But there is also comfort in knowing that all the foolish stuff is out there and that, you know, by putting it out there and leaving it there, I’m owning it. Yup, sometimes I am dumb, or boring, or lame. But that’s because I’m a person. And maybe the best thing blogs and the rest of the internet will do for us will be to make it undeniably obvious how integral dumbness, boringness, and lameness are to the human condition, so that we can get comfortable with them. That would be good for everybody, right?
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What is having a baby like
Before you have the baby, a bunch of people will say to you: “Everything changes!” They say it in a knowing fashion, with an expression on their faces like you are about to drink a cement mixer but are unaware of what is going to happen, or taste some other terrible food—basically, like you will survive, but man, is it going to be funny to watch your reaction.
Anyway, “Everything changes!” they say, but they don’t expand on that or elucidate at all or clarify exactly how everything is going to change, except that maybe they say you’d better get some sleep now, which is annoying because it is not really possible to store up sleep credits. Probably they don’t say more because, you know, every child is a unique snowflake/his or her own fresh brand of hell. But I think, even though I’ve only been fathering for seven months, that there is one universal thing I can say about all first babies, and that it is what all those people are getting at when they say, “Everything changes!” all the while smiling like they are a carny and you are promising your new girlfriend you will win that giant stuffed animal for her, for sure.
When you have a baby, your time is no longer your own. You don’t get to sleep in. You don’t necessarily get to sleep, at times. You don’t get to just up and go out to eat or to see a friend’s band. You generally can’t both get wasted at the same time anymore, though you will want to, very much. When non-baby-having people complain that their baby-having friends are no longer spontaneous, it is because that is exactly what happens: Spontaneity becomes nearly impossible. (Planning also becomes nearly impossible, at least for a while, because of erratic naps and diaper changes and abrupt changes in feeding schedules or crazy allergic reactions.)
Anyway, this is hard to adjust to, and that is me speaking as a guy; if you are a woman, it is about a thousand times harder, because of, like, breastfeeding and frequently being the primary caretaker, and of course the fact that this all starts after you carried someone around for almost a year and then they came screaming and flailing out of your body.
And the kicker is: Your time is no longer your own forever. You will think about this person, and any similar people who follow, more than you think about yourself for the rest of your life—unless something bad happens, and you would give all the time you’ll ever have to prevent that.
It’s weird. It’s hard. It’s totally worth it. But yeah, it really does change everything.
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