Jumping Back into the Blogging Ring

When I started posting again in April, as April, I thought I’d come back quickly to regular blogging. Yeeeeeah, about that. Clearly that wasn’t the case.

I’m going through some major life upheavals, and though I won’t go into it now, I plan on posting about it on here at a later time. Right now, a lot of it is still under wraps, kept off of here and off of my social media, but as things move forward that will start to shift.

There’s just a lot to work out and through and I’m really in the shit right now.

In some ways, it’s been that way all year, even before corona and quarantine and George Floyd’s murder and protests and Federal troops invading the city where I live. A good friend and I usually do “XX for 20XX” goals Google Doc where we list goals for the year and track our progress over the year, usually with an ebb and flow of updating during the year. We got the idea for the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin, which we both listen to, and have been doing it for a couple of years.

This year, I couldn’t even come up with a 20 for 2020. I was just too far in the muck to have the bandwidth to think of it, and felt I was in too much uncertainty to think as far ahead as a whole year. That seems quaint now, because life went into a stage of so much more uncertainty at the end of February, and then of course that was only compounded by all the events of 2020, and my personal uncertainty and turmoil seems to reach towards higher and higher peaks as time goes on.

So, all that to say, as things got murkier, I fell off of wanting to post, instead engaging in a lot of “doomscrolling” and distraction. But oddly, now as my own shit gets seemingly ever worse, I’m kinda like fuck it, might as well get back to blogging. I can’t really explain it. It’s as though the same distress that got me off the wagon of posting that I thought I would start back up is now helping me start back up. As I type, I realize that this really doesn’t make a whole ton of sense. But I think I’m okay with that.

This time, I’ve given a lot of thought to how to get back into blogging. Instead of just saying oh I want to (or more accurately, I should) do more of that, I’ve thought a lot about what I want this site to look like going forward. And there are a couple of things I want to do more regularly.

As anyone who’s ever read my site knows, I tend to not be able to be really “on brand” – my mind just doesn’t work that way and I’m interested and want to discuss so many different things. So this will be a hodgepodge. But here’s what I anticipate going forward:

Creativity Goals Updates – Weekly and Monthly

I’m someone who is very motivated by working towards goals, little and grandiose, though I can tend to get disorganized and distracted. I am a planner, through and through, and a scheduler. I’m not as good at follow-through often though.

It really bothered me to not be able to come up with a clear 20 for 2020 at the beginning of the year and left me feeling really unfocused. Oddly, I got more goal-focused than ever once quarantine started. Perhaps it was because of being in a personal quagmire of tumult, having goals to work toward grounded me. Or some shit. I even, with same aforereferenced friend, and again following advice from a dealing with covid episode of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast, made a 19 for covid-19, which has been going fairly well so far.

So, I want to bring some of that goal stuff here, specifically focusing on creativity goals, because that’s been a huge theme since, well, forever, but especially lately. So I thought I would check in here once a week, on Sunday nights, about goals for the next week, and how I did on that week’s goals. I’m thinking I’ll also do something monthly and yearly as well.

And, look, it’s not always going to be sunshine and roses. I realized recently that’s one of the things I really struggle with with social media and with life – the pressure to be positive and happy and have the perfect public persona all the time. And that’s not me. That’s not even what I value; I value being real and authentic and having space for struggle and all the feelings.

So, sometimes, I’m going to fuck up. And I’m going to start goals that turn out to be unrealistic, or have to be adjusted, or get disrupted, or sound good in theory but aren’t right for me, or are more of a should than something I care about working toward. I hope that recording what really happens, including the successes and the failures, the triumphs and the struggles, somehow has value to people who might read it.

The Artist’s Way Reflections – Weekly

One of the things I started doing when everything went topsy-turvy for me was to go back to a book I’ve gone back to many times over the past two decades, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. It was written almost a decade before I started working with it, in 2000. Since getting back into it, I wanted to post some reflections about that experience.

This, too, won’t be all sunshine and roses. Sometimes I disagree with her. Sometimes I get mad at the book. I have a long, winding history with Morning Pages, one of the prominent tools in the book. There will be struggle here too.

I have a book called The Complete Artist’s Way that includes two others as well, so this should be an ongoing post series for awhile.

Spotlight Series – Monthly

Like many others, I’ve been thinking about what I can contribute to racial justice, and specifically what can I do here, on my site, that could contribute in a positive way. I realize my site is just my little wordpress site, I don’t have any big platform, I think most people who come here come to read old posts about Breaking Bad, I don’t really have much of a voice in the grand scheme of things. But I do have this site, and I do want to do something.

One thing that occurred to me, especially while reading some suggested reading/watching/listening lists, is that I consume a fair amount of pop culture that is by and/or about BIPOC and I do tend to write about pop culture on here, so why not merge that and intentionally post about the media and pop culture that I personally love and use my page to lift up those voices. And because I was already listening to and watching and reading a lot of what I’m planning to recommend, it will come from a really genuine place and hopefully will inspire others to also read and watch and listen.

So, once a month, I plan to spotlight something. I’m also going to include pop culture by/about People With Disabilities (PWD) in there too because that’s the marginalized community I’m part of (and yeah, our portrayal in pop culture leaves a lot to be desired and so there may be some “can you believe this shit?” spotlights too).

These posts are going to be monthly because I intend for them to be deeper dives and to take more work to write. But my list is already enough to fill more than two years, so there’s that.

Pop Culture Round-Up – Monthly

I was thinking of doing a quick round-up post at the end of each month, highlighting what I was listening to, watching, or reading that month. And also keep a running list of books read this year. I may have gone a bit nuts with the audiobooks during quarantine sooooooo 2020 has been a book-filled year.

Other Stuff – Weekly

At least once a week, I’d like to post something that’s not from one of the above categories or regularly established columns. Topics of these posts may include: