Category: personal

State of the blog: 2022

Ah, January. A month of promise, a month of hope. With my resolutions written, it is time to take a look at my blog. My bastion, my slice of the internet. Whatever storm weathered, this is my safest port (if not my only port in the storm). With this post, I wanted to take the time to talk about the past and look forward to the future. All my plans and dreams (blog related), laid out for the world to see.

2020

A lot of planning went into my blog for the year and the effort showed. My goal was to provide consistency without burnout and to that end I am extremely proud of the work I’ve done. I have no pressure to write and have a lot of freedom when it comes to what I write. I’ve situated myself as a poetry, short stories, and articles blog and made the brand Mike Cole, so there’s no confusion as to what you’re getting into.

2021

I could better understand what was working and what could be improved upon. Overall, a great year. A year of growth and progress and I really have no complaints. Some minor tweaks here and there and 2022 is poised to be another great year.

Come this year

I didn’t want to take too long going over the last couple years as this year is the most exciting to me. This year is simply refinement of the core concepts developed in 2020 and 2021.

The Newsletter

The Newsletter is now official. It was experimental in 2020 and was my way of adding cohesion to the blog itself. In the past, if I disappeared for a while, I would occasionally write an update to let people know what was going on. The problem was, it would be completely random. By having a monthly update 7 or 8 times a year, I’m able to better communicate what’s going on. I find it enjoyable to give a glimpse into my life and the reception to the updates has been fantastic. The Newsletter had a bit of a branding crisis early on but this year I’ve worked out most of the kinks and have a better idea of what I want the purpose of the posts to be.

Series

In 2020, when I made the decision to make my blog a more consistent, cohesive experience I looked into what specifically that would look like. The Newsletters were a big aspect of that change. Every month, even if it was a busy month, there would be a newsletter; I wanted practice writing them and it makes a lot of sense from a blogging perspective. The second aspect of the blog was to give myself a time and place to write about what I enjoyed. Up till this point, the articles I wrote were great but once again inconsistent.

Short Stories

For the series, I decided early on there needed to be four. This gave my content a rounded out feeling and would allow me to have exciting content throughout the year. Short Stories are something I had always pondered writing but usually make me blush in embarrassment with how dorky they can be. I equate them to a similar experience as a D and D campaign (I have only played one, I swear!).

The reason I’ve been so adamant regarding scheduled time to write short stories is I truly believe it helps with creative thinking and problem solving. I love any activity that challenges my brain so being able to create a world from nothing is extremely enticing. What I’ve written has garnered positive feedback and it’s an aspect I’ve been wanting to expand upon for a while now.

Sustainability Month

Years of brainstorming and it’s finally come to form. I picked two issues I cared about and chose those as my hills to die on. Sustainability has been near and dear to my heart ever since I was a young lad. My first memory is that of the garden we had at my preschool, picking peas from a pod and remembering how delicious they tasted. In my later years, I joined Students for Environmental Action and built a community garden at my high school. In college, we had a garden in our backyard and even made our own compost from our leftovers. Now, I can at the very least write.

Last year was the first year I started my sustainability series. It was exciting, fun, and for the most part lighthearted (except for the Oregon wild fires). This year, I plan to continue all that was good from the last year and expand upon it. Sustainability is a broad topic so it gives me a lot of ground to cover. I could talk about corporate greed, consumerism, and all in-between. I can also talk about walking, cooking, and all other manner of fun topics. The goal is for the series to be engaging and not go into climate crisis mode. There are many pieces written nowadays that stress the urgency of action but as far as effectiveness I don’t know if I believe it works. I’ve read about terms such as “climate anxiety” and it all seems very peculiar to me. Our world is complicated and my hope is to make it simpler. I’m excited for what this year brings!

Mental Health

Mental Health is a tough subject to talk about. In my everyday, I brush it off when in the company of others. I tell everyone everything is fine and it’s rare I’ve been vulnerable around anyone. A lot has happened to me the last couple years so the articles planned for this year will reflect that. I have a rough outline of what I want to talk about and overall I’m excited to share as I work through my life. This year will be a mix as I experiment with articles, only one is planned to be heavy subject matter with the rest being general mental health articles that are more on the lighthearted side.

