Happy Holidays!
I wanted to give a little update to all of you who’ve been reading my blog posts this fall. I’m going to drink some tea, write a little and listen to Drake’s Take Care. The album brings me back to the beginning of 2012, when I’d drive on I-5 into Sacramento, away from the loneliness of the rice farm where I worked to my unlikely haven, a financial accounting class at Sac City College.
I first started blogging in 2008, the heyday of blogs. I didn’t use social media much at the time, I had a facebook account I hardly ever checked and I didn’t get a smart phone until four years later. Blogging was a hobby, I’d post a few photos, write a paragraph about pupusas one week, or a blurb about The Wire or hiking in the Bay Area. I had fun with it, interacting with random people who stumbled across my blog and checking out their blogs.
My blog morphed into a travel blog in December 2008, when I went to Nicaragua to study Spanish. Then in fall 2011, it became a farm blog. While I was working at Sills farms, writing was my way of coping with the loneliness and drudgery of farm work, but also an exploration of the beauty of the agricultural landscape and the farming life. Farming got really boring that winter: I spent most of my time downloading weather data and throwing sticks into muddy ponds for Roco. Outside of work, I abandoned Occupy Sacramento and I got busy with dating, listening to hip hop and school.I turned 30 that March. I really liked accounting and eventually applied to and was accepted into grad school at UC Davis. That process involved a lot of writing.
So that brings me up to the present. I started blogging recently because I needed to express what I was going through with the move from Sacramento to Olympia and writing is a good medium for that. I wanted to craft some pieces to share with the public, and my blog was the easiest venue for that. I posted weekly for the month of November, but then gradually lost steam. Most of the pieces were retrospective rather than about my current life. That post I wrote about dancing, I didn’t just sit down with a beer and finish after dinner: I spent hours and hours writing that. I love to write, but writing means more time sitting in front of a computer and competes with other activities like exercising, reading, socializing, cooking and throwing the ball for Roco.
Blogging is different now. The way the internet works, random people don’t stumble across my blog anymore. The kind of blog that I’ve always kept, where I write about the experiences important to me at the time, has mostly faded away. I follow only a couple blogs: two weather blogs, a blog about water issues and a Mexican cooking blog. The blogs that work these days keep to a specific theme, or belong to publications or famous people. And that’s all fine by me. I don’t want to write a hiking blog cause I don’t hike enough. Even though I like to eat and don’t want to write about food every week. And I don’t have much interest in keeping a blog about my professional life. I want to write about the differences between using ACL and SQL for data analysis less than you wanna read about this.
Whether I blog or not, I keep writing in my journal, which I’ve done since I was 15. This recent process of making my writing public has sparked my interest in improving as a writer. When I first started posting again on the blog, I had fantasies of being “discovered”, thrust from the sometimes mundane office job life into the life of a self-supporting, independent freelance writer. But after thinking about it, that’s not really what I want right now. I enjoy writing for myself. It’s easy to become absorbed in writing to impress some imagined audience. A lot of what I write I never consider making public: it is too personal or fragmented. I think about a lot of heavy stuff and have a lot of big questions about the world and life. Writing helps me process the ups and downs of life, and this complex, fucked up, beautiful world we live in.
So where do I go from here? I’ve thought about writing a piece and publishing it on medium.com. I’m considering taking a writing class or joining a writing group. And I would love to find a way to incorporate more writing into my job. My writing ability helped me get both the professional jobs I had, and will continue to be one of my important skills. In the meantime, I’m gonna keep checking my WeCroak app, I'm gonna keep reading, and I’m gonna keep writing in my journal. I’m gonna dust off the hip hop moves I learned at Step 1 and dance a little while I wash some dishes. And I'm gonna try a restaurant I found recently called Casa Mixteca on Pacific Hwy South in Lakewood that serves dishes from Southern Mexico. Sounds delicious to me.
So Happy Holidays everyone. Thanks for reading. Keep doing what keeps you sane and brings you joy in the New Year.
