Let me take you way, way back to 2007. You could still buy and sell a house for exorbitant prices, and there were still banks that would give you loans for that.  You probably actually had a job, you know, working for some company that employed real live people, instead of spending all your time launching small businesses or polishing your resume and carpet-bombing employers with it.  Twitter was around, but only Left Coast liberal elitists used it.  Not us normal, real, working Americans! Not bloggers.  We thought “what in the world would I say in only 140 characters?  Give me my Blogger/WordPress/Movable Type/Other!”

Maybe that was just me?

Times changed fast, didn’t they? I picked up Twitter, became a heavy user, and then  2010 became the year that my blog died.  I’m blaming Twitter, whether it’s honestly responsible or not.  I have made over 11,000 tweets, but the quality of my blog posts is generally higher than my tweets.  Overwhelmingly, my blog has provided more value to my readers than Twitter has.  But Twitter is like information crack.  Need another hit?  Oh look, another 400 updates to your stream.  And writing a tweet takes 1/100th the effort of penning a blog post.

It wasn’t long after I signed up that I found myself doing nothing but Twitter and ignoring my beautiful, inspiring, educational, and—above all else—humble blog.  Instead of writing posts that connected resources together and shared them in a meaningful context, I tweeted links, sometimes without any context.  Talk about instant gratification though. People retweet a hell of a lot more than they comment on blogs.  You can watch in real time as something funny or clever spreads virally from your friends out into groups of people you never even heard of with vaguely disturbing personal profile photos. You really get the sense that people are listening on Twitter.  It’s harder to know when people are reading your blog unless they are commenting on it or retweeting your announcement of the post.  Nothing satisfies the need for attention quite like retweets.  They’re dead easy to do, but empty of real conversation generally.  They’re a medium, not a message.

It’s not just what Twitter has done to my sharing habits that disturbs me.  It’s the way my thoughts themselves have changed.  For a while now, I’ve felt my thoughts turning much more shallow, and I can probably only blame that partially on my heavy use of Twitter.  But it doesn’t take generating real, actual content on Twitter to get that little dopamine buzz of attention.  You can just share a link from your Google Reader.  Or retweet someone else.  I didn’t just become a consumer of information—I became a lazy syndicator, with the false feeling that I was generating content when all I have really been doing is shifting around someone else’s content (coincidentally, this also describes a bunch of internet news sites that will remain unnamed here).

I’m not going to beat myself up about it.  At the same time I was spending more time on Twitter and less time on my blog, I was launching my web design company Clockpunk Studios.  And Twitter has some very large positives associated with it.  It has been invaluable in making business contacts.  I’ve gotten more than one client from a Twitter recommendation.

So look, Twitter’s not all bad.  It’s not all good.  It’s just a new thing that I need to balance along with all the other things.  Maybe you’re struggling with that too?  Let’s talk about this. Has Twitter killed your blog too?  Head to the comments! And keep it civil. If you just want to make fun of people who use Twitter, find some place else to do it.  Like your own Twitter account!

I’ve sworn to myself—because I apparently enjoy making ridiculous oaths to myself—that I would relaunch my blog before the year is out.  The new design is only half done.  You’ll notice an absolutely lack of sidebars.  But we’re gonna focus on content for a while here, and let those other features fill in with time.

I’m starting with this post (which I am writing 5 days ahead of publication, as a part of a general effort to a: spend more time on blog posts, and b: get the content log rolling ahead of me to build momentum).  I’ve worked up a tentative weekly schedule, which will certainly change once I’ve gotten into it a bit and begin to understand what is working and what isn’t.  When I blogged regularly, I kept a 3 day a week schedule, but that would be too easy to slip out of now after being so out of habit.  Regular, daily content generation is the only thing that’s going to build up my blogging muscles again.  So here it is:

My New Improved Blogging Schedule!

Monday:  Personal Anecdotes

This is the day you won’t want to miss if you’re really super interested in the day to day of my life as a small business owner, aspiring midlist writer, and sometimes photographer.  I’ll be digging into my past in these posts with a general goal of trying to understand how I became who I am today and how that impacts who I want to become.  Of course, it will all be written in my trademark humorous style.  You will laugh, you will cry, and you will wonder why you became friends with such a blatant narcissist.

