So! I’ve been busy.

My latest and greatest: a self improvement blog by the name of Three New Leaves, where I talk about the three ways my life has changed over the last year. That sounds awfully self-centered, but I’m aiming to provide genuine value, here, and some inspiration gleaned from my own experience. I’ll still be maintaining this blog as the home of my official portfolio, but a majority of my future work will appear on the new site.

So! If you stumble across this site for reasons unknown, please do these things: check my portfolio, consider hiring me, and then just shrug it off and move on to my new home. We might just both benefit if you do.

Grazie!

I touched on this back in November, but the topic warrants another look.

How many times, during an average day, do you come across someone new? Better yet, how many times do you pass a familiar face that you’ve never bothered to strike up a conversation with? Colin Wright calls it civil inattention, and I call it the Public Dilemma – the ability of an incredibly social species to go about their daily routine without exchanging anything more than a smile.

That grin is the first step, sure. But your lips have another purpose beyond unfurling the pearly whites: talking. Italicized because it’s patently obvious, and italicized too because most of us do a poor job of employing it. No coincidence, then, that we can operate in a group setting for months at a time without actually meeting the group.

I had a light bulb moment the other day, though, when I realized that our – or at least my – public shyness reaches far beyond the real world. Those hours I spend glued to my screen count too, right? So what am I doing on the internet, given how many minutes I devote to it?

Well, I read things. Lots of things.

But it’s not enough. That was a startling realization, in the whole “how did I not see this before?” kind of way. I interact with peoples’ websites, their personal environments imprinted onto the web, but not with the people behind them. Basically? I still don’t talk to people. But forming these connections over the internet is hands-down the easiest way to network yourself, especially in such a recklessly global medium.

For anyone trying to do anything, you’ve got to talk to people. Part of that happens on the street, in the form of meet and greets of every social stripe, but it also includes the internet, whether you email a blog owner or at least comment on their articles. Social media steps in nicely, and there’s a pretty obvious reason why we can target specific tweets over in Twitter: you must talk to people. That’s a lesson slowly-learned, in my case, but one easy to fix.

I’ve been making strides in building relationships well beyond the computer, but it shouldn’t stop there. My blog – and my career, honestly – might live or die on my ability to make a sizable splash on the internet, but I can’t get anywhere if I’m not throwing stones out onto the water. And, you know, inviting all my internet friends to the lake.

I’ve also got to work on my metaphors.

My life, at times – deep breath now – is kind of a mess.

That’s painting it pretty thick. But here’s the thing, from the easy-peasy life of a middle-class white kid to another: I’ve got it good. Loving parents, generous funding, and a long string of letter grades suggesting this boy has more than a faint clue of what the hell he’s doing.

Maybe I do. I hope so, at this point, but that pearl of optimism is buried somewhere deep. Anything approaching respect for my abilities – for me – laps somewhere near the bottom of the barrel, sunken under that little niggling voice in the back of my head. I have a tendency to doubt myself. I have a tendency to sneer at my work and think “I can do better,” only to strain my eyes from staring at a blank screen.

I don’t think this is a good way to go through life.

And that’s the delicious irony lining the rims of this whole glass trap, the kind of reality that leaks through whenever I stop to think. I’m an arrogant coward. Mountains of ego, sir, but absolutely no desire to claw my way to the top. I’d rather kick back and cool down, think it through and think it deep, than look myself in the mirror and admit that all of my confidence is starting to crack at the veneer.

But I’m making changes. I’m talking to people, slowly, and celebrating that rare moment when I forget myself and live a little. I’m traveling, learning how to interact with people infinitely different from me, and staring to realize that it’s just freakin’ fine if they don’t agree with me. They don’t have to like me. I just have to like myself.

And so, starting today – April 19th, 2010 – I’m going to do just that. I’m not going to hate everything I write, but I’m not going to pretend that everyone is going to like it either. I’m going to take all these thoughts swirling around up top and force them onto the page, hesitant confidence be damned.

I’m going to write.

And I’m going to be happy. I’ve skirted closer to the ideal in these last few months more than ever before, but it’s time to stop watching from the sidelines. I’ve got to breathe.

For separate things, no less!

In wonderful news, Vagabondish.com just published my latest piece, the aptly-titled ‘How Getting Robbed Saved Me from the Culture of Stuff.’ I’d add on some self-deprecating witticism, but, uh, that’s what it’s about it. For real.

In less marvelous news, the internship I’d kinda-sorta banked on to carry me into the job world has fallen through, leaving me still with mountains of ego and little opportunity to employ it. Put simply, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my life. That’s normally not too big a deal, I think, but the game changes when graduation comes knocking in about two months or so.