Poetry Month

Celebrating national poetry month was fantastic last year. I opted to return to form to when I had started this blog all the way back in 2015. A simpler time filled full of questions of the weeks and a bunch of random other topics as I tried to gain a foothold on my chaotic world. It is rare that I have the opportunity to reach back into the past and pull it into the present, so the fact I can for poetry month has brought a smile to my face.

Most poems I write nowadays I simply write and leave up to the readers interpretation. I have my inspiration but the beauty of poetry is applying your own meaning to the poem you’ve read. To make poetry month special, I brought back analyzing poetry from my ‘Fruitful Friday’ series, a now ancient relic of a bygone era. The best part is now the analysis is of my own poetry rather than famous poets. Poetry month will stay the same for this upcoming year.

In Sum

There won’t be any major changes this year. The website is easy to read and follow and the content has been solidified. I am talking about what I want to talk about and the final piece of the puzzle has been resolved this last year. Horror Month is no more and Short Story month is here to stay. There are no creative restrictions and basically the sky is the limit for what I can write about. Two to three articles a month is reasonable for me and writing now takes top priority over other activities.

That’s it! This is just an overview for the upcoming year! Of course there will be updates through the Newsletters and more to come as we get closer the series. I’ll be back soon for the February Newsletter!

September 2021 Personal Newsletter: The Twilight of my Twenties

I am back! It honestly felt weird not writing throughout August but the break was nice. In the future, I think I’ll plan for a 3 week vacation and then write something towards the end of August. A month is a very long time.

The Month of October

I’ve been giving this month a lot of thought. And at the moment, I’ve settled on doing an Autumn celebration / horror month. I tried to stay away from horror and simply make it a short story month but that doesn’t really excite me to write. Any other genre would ultimately feel out of place and I just love the fall, so it really can’t be any other way. It’ll most likely be a two part horror short story, spread across multiple weeks. I like the idea of doing that rather than a one off. For the final week, it’ll be Autumn themed and a little bit more on the peaceful side for those who don’t like horror.

Sustainability Month

Was a huge success! For years I have wanted to talk about sustainability. ‘New Horizon’ was my first attempt to tackle the issues we face in a way that was fun and engaging. In other years, I’ve mulled through other sustainability projects that could potentially make their way onto the blog but for one reason or the other didn’t make the cut. This last year the pieces came together and I think the topic is worth a month dedicated to just talking about it. The topics were a lot of fun to write and my hope is to expand upon the foundation for next year.

Housekeeping and other musings

The big one, I’ve changed the name of the ‘Status Update’ to ‘Personal Newsletter’. I thought about just ‘Newsletter’ but then I was like, nah. This may not seem like a big deal but the verbiage lines up better with what is commonly used and the Business Major in me just can’t help myself. The ‘Series and Special Projects’ is more or less complete as far as format goes. As I start to write professionally, I’m starting to showcase more and more of my work, so it’s been helpful when people ask what I write just to send them to one place. And as far as traffic goes on the website, it makes it much easier for everyone to find the projects I put the most work into. Other than that, I’ve made slight updates to the flow of the website such as how many articles you see when you scroll. I opted for four as I typically write two to three articles in a given month, so it allows you to see the previous month as well as the newer content.

Outside of Blogging

Coding! That’s been my main priority other than finding a job. I’ve taken the last couple months to refocus my goals and landed on taking a 10 week website building course. I’ve been learning lots and hope to wrap up the course soon. I was also able to finish the first episode of a podcast and hope to practice writing more podcast scripts this upcoming year to see if it’s something I want to continue. The podcast is top secret for now but we’ll see down the road what happens with it. I still want to publish a book, but that is a very long term goal and I have quite a few things I need to figure out before I even feel comfortable doing so.

This Month

This month will be primarily articles! I’m in the mood to publish some topics that have been on my mind quite recently. The first will be on productivity apps I’ve been using and the other is undecided but I’m thinking an exercise related article might be in order.