Tuesday: Inspiration

This is where I’ll share the inspirational bits of things I’ve collected over the previous week.  This will include snippets of cool web design, awesome quotes in writing, cool comic book panels, and so on.  Stuff that inspires me to be a better artist, photographer, writer, and human being.  And not only will I share them—I’ll talk about why they inspire me.  The goal here is to get beyond surface level thoughts and back into that critical thinking mode that got me through liberal arts college with a solid B– average.

Wednesday: Tutorials!

I do a lot of stuff.  Sometimes, other people want to know how to do that stuff too.  I’ll be writing up various creative tutorials for Wednesdays.  This will run the usual gamut of topics, but expect a lot of website related stuff.  Your feedback will guide the direction of these posts, so if there’s something in particular you want to know about, then speak up.  As a comment or on Twitter.  Either way.

Thursday: The Week in Links

I have to give myself at least one easy day!  I’ll run down a list of links of interest that you might enjoy that I’ve gathered up from various resources throughout the week.  I’ll even go a step further than the old Delicious.com auto posts and actually provide some context to the links!  And they won’t be posted daily, so you’ll probably have seen and read every single one already, but hey, who knows…

Friday:  Lesson Learned

Finally, I’ll look back on the week and talk about a lesson I’ve learned, with a particular emphasis on my self-employed lifestyle and running my business.   But I reserve the right to make it lessons I’ve learned in just about everything.

So that’s that.  For now.

It takes remarkable ego to write a blog at all.  My ego’s going to have to grow a little bit to manage 5 days a week of hopefully scintillating content.  But with a little fertilizing in the form of feedback from my friends and complete strangers who clicked through from a Google search for “Yogi Bear foot fetish”, I think my ego will grow and grow until it wins 1st prize at the County Fair.

So here we grow!

Since my days of proto-writerhood, about 8 years ago, I’ve discovered that writer’s block is real enough, and not only that, it comes from a variety of causes. Because writing is a damned boring thing to talk about literally, I’m going to flog this naval metaphor as I explore the forms of block I have encountered in my years at sea.  (The irony of me relying on this—me, the kid who didn’t see the ocean for the first time until he was 19—is not lost.)

No wind

The most common block to my writing is a lack of wind in my sails.  The driving force behind my work goes away, and leaves me in the Sargasso Sea of the blank page.  Why does the wind abandon me?  Why does the wind do anything?  The factors are too complex to pick apart.   The wind of my inspiration can come from a lot of different places, mostly deep internal aspects of my self that I don’t really feel comfortable examining too closely.  It feels like fragile machinery that would be too easy to disturb when it’s working right, and when it’s not, I never want to risk tinkering for fear of breaking something completely.

When faced with a lack of inspiration, I shut down almost entirely as a writer.  I sit in mySargasso Sea and pass the time as best I can.  Read, watch TV. Sometimes, I draw.

When I’m clever, I remember the goddamned boat has oars, and I heave to as best I can.

Right now, I can’t even find where I put the oars, but that’s another story entirely.

Wrecked on the rocks

Oops, steered this one wrong.  Now I’m stuck in the muck, marooned on the rocks.  I write myself into a corner often, especially when I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m headed—when I’m writing for the fun of the journey and not the destination.

The best way for me to avoid this is to know where I’m going ahead of time.  For a while there, after conceiving of a story, the very next thing I attempted to do was envision the point or the finale.  What would it build to?  With that in mind, I could set sail.  And if I saw a better destination along the way, there was no reason I couldn’t change course!  My plans or outlines are never set in stone.  They’re there just to keep me from the rocks.

There’s a leak

Sometimes you set sail with a story made of little more than a vague idea and a half-sketched out character concept.  And it isn’t until you’re in deep waters that you discover your initial concept is full of holes (made by the wormrot of the implausibilitus, inconsistentia, or been-there-done-that-allia species).  Now you find yourself sinking, maybe bailing for your life with a little hand waving, but the boat’s taking on the waters of disbelief and some of your passengers aren’t going to see the journey to the end.  “No thanks,” they say as they dive off and swim back to shore. “We’ll take the next one.”

I scuttle a lot of story boats this way deliberately.  The initial rush of an idea, those hard fast winds that come early; too often, I would set sail immediately without any planning at all, buoyed by the excitement of the freshness of it in my mind.   More often than not, when I discover the flaws in my half-assed idea, I would sink the whole thing and move on.  I’ve probably abandoned five times as many story ideas as I’ve ever finished.  I was a strong swimmer in those days, but now I would just as soon arrive in a leaky boat and start work on patching.