So, yeah. I’m going to need employment of some kind. Soon. Freelancing (aka begging people to run my name) has been wonderful to me so far, so I’m going to stick with it as best I can. Fingers crossed that it might start offering a paycheck somewhere down the line.

(What? It’s Tuesday? Screw you.)

Round two: Priscilla Ahn.

I first met my new favorite half-South Korean (I know so many) through the fantastic Blogotheque project. For anyone confused as hell by that previous sentence, the Blogotheque — Take Away Shows, by another name – is music distilled, a shaky-cam experiment with light, sound, and typically obscure artists. The product is a wonderful thing despite it, a glorious excuse to take an artist, strip away the machinations of a studio, and sling ‘em on the road to do what they do: make music. (See: Arcade Fire in an elevator, Bon Iver in a French alleyway, the Guillemots out on the streets).

And that’s what she does. Priscilla takes an acoustic and sings. And laughs. She does that last one often, an energetic tickling pretty far removed from the mellow sound coming out of her guitar. But what sweet sound it is! She fits nicely in the modern generation of folk singers who seem to build something elaborate out of a scant few components, an idea rarely clearer than when she strums, sings, and chuckles her way until the video ends.

Check her out. I bet you’ll be charmed.

Out with it, then: I’ve been converted.

Twitter is awesome. Sure, sure, it’s little more than a glorified list of facebook status updates, but the last twenty-four hours have proven that it’s all of that and a little something I like to call potential.

Take, for example, Don’t Talk to Strangers (and Other Terrible Advice for Travelers) over on Vagabondish.com. I was pretty freaking excited to see the article go live at all, given my respect for the site and vagabonding in general, but the miraculous addition of (re)tweeting has just made me visibly giddy.

Let’s crunch some numbers. As of this time of writing, the article’s been retweeted twenty-five times. Here’s a semi-random selection along with their respective number of Twitter followers (approximated):

1. vagabondish – 5800
2. Lonely Planet (!) – 27,000 (!!)
3. LPUSAstaff – 3900
4. donnadeau – 2800
5. roadup – 1200
6. brianepeters – 3000
7. soultravelers3 – 24,000 (!)
8. TravelIndustry – 5000
9. journeyPod – 17,000
10. travelspauline – 1200

Totaled: 90,900.

First off: holy crap. There’s no point in assuming that every single one of those followers will bother to read the article, but it’s kinda remarkable still to think that at least 90,900 people could take a look at it. Add on to that the readership that Vagabondish pulls in and the other fifteen retweets not counted and there’s only one solution to be drawn: Twitter is awesome.

It gets a surprising amount of hate from techies and antediluvians alike, but anyone floundering about with a career as a freelance writer knows how vital publicity – the kind Twitter provides – can be. Will anything come out of all this? No clue. But it’s pretty exciting stuff for a new kid on the block, and I’m pretty content with leaving it at just that.

Thanks first and foremost to Mike Richard for running the article, and thanks second (and secondmost?) to everyone who read it. And thanks, lastly, to everyone who realized how narcissistic this post is and stuck around regardless.

(What? It’s still Sunday? Screw you.)

This, ladies and gents, is a completely irregular feature of vital importance. There’s a lot of music out there. Some good. Some bad. Mostly bad, actually, but what the hell —  plenty of good stuff is just waiting to be discovered, and I happen to know a few artists you lot should be listening to right now.

Exhibit A: Nujabes. I’d never heard of the guy until I gave anime series Samurai Champloo a whirl and experienced his unique hip hop stylings on the soundtrack. Wikipedia puts a ‘cool jazz’ label on his work, a description I’m more than perfectly happy to run with in lieu of knowing fancy music words myself. And you know what? It works. I bounced around between different ways of saying it, but cool jazz is a perfect layer to throw on top of the incredible warmth his beats generate between my ears.

More than anything else — more than any lyrical adjectives I could produce — Nujabes knows emotion. Every single track of his that I’ve heard inspires a comfortable sensation, often some hazy kind of delight I don’t encounter much otherwise. Early morning, I’ll call it — the warm gray, the sleepy and mellow hours before dawn where everything is perfectly content and everything else perfectly possible.

The emotions run deeper than that, probably further down than I can even begin to understand, but that’s the gist of it. Start here and work your way down the playlist, though keep in mind he has a wealth of tracks beyond this list that are all equally superb. Save Mystline for last, if you can. That one is single-handledly the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard, and thus the perfect capstone for his work.