Category: ultrapersonal

Meta post

No one tagged me, which is no surprise because this project has been so dormant for so long, but there’s a set of blog questions going around that has had me thinking about my tentative efforts to paying attention to this platform once again.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

My participation in discussion groups — especially alt.zines (and I am amazed that this old site I helped put together is still online) — dovetailed with my interest in tinkering with publishing during the early days of the web, so my old zine Rumpus Room slowly morphed into a web site to hold the features I had already published, and that slowly morphed into occasional updates, and then tools appeared that made it easier to publish those updates without writing pages from scratch all the time.

Publishing a zine in the ’90s was an expensive endeavor, since I was young and poor and trying to take the production values seriously. So my desire to express myself in some fashion shifted from print to the web, and after a while the online part took on a life of its own.

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Perpetual Professional Burn-Out

Ah, the holiday season — the time of the year when I invariable get a minute or two to catch my breath and reflect upon how exhausted I seem to be by the end of each year. It doesn’t take any deep reflection to know why: I do too much, and too much of it at once, because I constantly chase too many parallel interest and side hustles, and I exist in a state of almost perpetual over-commitment. I’m interested in too many things! Since I am lucky that I can earn a living by doing things that I enjoy anyway, work tends to bleed into non-work, and hobbies overlap with my profession.

An Instagram story prompt had me thinking today about how much I have actually done for work and work-adjacent activities over time. It’s…a lot. (And I say this while feeling a huge amount of shame over letting yet another work-adjacent project blow its last deadline because I haven’t had the time to properly concentrate on it.)

Twenty years ago (!), I published a post about my real résumé — all the jobs I’ve had, not just what I would list on a CV — and that was already a lot. So, let’s see what I’ve been up to since April 2004…

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