fide arti non casui
I am currently in the process of upgrading all of evenlake.com, and that necessitates that I move this blog to a subdomain.
Those of you who read this via RSS should be unaffected, but if you visit the site, please note that as of March 1st, its new address will be http://blog.evenlake.com
The old address will be valid until at least the end of March, but all new posts will be in the subdomain.
Thanks for understanding, and thanks for your continued reading.
As you can probably see, I’ve done some upgrades around here. Most of them were so I can see how it would look at domestic father (evenlake is Blanche to DF’s Baby Jane), but I ended up keeping a few of them. (evenlake gets a snazzy new logo out of the deal.)
I also did some long-overdue upgrades, things that you won’t necessarily notice, but make life better for me.
I’ve added a Contact form, so it’s easier to get in touch with me, if you feel the need.
Another new feature is the email subscription option. If you want to receive my posts via email, simply click on the “Email” option under Subscriptions, and you will be directed to Feedburner to enter your email address.
Finally, I am expanding my online empire presence. I’ve started to become a little more active at Twitter under the name evenlake, but am still just a rookie and don’t really know what the hell I’m doing. I am also experimenting with lifestreaming, though I prefer my name for it: netstreaming. I’m not really streaming my entire life, just my internet part of it. So if the idea of knowing what book I added to LibraryThing, or what I just listened to on iTunes really excites you, then head on over to evenlake.net to see just how vain I really am. (Seriously, though, I’m using it to learn a few things about website design and Yahoo pipes. It gets kind of messy somedays, as it is definitely in the experimental stage.)
Thanks for your patience, and I really hope this is the last of the test and meta posting for a very long time.
“Find your obsession.”
Tough words, from Merlin Mann. Tough for me anyway.
I have never been one to obsess about any one thing for very long. This world is far too interesting and life is far too short to devote myself to one tiny sliver of a sliver of it. I learn about one thing, and after it increases my knowledge of the world, I usually move on to another subject.
Many other people do the same thing, and, when I started this blog, I thought this was its topic: learning about learning. But that really doesn’t interest me. I don’t really care how I learn, except for how I might do it better or faster. Instead, I launched it as a story about learning, how learning about the world can change someone. That, I realized, was the arc of my blog.
Though I had an arc, I still didn’t have the topic, the obsession. What about those subjects I consistently spend time with, those things that are a regular part of my life? Reading and writing have been constants; I’ve been doing both as long as I can remember. I started birding 10 years ago and I still make it out into the bush several times a year. In the past 18 months, critical thinking (the subject of my other site) has become a more prominent part of my life. But I would call none of these obsessions. They are tools to help me understand the other subjects.
What, then, did all of the items on my list have in common? Why would I have selected those things, why were they important? When I made the list, and when I have subsequently amended it, I thought the items on it would enable me to understand what it was to be human at the beginning of the 21st century. But, I knew there was more to it, an undercurrent beneath all of the items, something I couldn’t quite see.
In order to find it, I had to find the obsession. To do that, I asked, “What is my weakness? What do I find it difficult to stop doing?”
Until a few years ago, I finished every book I read, and never walked out of a movie or changed the channel before the end of the TV show. Though I have started edging away from this compulsion, I can count on one hand the total number of books I’ve left unfinished and movies I’ve walked out of.
This was my weakness: I have to finish a story.
I looked back over the list, and I saw it. Every item was about story. Either a story of my own life, or a tool to help me see a bigger story.
Shit.
I was left with a personal blog about story and narrative. Like thousands of other blogs.
I looked again, and realized there was something more, though. All of the items were pieces of a big picture. They are an attempt to uncover the story of being human, a mini-story trying to find the truth of the mega-story.
I’m left with being one infinitesimal story about trying to understand The Story.
The Story is my obsession.
During this change, I decided that I would re-focus my other site, meaning I would ignore all of the expert advice: it would still be user-friendly, but my focus would be on writing, not traffic. No lists, no emphasis on social media, and no linking to the same thing everyone else is. It’s working out well; I’m receiving more positive feedback and am enjoying doing it.
At the same time, I decided to make this blog the anti-blog. I turned off comments, I use tags that only make sense to me, my categories are kind of confusing, and I am not in any way focused into an identifiable niche.
