Killing & Composting
Current location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading: Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz
Listening: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You by Big Thief
(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status)
Killing & Composting
A few weeks ago I decided to kill one of my projects.
I've been running a little podcast called I Will Read To You since September of 2021, and in the past little-over-a-year I've recorded and published nearly 200 poems and essays (but mostly poems) from the public domain.
Killing a project, I've learned, can be almost as difficult as starting one.
It's not easy to tell, for instance, if you're getting rid of it for good, justifiable reasons or due to a failure of fortitude and resilience.
It's tough to tell if the project in question is convertible into something else (if it might evolve into a bigger, better, more valuable version of itself with just a little more effort, a little more investment of time and energy).
You also never know who you might be upsetting, letting down, accidentally or incidentally ignoring; whose priorities you might be discounting in favor your own.
I personally try to think of this process as additive rather than subtractive.
I'm not pointlessly ripping a well-tended project from the ground, roots and all: I'm converting it into fuel for other ambitions.
I'm composting it so that the resources currently invested in its growth can instead be spent on other things.
Ideally those other things are more relevant to who I am, today, compared to the now-uprooted project.
In the case of I Will Read To You, I started the project as part of a larger effort to learn to properly use a new microphone I'd recently acquired, to exercise my jaw (and other speaking-related) muscles after surgery, and to explore types of writing that I'd always been interested in, but which I'd never taken the time to really investigate properly.
These goals were important to me, and I liked the idea of producing some kind of tangible output (podcast episodes) as part of that labor.
I also feel I've accomplished my goals, and then some: I was able to get my jaw back into fighting shape, create and refine an audio production routine that suits my mic setup, and discovered (and started to cultivate) an ongoing passion for poetry I may never have otherwise clocked.
Now that these ambitions have been achieved, though, I've noted a few downsides to continued investment in this effort.
For one, I've got a few other projects (existing and impending) that would benefit from the additional time and energy I'd otherwise be investing in IWRTY.
For another, I accidentally built a negative incentive into this project.
Because I'm recording these poems for broadcast purposes, I can only legally record and release those in the public domain. That limits me to poems published in the early 20th century and before, and consequently—although I've loved the work I've read and shared—my education in this space is also somewhat limited because I'm incentivized to spend more of my time reading the sorts of things I can eventually convert into shareable content.
While I'll by sunsetting the IWRTY podcast, then, I'll continue to read poetry every day, and will be even more expansive in my exploration, no longer focusing on older work because reading newer poetry would be "wasted effort" in the context of my weekly deadline.
This was a relatively simple project-cull, then, but it's not always so clean-cut. Several times I've considered killing off a project, only to rediscover its value or repurpose it in some way, instead, after weeks of planning its demise.
In these cases, the composting process served as a new lens through which to view my efforts and outcomes—a project's future utility and possibilities only apparent after I allowed myself to consider its absence.
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Things I've Made This Week
Select, recent works from across my project portfolio.
Aspiring Generalist: T-Shaped Info Diet
Brain Lenses: Reminiscence Bump (podcast)
Climate Happenings: Wind-Solar-Battery Hybrid Plant
I Will Read To You: Ebb Tide (this podcast will remain live if you're interested, and I've got a half-dozen new poems hitting the feed this afternoon)
Let’s Know Things: The Kia Challenge (podcast)
Curiosity Weekly / Daily: October 4 / October 4
One Sentence News: October 5 (podcast)
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Interesting & Useful
Where Our Earth Becomes Uninhabitable — interaktiv.morgenpost.de
(Note: you may need to translate this page.) Deadly heat, flooded coasts, violent hurricanes, lack of water: by the end of this century, normal life will hardly be possible in many places, as climate models show. Find out where people will no longer be able to live with our interactive globe.
30 collector cards from Tiere der Urwelt (Animals of the Prehistoric World) — www.copyrightexpired.com
30 collector cards from Tiere der Urwelt (Animals of the Prehistoric World) series, from a set inscribed 1916.
Rural Indexing Project — www.ruralindexingproject.com
Rural communities are dispersed across the American landscape. The buildings and streetscapes in these places are a repository for visual trends—historical, architectural, and social—that relate to aspects of commercial, municipal, and private life. Rural Indexing Project (RIP) documents these trends as they exist in the built environment.
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Outro
I'll likely continue to record things for IWRTY periodically, but it won't be a formal, deadline-based project anymore.
It has proven to be a massively valuable investment of time and energy, though, and I love having seemingly discordant efforts of this kind blended in with my other work: things that don't necessarily make sense from a professional and economic standpoint, but which scratch some other kind of itch (creative, therapeutic, exploratory, awe-inducing, etc).
I'm back in Milwaukee, and the past not-quite-a-week of solitude has been lovely (in contrast to the people- and pet-filled life I've lived for the past several weeks).
I had a routine medical checkup yesterday, have a dental cleaning today, and I'm getting that new bivalent Covid booster tomorrow—so checking a lot of little routine boxes (while also making plans to feel not-great on Friday, if the previous boosters are any indication as to how my body will respond to this new immune system software update).
Those little upkeep-related calendar items are kind of nice right now, though: predictable tasks that move me in a generally positive direction.
It's always easier (for me, anyway) to appreciate such things after a period of comparable unknowns.
How's your October going so far? Any big plans for the final quarter of 2022? How're you feeling at the moment?
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