It’s been a year with a lot of small but important changes. Sometimes the most impressive changes are the ones that are easiest to see - new house, loss of job, new pet, kid - but those sort of take care of themselves. They don’t happen all the time. For me, I find that I sort of coast through the big changes and it’s the apparent doldrums in between that get a little tricky. I could ramble about how my kid’s in preschool or recap the car accident I had in the summer, but my kid was in daycare before, and I didn’t get hurt in the accident and ended up with a very similar car afterwards. They make up events on the timeline of the linear version of my life, but they don’t make up real change. (more…)

I’m excited to be applying for a little writing job at a major content website, it’s the kind of change I’ve been looking for. I’ve got almost no chance of landing the gig, a monthly retainer project reviewing and writing about digital photography, but just taking the leap of faith to apply feels good.

It’s got me started thinking about other stuff, and I’m working on some skeletal ideas for other blogs. As much fun as it is to ramble about broken toes and quitting music and how much I love the little birdies where I live, I’ve got tons of interests, and I’m interested in forging the discipline of writing regularly about some of them. (more…)

I’ve been reading a compilation of Hopi stories called Hopi Stories of Witchcraft, Shamanism, and Magic. It’s mostly been a lot of fun, and the stories come straight from transcriptions of Hopi storytellers hoping to document their endangered oral tradition. There are some puzzling editing choices; I’ve come across 3 sets of stories that are almost identical and separated by a couple of chapters, but given the author and editor’s apparent qualifications and reverence for the Hopi culture, I’m reluctant to attribute it to any sloppiness, I just haven’t discovered the logic behind it. I haven’t spotted the important differences, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. I hate to catch myself yadda-yaddaing through 20,000 year old stories, it may very well be that the little things that matter greatly in a context like this, so I will tiptoe around the idea that I haven’t been patient enough to A/B the similar tales to spot the important differences that justified keeping both versions. (more…)

After feeling sort of uncentered for the last several years, I feel like I’ve started to get some direction. I mean, in day to day life, it’s not like I sit in a corner rocking back and forth and moaning or something, but I’ve missed a sort of “big picture” sense of my past connecting to my present connecting to my future. (more…)