And, I have gone back on my word. I wrote early on in this blog that I was going to be an All-Windows or All-Google guy. I felt that Microsoft took other peoples great ideas, made them less great, but also made them cheaper and easier to use. Then I got a Vista machine.
Vista is as annoying as everyone says it is. I get random re-boots, unpredictable screen savers, and very little backwards compatibility. The day before CJ was born, Sally bought me a new MacBook as a poke present and I haven’t looked back. I switched my hosting from Windows to Linux, installed WordPress and have never been happier with my whole computer situation.
The difference is simple: My Mac is stable, and established Linux programs are well-supported and inexpensive. These were things I tried to debunk in my earlier post, but I didn’t even convince myself.
After comfortably breaking every rule for this blog, I could not have been happier. If it meant I was the only one who ever read it, that’s fine. The only thing left to do was to discover my obsession.
Merlin Mann has several sites, but he is most well-known for 43Folders, a blog about personal productivity. The subject is something I actually find a little loathsome, only because I know people who are into this sort of thing and they spend more time refining their “system” than actually accomplishing anything. (This is a common problem, acknowledged by most productivity gurus.)
Earlier this year, I stumbled across his site accidentally, while looking for an index card wallet. (I have used 3×5 cards for note taking since high-school, and was looking for a different way to carry them.) Mann is the creator, or at least coiner, of the Hipster PDA, a stack of 3×5 cards held together with a binder clip.
Though I decided against the binder clip, I continued reading his site. When I found him, he seemed to be going through a transitional period. Fewer of his posts were about productivity, and he started to write more freely outside of this niche. I liked it enough to add him to my Feed Reader.
Then, at about the same time I was having reservations about blogging, he took a radically different approach. On his personal blog, he posted something titled simply, better.
Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content.
These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical.
It is his polemic against the state of blogging. He is tired of first-draft opinions and an infinitude of links to the same old things. He wants things to change, and he’s starting with himself. Writing of his own endeavors, he says,
All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better. Better, better.
Shockingly, he then began to smelt the golden calf: he changed the focus of his website, a website that was a large portion of his family’s income. In a retrospective post titled 4 Years he admits his role in creating a web that he dislikes.
By 2007, an increasingly large number of mornings would find me staring, dead-eyed, at del.icio.us or Digg or reddit, feeling queasy as I wondered what possible role, how ever small, my stupid blog might have had in helping inspire 1,000 hucksters to try their hand at half-assing a living from pretending to help strangers — while providing their quarry an unapologetically infinite source of pointless procrastination in the bargain.
He talks about the change he wants in his post Gears Shifting,
…if you share my feeling that real “productivity” means a lot more than index cards, lists of links, and endless, free bus rides for bored tourists, I think you’ll enjoy and benefit from the change.
And, finally, he sums it all up, in Time, Attention, and Creative Work:
I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work….
This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud….
I want you to visit here, get what you need, then get the hell back to work.
Now I was listening. A blogger who was actually telling me to leave his site? On his personal blog, he posted a talk he did at some blogger conference, called How to Blog. Where all of those other how-to experts tell you how to do the easiest things, Mann addressed the hardest part: writing something worth reading. He writes
Here’s everything I know about blogging in one slide: Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick. Get better.
Everything else is unimportant or easily learned.
After reading this, I realized evenlake needed to change. I turned off comments, stopped caring about traffic, and resolved to post more often. And I started to define my obsession. That was the difficult part.
I mentioned in my last post that I was changing strategy here. This site has always been, and will continue to be, about my effort to complete the list of things I want to do. It has always been personal; I’ve never tried to publicize it, and I’ve never written for anyone except myself. I’ve used it as a development site for my other blog and as an experimental notebook for writing.
My other site has a focus, a very narrow niche. While building that site, I studied what I was supposed to do in order to have a successful blog: Create top-ten lists. Add pictures. Break the text into digestible snippets. Use meta-tags. Don’t use too many meta-tags. Use tags that are meaningful to the reader. Top-ten lists are hackneyed; create top-seven lists. Use post titles that allow people to know what you are saying without making them read the actual post.
