Resolved

I was going to make a bunch of resolutions this year. Start exercising in the morning again, cut down on the booze, deal with unpleasant situations in a mature & direct way, all the usual bullshit we say we're going to do. But the one promise to myself that I must keep is to start writing again. One blog post per week MINIMUM.

I'm not going to give myself a minimum number of words to write because I know that I can force myself to type until I've reached whatever arbitrary limit I set and I'll end up kind of just . . . trailing off instead of finishing my thoughts.


I already know that my "go to" topic for a quick post will be recipes and food. Food is the new hotness these days and I'm 'bout it, 'bout it too. Everyone's talking about food; Mrs. Obama is up on food's tip, food in the schools, DC Healthy Schools Act. Food, it's everywhere you want to be.

Since WifeRat and I got together nine years ago I've been cooking more and better food. And for the last 6-9 months I would say that I've really been "feeling my flavor." Everything I do in the kitchen is just a little bit sharper, a little bit better & tastier these days. When I dice an onion now, the pieces are uniform. My temperature on meat & fish is getting close to perfect. I seem to be able to avoid typical home cook kitchen disasters either through careful preparation or simply having the confidence to try something to save the dish.

It's a nice feeling, having command of your kitchen. The freedom to start branching out into making new recipes and new types of food is almost like being able to fly. We started eating a lot of Indian food over the last 12-18 months and now I've started making it at home. I make a pretty good potato & cauliflower curry, but the thing that real makes the crowd go wild is my palak paneer. My newest challenge is to stop paying $10 for paneer cheese and start making it myself.

Food occupies a central place in our household, we have a beautiful open kitchen that's the heart of our home. In consultation with the rest of the family, usually I'll plan a week's worth of meals and then take the kids with me to the grocery store to do the shopping. I'm happy to trade off whatever drama & stress (minimal IMHO) taking two kids to the grocery store entails to ensure that I always have food I want (in the quantities I require) to eat in the house.

Since I like to cook in a clean kitchen, I also serve as the de facto scullery maid in our home. I feel like Sisyphus with the constant loading and unloading of the dishwasher. Most days it's the first thing I do when I get up in the morning and the last thing I do before I go to bed at night.

I actually enjoy cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing the counters and stove after doing the dishes and then wiping them down is like a form of meditation for me. It's a way for me to show my family how much I love them each and every day and connects me to the lessons my parents and grandparents taught me about how to live.

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What's the Opposite of "On Blast?"

I do a lot of whining, complaining, and otherwise excoriating various people, places, and things for slights and misdeeds both real and imagined. I experimented with a regular feature called "on blast" that ended in abject failure. To balance the karmic scales, it seems like I should talk about the good things that happen in my life with the same enthusiasm.

Too bad today was far too annoying for me to write a glowing post about anything. I'm just trying to get rid of some of these old drafts and I somehow thought that I was going to be able to muster up some enthusiasm when I sat down to write.

Last time I did this posting everyday for a month thing, I gave myself a 500 word minimum on posts. Things being what they are these days; WifeRat is 8 months pregnant and I've been extremely busy at work for the last couple of months; I don't know how realistic it is to set such a lofty goal. All I know right now is that I'm tired, it's almost ten o'clock, and I'm done doing anything other watching TV today.

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Daring to Dream

For the first time ever I'm thinking about my working life in something other than strictly practical terms.

When I started working full-time, professional gigs 12+ years ago I hadn't finished school. I was nervous like shit because I half believed all the people who were telling me that I just had to go back and finish school RIGHT THAT MINUTE or career and financial doom were sure to follow. At the same time everyone was telling me I had to finish school, I already had a decent job making about the same amount of money as most of my friends who had finished school. I found myself in a weird position; I was doing OK, but I thought I was lucky to be doing as well as I was and consequently I had no real ambition in my professional life.

My career continued to chug along, I moved from tech support to training and took a job at a kick ass, small company that had been founded by a guy named Mark Minasi. Ten years later I still haven't had a job that I found as challenging or rewarding as my first training job. It was an intense workplace filled with a lot of extremely intelligent and extroverted people who weren't afraid to get into arguments or challenge opinions. Part of what I loved about the job was that no one seemed to particularly care if you had a degree. The long pole in the tent there was were you smart enough and intense enough to keep up? I was and so it was all good.