I try to never patch-edit while I’m working on the first draft. That’s a sure fire way to end up completely bogged down.

Listening to the Crew

When things aren’t going well, the crew, made up of internal-editors, voices of self-doubt, and so on, they tend to get rowdy.  Sometimes, even when things are going well, they’re a noisy bunch, and it’s tempting to give in and listen to the nasty bunch of swine.

If I had my way, I’d make them all walk to plank at the start of a voyage, but they’re not completely worthless.  Best to gag them, tie them up, and throw them into the hull until you’re done with your maiden voyage, I say.

NOT Listening to the 1^st Mate

My friend Jay Lake calls his subconscious Bob, but I tend to call my subconcious “Potatohead,” because he’s really not too bright.  Sure, he’s creative and all, but he doesn’t have any concept of the realities of being a human being.  Impractical, is what I’m saying.

But when it comes to sailing, Commander Potatohead was born into a life at sea.  He may not know how to balance a checkbook or even earn a decent living, but the bastard knows how to sail better than I ever will.

I don’t always give him his due.  Me, Captain Ego, I want to be right all the time, want to be in charge.  I don’t like listening to the seasoned advice of Mr. Potatohead who really knows these waters better than anyone.  When you fail to listen,  you often end up  with a mutiny on your hands, marooned, or stuck in a Sargasso Sea.  Again.

That’s not even taking into consideration the difficulty of communication! While I speak the Queen’s English, Commander Potatohead speaks some patois that I’ve never even heard of before.  I’m pretty sure he originates from somewhere in Polynesia—some obscure island nobody has ever heard of.  So we can’t really talk.  We resort to drawing vague pictures, gesturing wildly in some ridiculous game of conscious/subconscious Charades.  And worse, we don’t keep the same sleep schedules, so we have to leave messages for one another on scraps of paper, rope, whatever we can find.

Frankly, it’s amazing we have ever completed a voyage together at all.

* * *

But we have. And I’ll be damned if I am going to let any of these things get in my way to completing my journeys in the future.  I don’t care if I make it to the other side leaking like a sieve, tied up and held hostage by the crew,  being slowly inched over the edge by a Commander Potatohead wearing an eye-patch—I’m going to make it.

When I look at creative block in the abstract, it’s much more intimidating.  Abstract concepts aren’t easily defeated, but when I concretize the idea into a giant tuber wearing an eye-patch, it suddenly seems so much easier to overcome.

Maybe that will work for you too.  Yarr.

That’s not what I want to talk to you about today.

What I want to talk about is the personal lesson that I have learned from my first year of running a web design business and being personally responsible for my own income. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy peace of mind.

Let’s start with the olden days.

The Way Things Were

Sarah and I graduated from college with an unbelievably large amount of loans, and I brought to our marriage a not insubstantial sum of credit card debt. We made decent money out of college, and when I think about the rent we were paying, I cry. $400 a month for a 2 bedroom! I can’t get than for less than 3 times that now.

But we never saved, and our expenses seemed to grow to match our income every time. Slight raise, oops, need a new car. Credit card debt growing out of control–let’s consolidate all that into a home equity loan and do some house repairs while we’re at it. We spent a lot of money, we borrowed a lot, but we never saved, and if the Wall Street Journal is right, nobody else did either.

The problem with this lifestyle was that we only ever had just enough. We were the definition of living from paycheck to paycheck, even though we were doing fine. We had no way of budgeting to deal with emergency expenses, however. A broken down car would nearly result in me having a nervous breakdown. Somehow, we’d scrape up the money every time, but I’d be profoundly happy about the entire thing, sometimes for days or even weeks.

I was terrified of losing what I had. Afraid that we would end up bankrupt and by all rights, we probably should have. I’d seen my father weather bankruptcy as a kid, and in my mind it was basically flunking adulthood. It kept me up at nights sometimes, and I developed panic attacks now and then.

I’m skipping over a bunch of stuff, but eventually we moved to Fort Collins from Wyoming and went back to renting after being home owners. Selling our house cleared out a lot of our debt, but not all of it. We still weren’t saving much, but we had put a few thousand away from the sale of our home. If felt kind of good.