While I didn’t follow much of this advice, what I found was that these expert tips are creating a homogenous blogosphere. Go to most any blog and you’re likely to see something like “Top 12 Ways to Let your Hair Down,” with a semi-professional generic photo of a smiling woman exuberantly taking her hair out of a ponytail, and 12 sentences broken into 12 numbered paragraphs, each with their own bold heading.
The vast majority of these blogs are excruciatingly boring. It feels like people have just started copying the easy parts of the expert advice (formatting, SEO, networking), and have completely ignored the hardest part: writing something worth reading.
I was getting a little disillusioned about what these experts tell you it takes to have a successful blog, thinking that if I wanted anything I wrote to actually be read, I would have to start doing exactly what everyone else was doing. Why bother? Why add to the clutter? If I was going to write about something, wouldn’t it make sense not to write exactly the same thing everyone else is writing?
Then, somehow, I started reading Merlin Mann.
I am doing some pretty serious changes to this site, so bear with me. I’ve upgraded the WordPress version, updated the theme files so they are much easier to keep current with WP.
I’m also revising my strategy here, beyond just technical details. I’ve started using WP tag functionality, so I’ve restructured the categories, and added a tag for each item on the list. On the About page I’ve listed any item I’ve written on, and linked it to its tag.
The sidebar will be changing to include only those sites where I think there is an individual with a voice. I’ve already removed one, as that site became less about the writing and more about soliciting reader comments, and thus was turning into the equivalent of a BBS or forums site.
More about why I’m doing this later, but for now, expect there to be changes, including a little less irregular posting.
In what will hopefully be the last time I switch blog platforms, evenlake is moving. I have tried to make Quick Blogcast work, but I just feel like I’m keeping it together with duct tape.
My new blog, Domestic Father, prompted the change, and it made sense to move both to the new platform. As this site is more personal, and not at all publicized, it will also serve well as a development site for both. With that in mind, you may see changes that appear and disappear as I test new features and new stylesheets.
I will keep the old site up for a week or so, but will deactivate it after I’ve exported everything. The old platform was Windows based, and on a subdomain, so any permalinks will be pointed to a 404 page. My sincerest apologies for the broken links.
If you are visiting at blog.evenlake.com, please join me at the new site, and if your reading this at the new site, welcome! I hope you enjoy the new look.
I have started a new website, only a blog for now. Below is what I posted over at Domestic Father yesterday.
———–
I quit my job today.
It was a good job; 6-figure salary, decent benefits, understanding boss, normal hours, co-workers I was friendly with, room for growth, basically everything you could want in a job and a company. It was such a good job that nobody gave me any grief, and in fact encouraged me, when I chose to take twelve weeks of family leave when my daughter was born in mid-March.
The first few weeks were pretty tough, as we, like most other new parents, encountered one challenge after another. Then, in early May, my daughter was hospitalized with a high fever.
This being my first child, I was not prepared to see my 8-week old daughter in a hospital crib with an IV splint attached to her arm. Though she was released after two nights with a fairly run-of-the-mill bladder infection, the experience had a deep impact on my life and my priorities.
Sally (my partner/mother of my daughter) and I had always tried to structure our lives in such a way that either one of us could support both of us, so neither of us ever had to feel particularly compelled to stay at a job that made us miserable. Either one of us could therefore support all 3 of us.
Before the birth, we had considered the possibility of one of us staying home, both of us agreeing for a variety of reasons that I would be the logical choice. But I just couldn’t quite completely embrace the idea of abandoning my career, and walking away from a good job.
Looking at her in the hospital bed, I kept asking myself one question:
Why would I go back to work to earn money to pay someone else to raise my child?
I could not come up with an answer.
Last week, Sally and I reviewed our finances and added me to her insurance. Today, I let my boss know that I would not be coming back from family leave.
As of this afternoon, I am a stay-at-home dad.
It is time to stop blogging in two places. GoDaddy has finally allowed
a bit more customization to their Windows hosted blog application, and
I must now make the final step. Though I still like Blogger better, it
is time I embrace my domain name, and stop having other people’s logos
and ads on my website.
So, this is the last entry that will appear in both places. If you
have been reading this at Blogger, there will be one more post
redirecting you to the main blog, and if you’re reading this at
evenlake.com, just enjoy the design changes over the next few days,
and keep coming back.
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