Not quite dead yet

I’ve been feeling the pull, so here I am.

About a year and a half ago, I finished grad school in a fit and fury. My family and I got on with the business of getting back to a normal semblance of life. And just like any recovering grad school workaholic trying to strike a balance would do, I joined a consulting firm and moved my family across the country to Boston. Now, to be fair, my company has exceeded every expectation I had going in (more on that later). Boston has been a revelation. We survived our first real winter. So many firsts.

But a consequence of all these firsts has been a lack of interest in anything involving a computer outside of work. My evenings have been filled with being with my family, getting up to speed in a stretching work environment, making new friends, forging hobbies, and you get the picture.

But I’ve been missing this outlet. I saw a friend on a trip to DC a few months back and he asked me, “What happened to Only A Model¹?” His words hit something in me and I remembered how much I used to love this.

This blog has seen me through a lot – good times, tough times, in-between times. From almost quitting grad school to defending. From programming hacks to struggling through answers about my faith. This is probably over the top, but it feels like a part of me. I’ll never forget the early days of blogging when all my friends wrote frequently, commented on each other’s stuff, and we generally felt like we were decoding and discovering the world. I’m a hundred times more nostalgic about this than I should be, but that’s blogging as I remember it.

Even though I can’t convince half of those old friends to pick up the pen again, at least I can.

Programming Notes

Honestly I’m not sure what I’m going to write about. Probably similar topics and themes, but different voice. I can tell you that I used to think about this site in terms of focusing on a niche, building a platform, even thinking that one day I might make some money from writing. I used to think I had a lot of great advice to give. Now I don’t.

But I still ruminate on things and can’t help but think that, one day, it’d be nice to be able to look back and see how far I’ve (hopefully) come. Now, that type of thinking doesn’t have to happen publicly. But on the other hand, what if we all thought out loud more, put ourselves out there more, shared our mistakes and lessons learned, and generally turned the realness up a notch?

That could land somewhere pretty great on the whole.

One post at a time, we’ll see where it leads.

Archives

Before I ever started this blog, I kept a pseudonymous blog where I struggled through topics around my faith. That period involved my deconstruction of institutional Christianity and my explorations into simple, off-the-grid pursuit of Christian community that was a lot more real and authentic than anything I’d experienced before.

Those posts disappeared from the ether and landed in a Wordpress export file buried deep on my hard drive. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to bring those posts into this blog now, for anybody who might look for those thoughts. You can find those posts toward the bottom of the archives.

There’s a lot in that material that’s kind of embarrassing to look back on. But I should hope that in in another eight years I feel a tinge of embarrassment over what I’m writing today. It’s one way you know you are growing.

Also, just because I’m archiving that content here doesn’t mean I’m going to start writing about spiritual matters regularly. But I might, occasionally.

Current listening: Bon Iver at AIR Studios (give it 5 minutes)