Tag: writing

New Zealand, New Mike: Expect the Unexpected

So when I left the United States, I was in a fantastic spot. I had a job that paid ok, I was in a relationship, paid off my student loans, ran a half marathon, and was spending most of my time with friends. Now that I’ve had a month in New Zealand, how am I doing? Well…

Things unplanned

So for this trip, I had spent a year planning. I asked myself if it was feasible and figured I could make it work. It is a growth opportunity. My biggest oversight was that it is the holiday season. I wanted a year of two summers and a year where I could celebrate Christmas in the Summer and New Year’s Eve in a foreign country. And… It was fine. It was nothing crazy and honestly it would have been better to have spent that time back home. I could’ve had an extra couple months to nurture my relationship and I think the holidays are always better spent with friends and family. That is the difficult part about this trip, being completely on my own. It does not matter how much charm you have in this world, it is hard to completely uproot everything and take a risk. Good decision? Bad decision? Impossible to say. Everything has a trade off, last year I did not expect to be such a good year for me but it was. So to leave that behind was difficult but New Zealand is a once in a lifetime opportunity. So we’re here now. My biggest obstacle has been everything is closed for the holidays, which has made finding work extremely difficult. So you take an already big change and add sitting around in a foreign country for a couple weeks while eating into your savings and it can add a bit of stress; I’ve been mostly holiday on this holiday working visa and my hope is in a month I’m a bit more settled. Hence, if I could do it over, I would have left mid January; a chapter turning in a foreign country sounds great on paper but it’s a lot messier than you’d expect.

Looking Forward

So this year is going to be a year of looking forward. If the last few weeks have taught me anything, it’s that I have a lot of insecurity. What better place to work through my insecurities than abroad? I’ve had to adapt and life seems to be moving forward, slowly. And hindsight is 20-20. A “proper” relationship was new to me before I left, so I shouldn’t be too hard on myself if it ended so that I could pursue this dream of mine. My birth defect hasn’t bothered me too much since I’ve been here but if I take photos I tend to get really self-conscious. This will also be a year of not being too hard and just going with the flow so we shall see how that goes. I just need to have faith in the decisions I make and not so worried about making the “wrong” choices.

Dumb Things I’ve done while I’ve been here

Speaking of not being too hard on myself, I thought it’d be fun to go over some really stupid things I did.

  1. The first would be taking my phone out in the middle of a rainstorm! Guess what happened. The charging port got water damaged! And thus I got to watch my phone’s battery drain as I got ready to hop on a 12 hour bus ride from Auckland to Wellington. The good news is I was able to barely make it to my address. I bought a wireless charger to keep my phone going for a bit longer and then I officially retired my phone after purchasing a new one. The bad news is I had to buy a new phone. And it was the Fan Edition of the Samsung Galaxy S23, which basically means it is prone to scratching, which I learned the hard way. Albeit, the scratches aren’t horrible but I went a week without a screen protector and even being careful, scratches were unavoidable. If I could do it over, I’d buy the S22 and go with a lower data phone plan; I lose the special contract bonus but in the long run it would’ve been a better deal.
  2. I drank too much in Auckland. And by drank too much, I mean a lot. I spent with reckless abandon and that cut into my savings like there was no tomorrow. I also ate out quite a bit, which did not help my wallet. It was fun but I wish I had done a little more planning into doing more day trips and maybe only eating out once a day rather than twice a day.
  3. I kept my phone plan with an international add-on. Seemed smart at the time. Keep the phone plan and worry about cancelling overseas. Not so. It would have been better to have transferred my number to google voice and just relied solely on wifi to access the internet. A vacation, international plans could work just fine, but living abroad I should have done a bit more planning as it could have saved me a headache when I got here. I had to buy a vpn to access google voice and then port my US number from Verizon and even now I do not know if it’s fully cancelled as it is a lot more difficult to call overseas than at home.

Insights Gained

A few key takeaways from the trip so far:

  1. No plan is perfect, so don’t fret if the plan changes
  2. Don’t dwell and always ask for what you want, you won’t know if you don’t ask
  3. Be proud of the decisions you make and there are no wrong choices
  4. Believe it will all work out
  5. Be grateful of every moment you have, life is about doing, not thinking.

The Goal

The goal is to find myself. Even when I was doing well this last year, I felt like something was missing. And while my last couple weeks have been far from perfect, that is exactly the point. I have spent so much time trying to make my world perfect that I have forgotten how to simply live and experience life. So for better or worse, I am here now, on the road less traveled, and I can only hope that will make all the difference.

Expect more articles on the way. My writing has slowed down as I take an easier approach to life but I’m sure I’ll have plenty to talk about such as my visit to the shire and what it’s like living with a bunch of other people. Stay tuned and as always, thanks for reading!

February 2022 Newsletter: Is Love in the air?

How’s it going?

February is moving along. It’s a strange time in my life right now. I’ve finally found some stability amidst the chaos and I am able to take it one day at a time. I work about 13 hours a week and for the moment, the extra free time has been nice. No more 40 hours a week, wake up at 3am and get home by 1pm. Just simple evening shifts and a morning shift on Sundays. I know this cannot last forever but it’s been nice during the Pandemic to finally have a chance to catch my breath. Eventually, I’ll need to be working fulltime again and even consider continuing my education to add more capital to myself.

Outside of work, I have been doing a lot more walking as per my new years resolution. I’ve gotten way too into Pokémon Go and have been battling my way across my neighborhood for the last couple months or so. For whatever reason, I’ve been getting more shinies in the last year than I have in my entire 20 years of playing Pokémon.

For the blog

This month is going to be relatively low key. My ‘State of the Blog’ post took slightly longer than expected and landed into the first week of February rather than the last week of January. Nothing too crazy there. The plan is consistency and this year should have everything I want to write about finalized. For this month I’ve been brainstorming a poem and while it’s not quite ready yet I’m excited to be writing a poem since it’s been a hot minute since my last one.

Other Things

I tried Yoga for the first time the other day! It was surprisingly enjoyable. It involves stretching (which I suck at), exercise (been a hot minute) and a mix of meditation (which I have been rocking). Cooking has yet to manifest itself but I grow tired of frozen burritos and potstickers so I imagine it’s only a matter of time. My bike is prepped and ready to ride, so now that I have a job I’ll probably try commuting to work everyday.

Thanks for reading! As we gear up for March, the blog will start to pick up. April is National Poetry Month, May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and July is my Sustainability Month. For now, I get to take a breath and enjoy the calm.

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!

In The Meadow: A Haiku by Mike Cole

In the still meadow

A bird sat to sing a song

A tune unheard of.

It is national poetry month. A month of poetry starting with a Haiku. As part of the fun for this month, I thought I’d harken back to when I first started blogging and analyzed poems by famous poets, except this time, the poetry is written by me!

For Haiku’s, I typically start with a simple idea, an image I create in my head. The poetry itself is meant to tell a story since the word count and syllable count is so low. Rhyming becomes much more difficult, so typically I opt out of including it in the poem.

For this poem, it is meant to relax, a simple tale of a bird in a meadow. That is it. It is simply stating where the bird is, what it is doing, and the novelty of the experience. It has a hint that perhaps this is a remote part of the world, where man has rarely set foot or notes the beauty of the song itself.