Looking ahead.

So far this has been an incred­i­ble year. After get­ting my full-time gig at Com­cast, I’ve been very excit­ed and ambi­tious about what my job can mean to me. In just a few short months I’ve been able to do things I nev­er thought I’d be doing as a job, like cov­er­ing SXSW for work [wait ’til you seen me On Demand] and get­ting things like Radio­head­’s New Year’s Eve con­cert for the site. It’s hard to know what’s next, but in a way I nev­er have before, I’m real­ly think­ing about how to make my job inter­est­ing to my audi­ence and myself.

Shock­ing­ly, this was all brought about by work­ing with Chris Wein­garten and Bran­don Sto­suy on Paper Thin Walls in its for­ma­tive stages about a year ago. It all began when I first learned about the site, and like a lot of strug­gling crit­ics, con­tact­ed Chris about con­tribut­ing. Before I knew it, I was fact-check­ing sub­mis­sions for ’06’s year-end mix­tape and sub­mit­ting bull­horns for their hilar­i­ous news­feed. I did a lit­tle research for a PLUG Awards sketch and sud­den­ly found myself being pulled into Comcast.net for my work at PTW.

2007 was pret­ty great too, con­sid­er­ing I got hired in April as a free­lancer and start­ed full­time in Sep­tem­ber. On the oth­er hand, 2007 brought trag­ic news, as my father broke his hip in a fall and was lat­er diag­nosed with late stage Parkin­son’s dis­ease. This has been a learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me, and has for­tu­nate­ly helped me have a clos­er rela­tion­ship with my dad, some­thing I nev­er expect­ed would hap­pen after suf­fer­ing some pret­ty seri­ous set­backs ear­li­er in the year.

But this is a new year, and I’m look­ing for­ward to Black­mail Is My Life being an out­let for me, free of the pulpy, blur­by copy I write day in and day out. That’s fun, but not quite as reward­ing as chew­ing up cul­tur­al arti­facts and digest­ing them in longer form. I’m real­iz­ing now how self-indul­gent this is; as blogs declared their mas­tery over web mag­a­zines, there was a fun­da­men­tal shift in the way read­ers snuck a lit­tle time to ‘dis­cov­er’ music, movies, books or any­thing on the web. In spite of that, I’m going to be bet­ter about writ­ing here this year and real­ly try to com­mit. I’m not alone in mak­ing these res­o­lu­tions, and it’ll be tough to keep, but I’m going to give it a shot.