CUT TO The Econopocalypse

After a couple of years of working in Fort Collins, continuing to live paycheck to paycheck, slowly growing to hate the world of cubicles and office meetings, I was laid off suddenly and unexpectedly. It was a curious thing, being laid off. Everyone around me was in tears about it. They had poured part of their life into the company. I was still the new guy. I tried, but I couldn’t hide the grin on my face. I felt bad about being happy, but I was.

Getting laid off felt great, felt like suddenly I had been handed possession of my own soul again. It felt like someone opening the door of a cage and luring me out with a bloody flank steak (in the form of a small severance package). I took it and ran, gnawing along the way.

We tried to be responsible. We made drastic cost-cutting measures. I began looking for a job, and to make the time pass more easily, I took on some freelance web/design projects, mostly for people I knew. I felt… good. Because thanks to my severance, I had a bit of a savings. I had a fallback, a safety net.

At the end of that summer, I got offered a seemingly great job; work from home, great benefits, doing some interesting work, and so I took it, and sidelined freelancing. It seemed like freelancing without the risk. All the while, the economy was totally tanking, but I wasn’t paying attention.

That job turned out to be more stressful than every other one before it. I worked hard, worked fast, and I did whatever I could to earn my pay and keep the job. Because now I had this fear of being let go, because I was dependent again upon the whims of the company. I was paranoid. We started to put a little away. Just in case.

Six months later, I was out of work again, but this time, I wasn’t grinning. While I wasn’t the first to be let go, and as soon as others had been, we had drastically cut our expenses again. We got rid of everything we could, and negotiated payment plans for some student loans for a while. And we socked away all the excess in savings. The severance was a pittance, especially compared to the last. And now the news was full of terrible things about a possible global economic collapse.

I was scared shitless it was all going to come down on our heads now. But that sense of freedom had come back, and the weight of a lot of stress evaporated upon its arrival. I was scared, but I felt good at the same time. But I thought I needed that safety net of a “reliable” job.

I applied for work frantically. Early on, I landed an interview with a company down near boulder. The job struck me as the kind of utterly boring, soul-crushing kind of thing that had slowly driven me mad in Laramie. so I had fun and played the interview completely honestly. Oh man. Don’t ever do that.

I wasn’t admitting it to myself then, but I didn’t want another job that could be ripped out from underneath me. I was living on a combination of freelance and unemployment at this point. Unemployment just barely got us by, and every freelance dollar I took just reduced that, so I was mostly just treading water. But I was dividing my time between freelance and searching for work.

I spent almost six months getting by on freelancing before it finally sunk in that I was happier than I had been in a long time. I gave up the job search, even turned down some job offers around the same time. I was seriously considering this… this uncertain world, to not be just some place I was visiting between jobs, but a place where I would settle permanently, and make my own way.

Our savings began to grow even faster because my attitude towards money had changed. Money is great to spend now, but it’s even better later should you not have a job lined up. Also, because I had to start paying my own self-employment taxes and I had no idea what they would be, I started socking everything into savings that wasn’t what we needed to get through a month.

By the end of that year, we had more in savings than we had ever had in our lives. I was still frightened, but the work was coming in, and if it stopped, our lives would not end. Everything would be alright.

CUT TO Today

My business is growing well! I have amazing clients, and new ones lining up. We’re finally moving into a slightly larger, slightly less slummy rental, even if it’s a bit more expensive. I recently had to transfer a bunch of money over from savings to cover some of the costs of it, and I’m also fronting some money to family in hard times. It was a lot of money to move over from savings to checking at one time.

The old fear came back. That deep, gnawing fear that I almost hadn’t noticed. The voice whispering “you will be living in a card board box under a bridge inside of six months.” It doesn’t carry the same weight as it did before, but it definitely makes me uneasy and disturbs my peace.

This is when I realized, money unspent was buying me peace of mind, and not only that, but I have a threshold level. If I have a certain amount in the bank, and a certain amount of work lined up, I’m not thinking about money much at all. I have my peace.

I’ve basically turned my savings account into a video game, and I’m constantly trying to get it to a new high score. Running my own business, I can make as much or as little as I want. I’m not tied to some flat payment schedule. If I want to book six projects in a month and work really hard, I can, and sometimes, I do. Sometimes, the work isn’t there, and that’s okay, because I have a buffer against such things. Feast and famine is something they teach new freelancers, but honestly, they should have taught the concept to everyone who receives a so-called steady, “reliable” paycheck too. Or maybe I just should have paid more attention that that ant/grasshopper parable from the olden times.