Too bad Mark and his brilliance left the company shortly before I got there and the company was on the verge of collapse. I only worked there for four months before the shit hit the fan and I moved on to a series of short-term opportunities where every six months I found myself sweating through interviews hoping no one asked if I had a degree. Eventually I got settled into some more long term jobs (including a stint working for BigDaddyRat) and somewhere along the way I decided to go back and finish school.

Finishing school took longer than I thought, cost more than I thought, but proved to be much more satisfying than I thought it would be when it was finally over. It's been almost a year since I took my last exam and the thought that it's over still brings a huge smile to my face. WifeRat and I have gotten a lot done over the five years since we've been married; she's gotten tenure, I finished school, we had a kid, we bought a home, and now the future is starting to look like a limitless horizon of new possibilities.

So now I'm thinking about work a little differently. For so many years I was just worried about keeping the job I had, but now I'm beginning to think about what it is that I really want out of work. I have no idea where I'm going to end up, but I can see a few different possibilities.

If I stay with the massive government contractor I currently work for I have to get out of the job I'm currently in. Right now I'm at the USDA and it is the most toxic government agency I've ever worked in. When I get back to DC I should have a chance to take a proposal writing class and I would like to leverage that against my presentation skills to jump over to the business development side of government contracting. The upside is that I stay in a recession proof industry and keep some stability. The downside is that I'm still a part of big bureaucratic entity and these fuckers have shown that they don't like to pay people, so I'm committing to fighting for every nickel I get out of them.

I could also bust out as an entrepreneur. Using those same proposal writing skills I can start getting myself some small contracts because there's no sense in throwing away 12 years of government contracting experience. I would also get into some real estate development, I led a tenant-sponsored condo conversion over the last four years and learned quite a bit about real estate. Our technical advisor is thinking about retiring in a few years and we have talked about getting together once we close the books on our current dealings. If I get my own company going I would probably also do some independent sales for various entities. I have a buddy who owns a company that does the signs in new buildings, they currently have no representation in DC. The sales are long-term and big money, but while I'm working for someone else I don't have the time to develop contacts and formalize my relationship with the manufacturer. Upside is that I would diversify my income stream, be independent, and get to work on different things. Downside is that administration and paperwork are not my strong suits and you have to have those things straight as a small business owner.

My final possibility is to become a full-time creative writer. As I continue to blog everyday, I feel my writing getting sharper and more clear. If I'm going to pursue writing as a career I will need to take a screen writing or script writing class in the near future. Ideally what I would like to do is bring fully formed ideas to an established production company that would take me on as a staff writer and allow me to learn the nuts & bolts of creative writing. BET is also getting into the business of creating new programming, so I think there's an opportunity for me there somewhere.

I don't know where I'm heading or what the final result will be, but it's good to feel free to dream again.

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Posting Everyday

This posting every day is no joke. Originally my goal was to post every weekday, but NylonThread put me onto to this NaBloPoMo thing and I felt like it was a good way to push myself and my writing.

Since I took my first creative writing class in college I have felt a desire to write more. But because of my freakishly bad relationship with school, I allowed myself to be caught up in the ridiculous notion that if I wasn’t writing for class credit then I was wasting my time.

Years later when I started working as a trainer and tech writer had to start creating classes and presentations, I started thinking about writing creatively again. But I had no idea how to get started and I talked myself out of giving it any serious consideration. It wasn’t that I never wrote anything that amused me or that I never enjoyed writing, commenting on blogs and e-mailing gave me plenty of that, but somehow I didn’t feel like I was writing.

Now that I’ve started this blogging thing I’m allowing myself to reconsider creative (specifically TV or movie scripts) writing as a career again. I feel like I have ideas out the wazoo and I’m getting closer to being able to assemble them in a coherent way. My experience as a gov’t contractor is going to be to my advantage, not just as grist for the comedy mill but also, in analyzing what it is that I need to do to sell an idea. Who to present an idea to, how to create a demand for what I’m producing; all the things you have to do to keep yourself employed as a gov’t contractor.

I was gonna put some humble pie bullshit in here about how I know I’m going to strike out a few times, but I don’t actually believe that. Either I’m going to put together some ideas that I can sell to a production company or who-the-fuck-ever (maybe have a more known writer pimp my ideas) or I’m not. It’s that simple, maybe the first buyer won’t bite but someone else will.

I don’t know where this well spring of confidence comes from, but I feel it.