Birthday Month

I am turning twenty eight this year! It’s hard to believe that in a couple years, I’ll be thirty. To be honest, I’m not thrilled to be hitting this age milestone but am hopeful good things are in store this year; I could use a break from what has been one of the most chaotic years of my life.

And that’s it for the newsletter! Next month will be all about horror with a sprinkle of seasonal celebration. If you like my content, I do have a Patreon and Ko-fi; the link will be listed below. And as always, thanks for reading!

Support this blog

Sustainability Month 2021: The Oregon Wild Fires

If you’ve read the blog, you know there’s been some debate over whether or not I would have time to write articles for a month dedicated to sustainability. According to the research I did, a sustainability month doesn’t exist. There is a month in October which is weirdly limited to higher education and after that there is Earth Day in April. Those are the two I found. Of course April is World Poetry Month and since I write quite a bit of poetry, I opted to forgo a month dedicated to sustainability entirely. But then late at night I realized I could do it any month, so why not July? With my schedule, I can plan ahead and not worry about a mad blitz to write an article the week of.

September 2020

My Birth month and now the month of perpetual fire. Where once Autumn brought a cool breeze, now the winds howl and bring an inferno to set Hell loose on Earth. A decade ago this would have been a wild dream. And as I thought about it more and more, I realized we are living in a world that is in decay. The planet will survive but we will not. The children born after my generation will be worse off then we were to no fault of their own; for them, they will inherit the apocalypse. We are looking at the last generation of human beings and in the twilight of my years, as the sun sets on my life, so too will the sun set one last time for our planet. The year twenty one hundred.

An interesting prospect, no? Our parents have answers for the economy and life yet how does one go about even expressing the devastation that will be wreaked upon our lives? Perpetual war, terrorism, and a global pandemic will pale to what we will see by the end of the century. Imagine a world with an Amazon Rain Forest turned kindling, Coral Reefs as bright as the stars, and Mega Storms the likes we are only now beginning to see.

My first few decades were filled with hope, now more and more I am filled with a sense of impending doom. The forest fires seen in Oregon could have been improper forest management, sure. But a part of me knows that this will not be the last time I see fire of the magnitude I saw.

And do we act?

Throughout my Life, I’ve had the pleasure of watching Documentaries starting all the way back with Planet Earth in 2006. There’s a lot of beauty in our planet and I would’ve loved growing up decades earlier to truly appreciate that beauty. A time when there were few people and growth wasn’t the only mindset. I’ve only ever lived in a time where there have been cities and people are nigh unavoidable. There is always hope but we are walking a fine line between seasteads and “The Road” right now. Forget “Fahrenheit 451”, we’d be lucky to end up in that dystopian reality. I truly believe that if we don’t act within the next decade, it will be like toppling dominoes.

The Fear I Felt

The sky was blackened and clear blue gave way to an orange glow. For a couple weeks I had a taste of the apocalypse and all I could do is watch the fire consume Oregon as it crept towards my doorstep. I never saw the blazing infernos fortunately but I had my things ready in case our alert status changed. High winds the likes I never heard howled throughout the nights and made what was already bad, worse. I thought trees were going to topple and we’d all be blown away. Then, the other night, I heard the winds once more. A “freak” occurrence they called it but I had to wonder if this reality wouldn’t become all too common…

This is the start to my first ever Sustainability discussion. I’ve been looking to weave causes into my blog for a while now and the Wildfires of 2020 seemed like the perfect opportunity to talk about a terror that is still relatively easy to ignore at the moment. I wrote the bulk of the article when the fires were still fresh in my mind and while not all the articles for Sustainability Month will be like this, I thought it important to talk about. It’s a worse case scenario and I’m hopeful that it’ll only ever be a bad dream. Next article I’ll be talking about going vegan, so take a breath and recover if you are sitting agape in horror.

June 2021 Status Update: A Tinkerer’s Guide

It’s June! As we move into the warmer months, I’ll be talking about Sustainability in July and in August I will be taking a month off to relax. This month will be relatively tame with most likely a poem and will be used to plan out my articles for next month.

