The simple fact is that I can’t keep doing this. I am completely burned out. It isn’t just that I don’t like what I do. I could handle that. We all have to do things we don’t enjoy from time to time. The real problem is that I don’t like who I am when I do the job I do. I don’t like what I become and, in all honesty, it is killing me. I spent two days away. Just two. Now yeah, I still did work but I took it easy. I concentrated on getting better not on the job I had to do.

In two days, I started to recover mentally and physically. I worked out this morning. I read a bit this afternoon. I actually laughed. I wrote. I smiled. I even cuddled my wife. I was, in short, me.

I like me. I like the me that is focused on words and stories and the people who tell them instead of machines and corporations and the people who run them. That me is the healthy me.

When I went back to college it wasn’t because I wanted a new job or some high paying career. I went back to find a person I left behind a long time ago. A person I was sure was gone and buried.

I found him. I am sure as hell not giving him up now.

So I applied to a Masters Program up North. I am ending this career and moving on. I am sure it won’t be easy. I may have even have to suffer some serious consequences to do it.

I was about to say that I have no choice, but I do have a choice.

I choose this.

There are places I am okay dying. I am okay dying right here at this computer in the middle of typing. I am okay dying in my sleep, at sea, in the jungles of Tahiti, in some massive car wreck, even in a hospital bed surrounded by the people who love me. All of those are acceptable places to die. I will not, nay cannot, die in the middle of a grey cubicle corporate wasteland.

So, I packed up and I left. I drove my chubby little behind to the nearest Urgent Care and I sat there until a series of very nice doctors and nurses took care of me.

I felt like I was eight all over again.

That was the year I had an asthma attack at a KoA Campground in Montana. We were supposed to sleep in a Teepee, but I woke in the middle of the night unable to breathe. My mom didn’t have any money so she took me to the onsite laundry because the humidity sometime helped to loosen my airways. It worked and I lived, but I remember that pressure, that lightness in my head mixed with the throbbing.

This time, they gave me a cool tricked out breathing tube with a foul tasting meds that kicked my heart up another 15 beats a minute or so but let me breathe a little better. They loaded me up with my prescriptions and sent me home. I am a good little droogie, though. I went back to work first and updated my boss and moved my cases around. I am working from home tomorrow but I am still working.

It sucks that I hate what I do so much because he is probably the best manager I have ever had. I so wish we were doing something else because, if I loved this job, I would be in absolute heaven. Instead, life is barely tolerable and it continues to take a toll. As it is, Courtney is sure that the job is killing me and I am only half-convinced she is crazy. I know that my health has been in free-fall ever since I went back into this industry and that is a bad thing.

Now, I just need a realistic way out. Before it really is too late.

This is the path to misery. We see suffering and hurt, and we don’t fight. We accept it as a part of the status quo. We rationalize pain, poverty, and loss. We cease to struggle or care. It is okay to be meaningless and empty. We all are. At least there is food on the table. We believe that the only importance is the job, the position and the money. We spend our lives in pursuit of that. Education ceases to be about learning something new, becoming a better person and a more involved citizen and; instead, it becomes a chase to a better position. Art is about profit margins and creating with a buying audience in mind. Now, we even shape our existence to fit that lie. We sell ourselves. We cultivate our online presences. We build our custom profiles. We share a thousand items a day just so that we can make sure not to share anything real. What a shame it would be if some truth actually made up there.

Unfortunately, I still had to rely on those completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart (CAPTCHAs) for my contact forms or risk the occasional flood of spam email. It was a devils bargain of sorts. I could make communication more difficult or I could deal with a spam sent from my own site. Neither option was preferred.

Enter the newest version of WordPress’s Jetpack plugin which now includes a nifty, new and highly customizable form tool that actually funnels the messages through Akismet and integrates the emails directly with the WordPress dashboard under the Feedbacks tab.

Simply put, it is an incredible addition. I loved what Contact Forms was doing, but the Akismet integration alone is enough to get me to switch. The flexibility and functionality have been truly impressive so far. I can’t wait to test some more complex examples.

Oh you can find Jetpack and all its neat little toys here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jetpack/.

This isn’t about the distance between a mother and a son, though. This is about the things that keep us going. My mom has a dream. It is a dream that drives her every day. It is the reason she gets up every morning in a little cabin in the middle of the woods and feeds far too many horses on a budget that barely covers her rent. She wants to run a horse camp for troubled and needy children. Now for her, this involves religious outreach which tends to temper how involved I get. I still do what I can, though. I take care of her brochures. I write her an action plan and design her website.

