Skip to main content

Posts

A procrastination about process

It's a Saturday morning and I won't publish anything on deadline today.  But I wake up wanting to use my time to get something done, because that's what I feel I am on this planet to do. Document as much as I can, including my life!  I'm watching Newcastle play Sunderland in the third round of the English FA Cup. This is the equivalent of a major league team and a minor league team playing. The stands are filled with people there to support their team. Both teams are in kits with vertical stripes, which is making it very difficult to tell who who is who.  Sunderland is 6th in the league just below the Premiership. Newcastle had a great start to the season but have not been doing so well and are mid-table. I'm not sure who I want to win, but my enjoyment of this sport is to watch what happens and appreciate how all of these matches fit together in a bigger tapestry.  There's also no VAR - video assistant referee. Matches in the Premiership are a lot less exciting
Recent posts

Stuck in the moment, momentarily stuck

There is a point each day where the enormity of existence hits me. This manifests itself in a physical way as I feel my body crushing under the weight of intense disappointment. Usually this happens after I have had a success. Success is usually publishing something or otherwise accomplishing something professionally.  What does personal success look like? Somewhere in my inability to answer that question lies a tremendous sense that I'll never really be at rest for it makes me feel vulnerable.  Yet I recognize you have to slow down, but when professional matters are not pressing I find that I have free time to ponder the constant isolation and the paradox it presents. In order to be productive, I need to spend a lot of time alone. But to move in a direction of more personal success, whatever that means, I might need more people around.  Writing paragraphs on this topic helps me think and there are many times when jotting down my thoughts is enough to make me transition from the en

The disentanglement from the narrative

This has been a year of change and so much of what holds me together is my isolation. If I only have my own thoughts in my mind, then I stand a better chance of sorting through everything I need to do to be as productive as I am. I know there's a lot missing from my life as a result. And I don't know what I can really do, because the productivity brings meaning. The meaning keeps me going as a business.  I recently put working clocks in the front room, two of them that were formerly at the old house at Dogwood Place. I would still have preferred a better outcome.  But this is the now I find myself in, having made a series of choices including realizing that so many had already been made.  So what do I do now? What is this place I find myself? I wake up every day a different person with some of the days filled with adventure but most of them filled with endless research into the existence I find in the public record. I have built a life around turning public discussion into stor

Adventures in Radio Garden

I am challenging my boredom by refusing to be bored. I've made it this far by living a pretty untraditional life, and it seems to be working. As in, things happen from time to time that are interesting. Maybe not significant.  I texted a friend recently about wanting to know more about music from Brazil. At some point after that I spent an evening listening to whatever Apple Music has in their "essentials." I don't speak Portuguese, but I'm interested in the rhythmic quality of the language.  At some point in the last week, I remembered the existence of a website called Radio Garden. This link will take you to the station I'm currently listening to, in Aruba. Click here to listen! I have no idea what they'll be playing when anyone read this, but at this moment I've escaped to this station, which features at this moment a beat and kind of music I can't quite describe. The announcer keeps breaking in, and then suddenly we're to something more lik

Reform wishing reform

I hated high school and could not wait to be out. I'm sure others are in the same boat. I ended up teaching myself what I needed to know when I got to college. High School was when I realized that no one except me had my interests at heart. If I could recreate the perfect experience for me in the past, it would have been to have had a way to get experience in journalism earlier. Sure, the profession was already dying, but I'd argue the world needs idiots like me who don't have anything better to do. I think it's many people's experience if you weren't born into the system. Being a first generation American born into a family that didn't do much to assimilate means I'll die an outsider, too. I then went to Virginia Tech, which was a waste of an experience where I learned how truly little I mattered. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Guidance counselors in high school thought I was just weird. Again, I found my way through journalism, but the competi

Finding the structure

It's been a week of change in a year of change. Or at the very least, I know I'm in a new era when a new fridge has arrived. I don't feel like I deserve it at the moment, as the mini-fridge got me through for a while.  My idea of being human has involved a lot of pondering about whether any of this is real. Each day I wake up after a series of dreams in which I live other lives, and much of it seems so real.  And these days I wake up and I get to work on the next set of stories, and try my best to make sense of the world around me. I get paid to do this, and I'm grateful for all that had to happen for me to able to be here. Underneath the old fridge I found an artifact from December 2008, something to add to a collection of talismans about a specific time that radiates throughout the rest of my life. I didn't know that this piece of the puzzle was lost, but now it is waiting to be reconnected to the other specimens.  I somehow seem to get by from day to day by remem

Describing the pause

Every now and then, I hit a series of obstacles that derail my momentum and I end up wondering if I'll ever write again. Both yesterday and today I feel like I've used up all of my interest, and fear I've been getting it all wrong the whole time.  This can be quite debilitating because I've got a lot I need to write in a given week. Maybe too much, which is what's worrying me on this Friday evening in mid-November.  I have enough administrative to work to do to make it feel like I'm doing something. One of those is to post articles from Charlottesville Community Engagement   over to the Information Charlottesville site. Another is to update cvillepedia, even though that's not at all part of my job anymore.  I keep dreaming of other places and exploring my own life rather than spending it writing about this one community. I have made a decision to stay here long term and I'm going to honor that because I'm five decades old now, and I've spent mor