Mental Health Awareness Month

This year was a pivot away from some of the darker topics. Instead, I’ve opted for the articles to be more story driven in nature and focused on concepts, reminiscent of my older articles when I discussed business terminology in the context of my life. I’ve written some great articles on my personal life and personal strife but it’s time for a change. I scrapped a couple drafts this month in favor of talking about social media, meditation, and anxiety. Anxiety I enjoyed writing about and I’d like to keep it that way. I’m comfortable talking about my fathers alcoholism but that had a time and place. I was able to make sense of his world and any more on the subject would be to dwell; a road I don’t feel inclined to walk down. I had a draft for an article talking about the passing of my father but ultimately left it unpublished and unfinished. I thought writing about his death might reveal some hidden knowledge much as writing about his alcoholism helped me come to terms with my reality, but it didn’t. The fact of the matter is death is death and I was with him in the end. In the end, I chose love over bitterness. If I do bring it up, it’ll be here or there but I have a strange sense of peace with the whole situation, a peace I didn’t have a year ago. The toughest aspect has been an underlying exhaustion which could be symptomatic of mild depression; understandable given the trauma I’ve endured. I wrote a poem at the end of April and that felt more a fitting send off then the cold calculus of an article.

Special Series and other Joys

I’ll be making a slight adjustment to my series; instead of a post a week, I’ll be doing three for a given month. Four a month was an arbitrary number, based solely on the fact that I thought it’d be cool to write every week of a month. Three a month is more manageable and gives me more time to work should I have to re-edit an entire article (which happens more often then you’d think). I might make other changes as I continue to write special series but for now I’m happy with making this small adjustment. I’ve started initial work on creating a podcast and while nothing may come of it, I’m in the process of drafting the script for my first episode. I have no idea what I’m doing but I want a hobby where I can actively practice public speaking, much as I’ve done with writing.

Goodbye Social Media

As you may have noticed, the Twitter feed is gone from the blog! I’ve had a lot of time to think about the internet during the Pandemic and I have deemed social media unworthy of my time. Since writing my mental health article, I reinstalled and uninstalled various social media apps; I now have none on my phone. If people need to get in touch, texting is the way to go. I want the blog to reflect this choice and not create stress through a constant feed. The blog is healthy as it is with organic traffic and while I might still use social media sites from to time, I long for the day where I can be free, or at least, for social media to be better. I’ll most likely write about social media more as the years progress, however, I’m looking to make improvements from my mental health article. Mostly, I’ll emphasize the positive benefits of quitting rather than focus on the dystopian nightmare social media is.

Outside of the blog

A career is weighing heavily on my mind. I’ve worked a job but not a career. I’m frustrated that when I invest in an action, there is no payoff. What I mean by this is, for example, my brother is an artist. He can go out and take photos because he thinks something is of interest. He can then take those photos and use those as reference for his work. His hobbies lead to his craft and he gets that satisfying burst of fulfillment. I do not have that luxury at the moment. Writing I enjoy but that’s where the buck ends. In the intangible sense, it’s great, I can craft narratives and work on my communication. Conveying voice in writing is not easy and yet, my writing becomes more distinct the more I write. It’s a fun bit of trivia, a quirk to mention in passing. Yet, with Management as my field of study, it can be a difficult sell. I’m not writing articles as a Manager, Sales Rep, or any numerous fields attributed to Management. And thus, a lack of fulfillment ensues. A framework I’m adopting is I have not quite found a job where I can directly apply what I enjoy doing in my free time. Learning to code feels far from home and while the dots might connect to business, they do not connect easily. Hence, a lack of fulfillment and a wave of misery that follows. The dream is to learn web development as a starting point but often it can feel as though I’m throwing effort into the void. Or it could be simply a dark shadow cast by depression, a lack of meaning brought about by tragedy. Who knows!

But…

The blog is healthy and I’m building it around the future work I’ll eventually do. That means a month off in August, three articles instead of four when writing special series, and a steady stream of status updates that are essentially my newsletter. This is my little piece of the internet and I’m going to hold onto it. No update next month but get ready for articles on sustainability! August off should be nice! That’s all I have and feel free to comment below; I am always open to feedback!

If you want to support the blog, link below:

Support the blog

%d bloggers like this: