Hey, I appreciate you're here.
I used to blog personally all the time. Before there was WordPress was MovableType and before that you basically were building your own content management system; otherwise OG vibecoding html pages. It was 2002 and the Internet was still new. By 2005 I started producing content for work and I grew to loathe that all my writing was marketing copy.
Twenty years later, those days are over and I feel a real desire to get back to the kind of sharing I was able to pull off through the three years of the Radio Genius podcast I helmed from 2006-2009.
Here's to starting that journey again. Thanks for joining me :)
Topics:
- Family
- Funemployment
- Sprint Goals
- Stuff to Share
Family
Norrin, my 16yo son, stays with me every other week. I am at least on full-time dad mode when I have him, or when Logan, my 20yo daughter, needs me for anything. When I don't have Norrin, there have been days that go by when I haven't had a single in-person interaction. That gets pretty surreal.
Minor Setbacks was a pitch-perfect murder mystery comedy in the vein of Rian Johnson's Knives Out movies and Poker Face. I can't wait for Norrin's IB program to share the video. I am a super proud dad. Was really impressed with how engaging/entertaining these Junior projects were.
I helped Logan move out of her dorm and back into her mom's place. Since then she started working at a Montessori day-care for a summer job, in addition to picking up emergency shifts at the local fishmonger. While I have Norrin every other week, Logan and her boyfriend, Shamus, come over every Sunday for family dinner.
Funemployment
I was DOGE'd mid-February. It wasn't until the end of April that I began receiving unemployment benefits, let alone SNAP and Medicaid benefits. Between having no job, having no income and no insurance for basics like keeping prescriptions going, it was a painful 10 weeks. Since May 1, I'm back in Portage Park living with my folks (they're doing pretty great!).
I apply for all manner of jobs every day. I customize my resume for some of the applications. I'm applying for instructional design, learning/training management, project management, program management, product management, user experience design, DevOps, Scrum Master... every single job now is looking for roles that accentuate the use of AI, and I've yet to land a single interview in over three months of applying. Could be my age; could be my experiences. It could also be that my skepticism for AI is so intense that it's visible from how I compose my resume.
This is why I'm pretty settled on tapping out of tech for good. Anyone hiring is enamored with AI, and it's all a sham. I'm pretty confident about retraining as a barber and building a business/career in a trade where my success is largely centered on my talent and skills, rather than how well other people sell what I can produce. Barber colleges cost between $10k and $22k. There is (still?) a Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act grant that will cover up to $5k of that tuition, so I've been waiting for my intake meeting scheduled for mid-June to get to the point where I can start going back to school. One program I found would have me complete my 1,000 hours of haircuts in 36 weeks, and that is my ideal scenario.
Meanwhile, it's a lot of filling my time on unemployment. Thankfully, a temporary disc golf course was set up at a park only 15min from Portage Park, so I quickly built a daily biking/disc golf regimen that keeps me busy when the weather doesn't suck. And when it does, there's always Diablo IV.
Sprint Goals
Since announcing that I was quitting LinkedIn, I had a main goal of just getting this first newsletter out within two weeks, and organizing my ideas into goals beyond that.
I am readying a few DJ sets to post or stream live on Mixcloud. Not just pure music, but also spoken word narrative arcs. I currently have a four-episode arc in-mind that will take listeners on a musical journey of my year so-far. Two of those set-lists are ready to roll – I'm working on refining the narrative parts so I don't ramble or meander too much when I take it live.
Over the next two weeks, my goal is to lock in those sets, schedule them so y'all can tune in (or at least download them to listen at your leisure).
Stuff to Share
This guy really gets it.
What burning questions might I answer for you?
