The Beckoning

My buddy @alao has been talking Steemit for quite awhile. During one of his visits from D.C. to Saint Augustine, FL he even wore a Steemit shirt—I think it was a psychological play to plant the seed 😃. On another visit, his better half, @ealbania, reinforced his message and showed the platform to my wife, @edjag. Before they left she, too, was signed up and was construing her intro post. She's been encouraging me to join ever since.

The Resistance

I wasn't holding out because of fear or apprehension. In fact, one could say that I began cultivating myself for a blogging platform a couple decades ago: I graduated with English and Art degrees from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 1997, during the rise of eCommerce and dot-coms; back then I practically lived at The Minnesota Daily, one of the largest collegiate newspapers in the United States, where I worked as an HR Recruiter and performed occasional freelance writing and graphics work; I roomed with the Daily's first online director and had a right-hand seat as we self-discovered how to migrate content onto the server we affectionately nicknamed "Dilbert" (after the popular comic strip character), before anyone could have foreseen the impact digitization would have on the printed media; I wasn't in the computer science program, but I learned HTML and Perl through exposure before asp or css was even a thing; I even broke ground by being the first to submit a senior paper in markup to the English department via URL.

No, I wasn't avoiding Steemit because of any idealistic principles or devotion to other social media sites. I was avoiding it because I am busy, and just didn't want anymore screen time than I already get. See, eventually I decided HR wasn't for me and I did get another degree—in Computer Science. I had this wonderful vision of blending writing and photo-design and technology, but "real life" is hard on artists. So I moved away from content and really geeked out. I did my time in a support center, advanced to a BA role, seized an opportunity by writing some code (lots of code, actually) to cover gaps I discovered during systems analysis, which led to me becoming a full-time professional coder (Perl, VBA, C# NET, regExp, multi-threading, SOAP and WSDLs, XML processing and generation, XSLT, ADO, LINQ, Entity Framework, SQL, database development, and more). Since my efforts were largely concentrated on the ETL and exchange of sensitive data, I even taught myself about MD5, Diffie-Hellman, RSA, PGP, and AES (THE original block-chain cipher).

Along the way I was promoted from programmer to system manager. I earned employees, and then more systems. I inherited problems to fix, and lots of data to coordinate. Who needs more screen time?

The Slow Turn

When my kids entered my story, and the passage of time brought their homework needs into my evening routine, I could have promised that there could be no time for steeming. But I was wrong, and my kids are actually the catalyst to my slow turn. Here's the low-down on why I'm here now, typing my introduction--

My oldest daughter is wonderfully nerdy, and in due course she was one day asking me about my job. I found that we weren't quite ready to talk software engineering design patterns with each other, but she was familiar with "searching things up" on the internet. Seeing a teaching moment, I configured IIS on my home desktop and demo'd a silly page for her. The concept of immediate self-publication to a world-wide audience rightfully peeked her wonderment. We pledged to have daddy-daughter scripting time so she could learn how to do the basics.

Our annual trip to the Mediterranean, visiting Edja's homeland in Albania, threatened to interrupt our plans. So I learned how to establish a WebDav connection, and we committed to doing a travel blog. We documented our adventures here, in real time. We let family and friends know when updates were ready, and we delighted to share our story with them. But something else clicked, too....

The Awakening

I realized:

1. My creative writing had gotten rusty after years of corporate suppression through executive summaries for people too busy (or lazy or incompetent) to actually ready anything more than outlines
2. I enjoyed describing the moment in colorful detail. Not an abstract about a future plan, or a technical whitepaper on how to build something, but metaphors memorializing the experiences of today
3. I still do not have the time to spend on styling recreational pages for free (although nothing beats a sophisticated design!)
4. It is harder to write with an unfettered voice when your friends and family might offer some criticism, but addressing people you don't know gives one the courage to flop
5. Much to my surprise, people were actually validating my effort and encouraging me to continue writing more
6. I don't want to market my domain, especially when there are platforms that already have lots of users
7. My work value and my salary are great. The long-buried over-simplified ideals of my youth, to be a teacher or a writer or an artist, are even greater. They rouse and awaken my vitality.
8. I've aged and matured enough to justify my opinions; they aren't a shallow echo of the masses. I have experiences worth sharing that range from art and literature to technology to socioeconomics to philosophy to comical rants about the mundane that I think we all are forced to survive.

The Flip, and the Painful Wait

Work is still crazy. I still love spending time with my family, and I especially love exploring the analog world with them. I still have cooking and laundry and house projects and skill-building-needs and, well....life to live. But that routine, as golden and blessed as it is, can also risk sucking the soul out of one's individuality.

I decided to shun introvertion—there are opinions and ideas and realizations that my physical acquaintances may not have the patience or energy to listen to (especially if I'm rambling through a stream of consciousness for the first time), but there is enough variety in the world that somebody somewhere might have the time and tolerance to give my words a chance. And that if I should espouse a personal "observation" I shouldn't have to worry about a senseless retaliation from a thoughtless soul who can't seem to adjust to different points of view. I can only hope to receive legitimate feedback substantiated by reason, so that I can also benefit from the chance to reconsider alternate views.

So I finally requested a Steemit account, and then I waited. I didn't get the validation link within an hour or even a day. It took nearly the full week. It was like a sadistic tease that forced me to reconcile what I want to get out of this platform, and each passing day could have been an opening to decide to retire from social media. Instead it gave me time to understand the potential for good, and jump in.

Thanks for the encouragement Edja, Arelowo, and Elda. I look forward to the journey.