My business is the most reliable source of work I’ve ever had, thus far. I don’t think I want to go back to that other world ever again. They claim it’s reliable, but they can fire you at any time. At least as a business owner myself, I know when hard times are coming, and I have the power to try and fix it. There was nothing I could have done to stop myself from being laid off and I think that’s why it hits some people so hard. It’s that feeling of powerlessness, knowing that there’s nothing you can do. But it was that fact that I could say, “it’s not my fault” that gave me the confidence to go forward with my life afterward. I won’t lie–being laid off the second time hit my self-esteem pretty hard. But it’s bounced back sure enough.

I think about time and money so differently now. That’s a good and bad thing, but mostly good. And I owe that change to starting my own company and taking my destiny completely into my own hands. If you’re a freelancer or an independent worker or whatever we’re calling ourselves today, or even if you’re not, my advice to you is, figure out your threshold for basic peace of mind and make that your first goal financially.

Once you have that, you can take on so much more than before. At least in my case, I felt like I got a good chunk of my brain back that was always worried about money before. Always anticipating that next emergency expense. Now, I grumble, but they don’t cause me to go apeshit when they happen.

If nothing else, my wife heartily approves.

Who is an artist? (the ingrained notions)

Here’s what I grew up thinking of artists–not actively thinking or deliberately deciding to believe, but just absorbing in Kansas/Midwestern culture.

Artists are people who do not have real jobs.  They are as likely to spend their time drinking absinthe, doing drugs, and sleeping around as they are to do anything honest and deserving of compensation.  Artists do not contribute to the growth and welfare of society in meaningful ways.  They are probably not very smart, because if they were smart, they would have gone into a profession like engineering or medicine where they could actually do some good and make real money to support their families.  Artists, above all else, are irresponsible, childish, and poor.  POOR!

Conversely, artists are talented (even if that talent isn’t valued very highly).  They can draw anything they can imagine effortlessly.  Their imaginations are superior to almost anyone elses’s.  They speak a secret language of color and form, and really, if you want to rearrange your living room and get some new curtains, an artist would not be a bad person to ask.  They’ll probably help for beer money.

Why I am not an Artist (the rationalizations)

I’m creative, sure.  I do a bit of writing, but writing isn’t art, because art is visual, and writing is language.   And yes, I know how to operate a camera, but artwork should convey emotions, tell a story, and my photography doesn’t convey any such thing.  Anyone can pick up a camera and point it at something.  Anyone can take enough shots, throwing out the bad, to make themselves look like a moderately decent photographer.

I’m a web designer, but design is not art.  Design is communication, and it has strict rules (rules that I struggle every day to learn and understand better).   And anyway, I primarily excel at writing code and solving technical problems, less so than making things beautiful and artistic.

Despite my ingrained beliefs about artists as professionals, I grew up secretly wishing I could be some kind of science artist, but I  wouldn’t ever really because I wanted to contribute and make money. And finally, for some reason, I cannot ever be an artist because I cannot draw anything that I picture in my head.

Why I am an Artist (the realization)

First of all, most of the bullshit I grew up believing about artists is just that–bullshit.  Artists are as intelligent as anyone else, if not more so,as responsible, and they are no more likely to drink heavily and do drugs than anyone else.  They contribute to society in less quantifiable ways than say, an engineer, but they act in a way as society’s conscience, as it’s outlet.  As a means of self-reflection.  Artists play a role, and while I don’t quite understand that role, I know they have one and it’s deeply important.  Being an artist is a real job, and has all the baggage that jobs have.  It’s also really, really hard to make a living at.

Being any good does not determine whether one is an artist or not.  And art encompasses many more skills than just drawing.   My photography may be something anyone can do, but every once and a while I make something nobody else  but me could make.  I’m actively trying to sell prints of my work actively, so I guess that right there makes me an artist in the same way that actively pursuing publication made me a writer.

Design may or may not be art, but I’m a working creative individual.  Sometimes, what I create is art.  Sometimes, it’s crap.  Well, more often than not.  But I share more in common with working illustrators and painters now than I do with my friends who spend their days slicing DNA in laboratories.