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T Diamond Ranch

So after the call was made for Obama last night at 10pm our (central) time, we hit the road for Montana. I caught an hour of sleep before we left the in-law's place and slept the first two hours we were on the road before I took over behind the wheel at about midnight. We drove across western North Dakota and Eastern Montana until about 5:30am when I had to pull over to rest. I caught another two hours of sleep in the car and then not too long after we resumed our trip our route took us off the interstate.

Once the sun was up I could see that Montana is beautiful, it reminded me of the phrase "magnificent desolation". We stopped for breakfast in the thriving metropolis of Roundup, MT before coming into the home stretch of our trip. About 20 minutes outside of Lewistown it started snowing; I'm not sure of the geography of the area, but apparently we entered some mountain range. There was much rejoicing when we finally pulled into the driveway of the T Diamond Ranch.

After greeting everyone and a lot of hugging and excitement, BabyRat and my nephew/Godson (n/g) demanded to go out and play in the snow. We made a snowman and burned off some of the energy that BabyRat had built up sitting in a car for 12 hours before we had lunch. I won't bore you with the rest of the day, but it was pretty standard fare.

After we get the kids to bed and the adults are hanging out I realized that it's 10pm and I haven't done my blog post for the day. So I'm trying to excuse myself to bang out my 500 words for the day, but I'm not really sure what to tell people. I don't really want to tell them, "I'm a blogger" for two reasons. The first being I would feel like an unmitigated tool referring to myself as a blogger and the second is then they may want to read my blog. It would be fine for my sister & brother-in-law, but somehow I'm not comfortable with the idea of my brother-in-law's parents reading my piece of shit blog.

I realize this hesitance to tell people I have a blog is a weird bit of cognitive dissonance when you consider that anyone in the world can google "hill rat" and this blog is the second hit. I want people to read this blog, but I guess I just don't want certain people to read it lest I feel like I have to censor myself even further. Does this makes me a phony because I don't want some people to see behind the carefully constructed facade I present to the world?

Do any other bloggers feel the same way? It's kind of like I have a desire to keep my online life and identity separate from the rest of my life even though my life in meatspace is pretty much all I ever talk about.

PS - Special to my NaBloPoMo peeps. I pushed the send button on this post at 11:20pm Mountain time on 11/5/2008. Fuck that time stamp.

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New Commitment

So while I've been out here in Fargo I've steadily been accumulating observations and anecdotes about life out here on the plains. The problem isn't to find the time to write, I have as much time as I need most days, but rather finding the discipline (and perhaps courage) to write each and every day. I know each blog post doesn't have to be "The Invisible Man", but because that kind of literate, precise, and clear writing is what I strive for, I often find myself paralyzed by my own limitations as a writer.

The decision I have made to get myself over the hump is to make a public commitment to write an average of 500 words a day, five days a week for the remainder of the calendar year. I'm guessing that those five days will usually coincide with the work week, but perhaps not. Sometimes the 500 words will go down in a single post, other days I may do five 100 word posts and I'm gonna leave myself some wiggle room in case I write some sort of emotionally exhausting 1500 word screed, that so long as I reach 2500 words for the week I'll consider my commitment fulfilled.

Of course, the $64,000 question is always does anyone give a fuck? I'm guessing at least a couple of people will be interested to see me spill my brains all over the internet a little more often, but this public declaration will mostly be met by raging indifference.

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The Beautiful Struggle

I've been in the tank for Ta-Nehisi Coates since the first time I read his blog a few months ago. In addition to bringing a strong voice new voice to the Blogosphere, TC is the only blogger (that I'm aware of) that has seen fit to bless me with a link. I hold tight to that link as a soupçon of legitimacy for my blogging. Herr Coates just published his first book earlier this year, The Beautiful Struggle and I finally got a chance to read it.

I'm gonna try not to get too caught up in a bunch of superlatives here, but the book is damn good. Even though I'm a few years older than TC and we had vastly different upbringings, I knew that as a Black man and an aspiring writer this book was going to have something to say to me. I read the book in two sittings; after I woke up from a nap today I read the first half while enjoying a couple of hours home alone and then after I put BabyRat to bed I finished it off. I think the last book I devoured like this was the Godfather.

What struck me about this book was that it seems like a spiritual companion to so many other great coming of age stories, both real and fictional. Even though I want every Black man and boy in America to read this book, I hope that others who didn't grow up Black or in an urban environment will read this book and find some reflection of themselves and their life in TC's words.

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