It is the least I can do from my nice and comfy apartment in the middle of the city.

My mom, she lives hard. She told me that this evening. She lives hard and she is starting to feel it. She’s not as young as she once was and the mornings are still cold and the buckets of water and feed weigh more every day. Still, she stands up and she goes. She lives hard, but she lives with meaning.

She lives to help.

We may never be able to see eye-to-eye but I certainly hope I can live a life just as focused.

The result is a whole bunch of empty time and space where nothing is going on which, in turn, makes the blog look dead. I hate that even more, so I decided to do something about it. WordPress has a lot of tools to help prevent these issues and I can always code what they don’t have. If I want to keep blogging (and I do) then I am going to have to make WordPress work for me not vice versa.

I love this theme and the work that pnts has done on it, but it needs an update especially for WordPress 3.3.1 functionality and mobile users. It needs better gallery and image handling and I have a couple ideas there as well. I also need to start really developing a way to present work online. No, I will never post everything here but I have an idea I want to play with and this is where I do that. I already have a child theme working but I am going to start with the base and rebuild a lot of it from scratch.

For readers, not a lot will change except that I will be posting again. You may notice a few small details here or there that are being updated and the site may look funky for a little bit. Please let me know if you have any usability issues. I will, of course, let everyone know how the rebuild is going as it continues.

Okay, that’s enough with the boring news.

Let’s get back to exploring the Arts, Literature, and Technology.

I strongly believe that higher education should be available to anyone who wants it. By education, I am referring to individual classes as well as whole programs. I think a lot of people have an intellectual curiosity but the current college design does not allow them to easily explore their curiosities without a degree or plan in mind. I believe we should foster this curiosity. It should be welcomed and celebrated.

I do take issue with driving young people into college when they have no real desire to go and even less idea what they really want to do. It is a perfect recipe for elevated debt and failure. I also worry that it poisons the very intellectual curiosity I would like to see nourished.

I grow more and more incensed every time I read about the how stupid it is for a student to major in English or History or Anthropology because, “they’ll never get a job in that.”

Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of people in those majors who don’t belong there and they are in trouble. Even worse, there are a whole lot more who don’t belong in college at all. Instead, they are stuck because they were told that college is the only choice after high school and they believed it. It isn’t. In fact, I would I would go as far as saying that unless you have a very clear idea of what you want to do and how college will help you achieve that goal, attending college is probably always a mistake.

I went to college to connect and learn from authors and researchers in my chosen field. I did not go to college to get a job. No one puts up a help wanted ad for what I do. I study literature and technology. My research as well as my fiction and nonfiction work tends to center on the craft of writing, literature, and technology. When I chose to make this my life’s work (and I have) I knew it was going to be a challenge. I accepted the risks and I am working incredibly hard to make it a reality for me.

Four and a half years later, I am still working at it. I have a spent a lot of money and a lot of time and I expect to spend a lot more. In fact, I will be back in college this fall to continue pursuing that research. Sure, I am not always happy with how things go, but I regret nothing. I love the discovering this field and possible avenues of research. When it comes to writing, I love watching my voice evolve and I love encouraging others to find their voice. The community of writers is a small one and I am still so very new. I have been honored to work with the people who have taught me and I hope to someday be as much of an inspiration to other aspiring students. In short, I know where I want to be and I am working towards it with all due haste.

If all I wanted was a job. I never would have done any of this. I had a job. By all accounts, I had a very good job in a solid technical field. The money was nice, but I wasn’t happy. I didn’t enjoy my work at all. Some will tell you that it doesn’t matter. They will say that money is more important and no one actually likes their work. We should just buckle down, do our jobs, and drink the problems away. I know a lot of those people. They are all over the tech industry and they are, indeed, miserable. They taught me that I would rather be dirt poor for the rest of my life than spend eight hours of every day doing something I don’t want to do.

I am the exception, though. Most people go to college and then enter the workforce. They want a nice job, a house, and all the other accoutrements of a traditional “happy life.” College is not the place for them and that’s okay. In fact, it is a good thing. I can guarantee that an in-depth study of Freud and the uncanny in 18th and 19th century American literature is not going to help them in their office staff meeting. For them to take that class, instead of pursuing job focused training is to make a several thousand dollar mistake. Yet, that is what happens every day in our current system.