So, yeah.  I am an artist.  Whatever that means–I’m still learning. It’s not all that I am, but I’m done not calling myself that just because I can’t draw and I grew up believing some kind of dumb things about who writers are.  My life is centered around creative acts of one form or another, so.  There it is.

Have any of you ever resisted labeling yourself like that, for similar mixtures of reasons?  I’m curious to know if this is difficult just for me, or if it is for others.

PS:  I keep trying to fix that drawing thing.  I’ve been stuck in the first couple of chapters of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” for a couple of years.  Maybe this year will be the one that I finally get past the weird tracing stuff and start learning how to stop myself from drawing on the left side of the brain.

I was not set up this year to pay estimated taxes because I had not intended when I started out to be freelancing for the entire year.  I spent half the year looking for a job before finally giving up on that and settling into being a full time freelance designer.  I’ve done alright for myself in those last 6 months.  But I’m looking at my savings and knowing that a considerable chunk of it is owed in taxes.  How much exactly is what I would like to know.  I don’t even begin to understand how the tax system truly works.

That’s all a long way of getting around to saying, I file early every year.  As soon as I have the paperwork.  I almost never fail to have my taxes done by the second week of February.  This year, I’m not sure what to do, because of a bunch of 1099 forms from my clients are slow to arrive.  Several have not even been sent yet, despite the fact that the government requires that 1099s be mailed no later than January 31st.  Now, I have very detailed records of my income thanks to using fantastic invoicing software.   I  don’t need the 1099s to know what I made.  But I think the government expects me to send them in.

Any tax experts out there know what the requirements are regarding 1099s that are so damned slow in arriving?  If I report the income myself, does it matter if I don’t send a 1099 that didn’t come in time?

Ugh.  It’s enough to give me an ulcer.  You know, it’s not like freelancers don’t have enough to worry about.  The complete lack of income security is plenty!

I can’t say that I’m happy about it.  But I’m coming to terms with it.

At this point in my life, birthdays for me are a reminder of my mortality.  They ceased being about gifts when I was in my teens.  For a while in my college years, I thought my birthday was bad luck due to a string of nasty events around my birthday, so I went out of my way to hide it from friends well into my late 20s.  I’m past that nonsense, but I still grow melancholy.

I wanted to do so much more with my life than I have.  It feels as if I have squandered the last ten years, even though I know this is not so.  I have some wonderful things to show for my time.  Nothing of serious consequence in the greater world, but… I am content with this.

It’s time that instead of doing things to impress other people and draw attention to myself out of some misguided sense that it would be a way of achieving a kind of immortality, I have instead determined that I will attempt to dedicate my remaining time towards living a life that I can look back on without regret.  As my old boss used to say, each day is a gift, and it is up to us how we use them. I have long squandered them on things that I will not remember when my time comes to pass.

So today, in an attempt to live each day more fully, to connect more with the passage of time and develop more of a sense of being here in the now, I am launching my 365 day photography project.   I am taking and selecting one photograph each day for the next year. There’s nothing original about it.  Many people have done these before, but I have not.   I  At times, I will experiment with new techniques. Sometimes, I will probably not be able to get out of bed, and so I will be forced to find some interesting way of capturing the ceiling of my bedroom.

If you all, the audience, serves a purpose in this project, it is to keep me honest.  I find that when you do something like this out in the open, you feel more dedicated to the task.  I let myself down often enough, but it’s a motivator to avoid letting others down. Ultimately, however,  this is a project I do for myself.  You’re welcome to take pleasure from the project, and I hope you do. But I’m doing this for so many more reasons than usual.

The 365 project can be found here. You can follow it on twitter here.

So that’s my primary goal right now, on the road to turning 33.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m planning another redesign of this site to showcase what I’ve learned lately. I’m growing in leaps and bounds as a designer, I think, but I’m also experimenting with some weird ideas too. Just don’t be shocked if you come to visit here in a few weeks and nothing looks the same…

One gripe to end things out for today– this coffee shop has tables that are too high for their chairs to type comfortably and the chairs are not that comfortable either. But they used to provide pillows to elevate you to a more comfortable typing position. I come in today, and they have none–they’ve gotten rid of them. Which I think marks this as the end of my time working and drinking here. I’m not going to give myself carpal tunnel just because I like the ambiance. Starry Night is at least a comfortable place to sit.