I wanted to give a little update to all of you who’ve been reading my blog posts this fall. I’m going to drink some tea, write a little and listen to Drake’s Take Care. The album brings me back to the beginning of 2012, when I’d drive on I-5 into Sacramento, away from the loneliness of the rice farm where I worked to my unlikely haven, a financial accounting class at Sac City College.
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| Winter Wheat at Sills Farms, January 2012 (I disced this field) |
I first started blogging in 2008, the heyday of blogs. I didn’t use social media much at the time, I had a facebook account I hardly ever checked and I didn’t get a smart phone until four years later. Blogging was a hobby, I’d post a few photos, write a paragraph about pupusas one week, or a blurb about The Wire or hiking in the Bay Area. I had fun with it, interacting with random people who stumbled across my blog and checking out their blogs.
 |
| Uncle Marc's Christmas dessert, 2009 |
My blog morphed into a travel blog in December 2008, when I went to Nicaragua to study Spanish. Then in fall 2011, it became a farm blog. While I was working at Sills farms, writing was my way of coping with the loneliness and drudgery of farm work, but also an exploration of the beauty of the agricultural landscape and the farming life. Farming got really boring that winter: I spent most of my time downloading weather data and throwing sticks into muddy ponds for Roco. Outside of work, I abandoned Occupy Sacramento and I got busy with dating, listening to hip hop and school.I turned 30 that March. I really liked accounting and eventually applied to and was accepted into grad school at UC Davis. That process involved a lot of writing.
 |
| Roco, March 2012 |
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| Combines at rest, January 2012 |
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| Sills Farms, January 2012 |
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| Sutter County in the winter |
So that brings me up to the present. I started blogging recently because I needed to express what I was going through with the move from Sacramento to Olympia and writing is a good medium for that. I wanted to craft some pieces to share with the public, and my blog was the easiest venue for that. I posted weekly for the month of November, but then gradually lost steam. Most of the pieces were retrospective rather than about my current life. That post I wrote about dancing, I didn’t just sit down with a beer and finish after dinner: I spent hours and hours writing that. I love to write, but writing means more time sitting in front of a computer and competes with other activities like exercising, reading, socializing, cooking and throwing the ball for Roco.
Blogging is different now. The way the internet works, random people don’t stumble across my blog anymore. The kind of blog that I’ve always kept, where I write about the experiences important to me at the time, has mostly faded away. I follow only a couple blogs: two weather blogs, a blog about water issues and a Mexican cooking blog. The blogs that work these days keep to a specific theme, or belong to publications or famous people. And that’s all fine by me. I don’t want to write a hiking blog cause I don’t hike enough. Even though I like to eat and don’t want to write about food every week. And I don’t have much interest in keeping a blog about my professional life. I want to write about the differences between using ACL and SQL for data analysis less than you wanna read about this.
 |
| Spiders, January 2012 |
Whether I blog or not, I keep writing in my journal, which I’ve done since I was 15. This recent process of making my writing public has sparked my interest in improving as a writer. When I first started posting again on the blog, I had fantasies of being “discovered”, thrust from the sometimes mundane office job life into the life of a self-supporting, independent freelance writer. But after thinking about it, that’s not really what I want right now. I enjoy writing for myself. It’s easy to become absorbed in writing to impress some imagined audience. A lot of what I write I never consider making public: it is too personal or fragmented. I think about a lot of heavy stuff and have a lot of big questions about the world and life. Writing helps me process the ups and downs of life, and this complex, fucked up, beautiful world we live in.
So where do I go from here? I’ve thought about writing a piece and publishing it on medium.com. I’m considering taking a writing class or joining a writing group. And I would love to find a way to incorporate more writing into my job. My writing ability helped me get both the professional jobs I had, and will continue to be one of my important skills. In the meantime, I’m gonna keep checking my WeCroak app, I'm gonna keep reading, and I’m gonna keep writing in my journal. I’m gonna dust off the hip hop moves I learned at Step 1 and dance a little while I wash some dishes. And I'm gonna try a restaurant I found recently called Casa Mixteca on Pacific Hwy South in Lakewood that serves dishes from Southern Mexico. Sounds delicious to me.
So Happy Holidays everyone. Thanks for reading. Keep doing what keeps you sane and brings you joy in the New Year.
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