Students who truly want to study the liberal arts are not the problem. They are critical to our culture and our understanding of our place in the world. Their research into who and what we were, are, and will become is just as important as any scientific or engineering marvel.

The problem is a system built on driving students into costly four year degree programs purely because “they have to” rather than encouraging and pushing vocational and apprenticeship opportunities. It is a system that improperly looks down on those without four years degrees and pushes people away from rewarding and important jobs in all sectors of our economy and society. This not only hurts people for whom college is not a great fit, it also drives up the costs of education for everyone resulting in catastrophic ballooning loan debt.
That is where the real problem is. Resolve that and the rest will follow in line.

Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? I gave hundreds of speeches before I got paid to write one. I’ve written more than 4000 blog posts for free.

Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word–over.

A few brief points:

Poets get paid and should get paid.

Yes, it is true that most poets supplement their pay through teaching and other artistic endeavors but published poets do get paid for their work. Poetry is one of those cool, extraordinarily broad genres that cross over easily into other areas so it does tend to take on more forms than writing alone. To assume that poets write poetry for free is silly, though.

We’ve always had amateurs.

Just ask any slush pile reader or look at the early Broadside ballads. Amateurs have been around for a long time and the Internet didn’t really change that. I keep hearing that the future is filled with amateurs and all I can assume is that the word amateur must mean something different than it used to. Yes, it is easier to publish now. That just makes it easier to for your work to remain undiscovered.

Merely posting your work on the Internet is a meaningless act. Even posting to Youtube or Smashwords doesn’t really gain you much. Did you see Google’s ad about Youtube? Your 15 minute homemade movie is about as likely to be seen as I am to win the lottery.

That said, I do think making the slush pile public does have its advantages. It allows a check on editorial oversight where the truly talented can be discovered. That doesn’t mean the amateurs rule the day. It just means that they have to do what every professional has to do to actually make it: work.

What we’re talking about is stock business models

Yes, certain forms of publishing business models are going to lose out. As someone who freelances occasionally, I’ve seen the market. If you want to write filler content, you’re going to go broke. Viewing writing as a lottery will also probably decline as the era of huge advances is on its way out. That doesn’t really change a thing, though. Already, new business models are springing up. That’s exciting. It certainly doesn’t mean that future writers won’t get paid to write, though. It may mean that formats change (and I am sure they will) but the world still needs good writers and it will reward them.

It all boils down to this: “the truly talented and persistent will make a great living.”

In other words, nothing has really changed.

*See Margaret Atwood’s speech for the cheese sandwich reference

Let’s start with politics. After all, this is an election year.

Of course, isn’t every year?

Ah, that may be true but this year is a Presidential election year. It’s like the Olympics of pandering and spin where my television oozes with mock nationalism, pointless promises, and endless commentary on absolutely nothing.

Oh boy, I just love how this country handles its elections.

So. Rush. When I was a stupid brainwashed kid still sipping the koolaid of my mother’s particular brand of fundamentalism, I actually listened to this echo chamber of an individual. Luckily, I also read books on the “unapproved list” and actually thought that education was superior to blind indoctrination. Imagine my surprise when I followed those beliefs in the really real world where Rush and and his disturbed little fantasies don’t hold much water. Let’s just say I had a quick, brutal, and so-absolutely-needed awakening.

Anyway, this isn’t a blog about politics per se and I don’t ever care to make that a cornerstone on which to speak. Rather, I find it fascinating that the all of the chaos here came from one word. One, silly little four letter word.

Do you want to know why I love language and words? Do you want to understand how important they are? Pay attention. Words mean things. In fact, one word can say a hell of a lot. I know we love to pretend they don’t especially in a Presidential election year, but they do. They have effect and power. They tell a story and they reflect on both the author and the subject alike. With one word, Rush told us exactly who and what he was. He revealed himself and even more troublesome he revealed the mindset of those who think like him. One word told a story that no picture could capture and no amount of spin could silence.

Oh, it will blow over. These things always do. Let’s face it, we have the combined attention span of a hummingbird and Super Tuesday is already sweeping in. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of drivel that we wade through. It’s even easier to lose focus on why words still matter when so often they are merely used as filler and fodder. It takes moments like this to remind us that words can still do one of the most powerful things in the world. They can reveal a small portion of truth even if the person speaking them would rather they didn’t.