Greetings from Little Rock(that still hurts to say),

To your left is a fine picture of Vin and I during his last week at preschool in St. Louis last month. It felt good to throw in a pic of the Buffa’s for this end of the year post. A dose without pictures would only leave a lot of lonely words.

It’s time to let it all hang out. Grievances, surprises, good, bad, ugly and the rest of the things that rattled around my head. You won’t get a lot of sports or film here. I spread that around often in other places that it would be rather predictable for me to talk much about those two lovers of mine here. For the most part, I’ll choose the scope that turns around and reflects on me and the world I live in. The things that happened. Things I learned. The things I need help learning about. So here we go. Don’t expect a well established order to the following topics. I’m going old school here and just unplugging the drain. Shedding the dead with a few ounces of lead from the head.

(Warning-There may be spelling or punctuation errors in this dose. It is a rant after all. Apologies to the keyboard mafia in advance.)

Working Overnights Isn’t Ideal

In February, I worked overnights at Conway and hated it. I lasted four weeks before throwing in the towel and going back to Ronnoco. Why? Well, Conway is located in EASSTTTTT St. Louis city. Like “The Wire” of my hometown. It’s not safe and the farther you drive down on Hall Street, you feel like Rambo should be riding shotgun. It’s a dead end job full of tedious paperwork and robotic like movements. This confirmed the fact that overnights aren’t great unless you are a zombie who likes to function outside the house at night in a working environment. I am a night owl unlike any other, but this job made me realize that when it comes to making money in a 9-5 fashion, overnights aren’t cool. Yeah, and Conway sucks.

Writing Exposure’s Ups and Downs

This year, I wrote for a total of 5 websites. I wrote over 220 articles on the Cardinals this season. I wrote for Arch City Sports the most, and by November, I would be separated from them for one simple reason. Integrity. There was a time and place where everything(sports, movies, ramblings) went out of this site. In the past year and a half, I joined a few new sites. I became serious in social networking on Twitter and Facebook. I broadened my horizons from my personal friend list to people across the world. In that time, I got serious backlash, found good readers, and also learned a lesson about where to put your work. Arch City Sports broke a few ethical rules in my book. I was called out for patting myself on the back when I wrote about it here last month. In reality, I was clearing my head and trying to instruct other young writers that a scribe should never fall in love with page views and forget about ethics. I’ll admit. I got lost in the page views this past year. It’s part of dipping your abilities in deeper waters. At the end of the day, I was able to realize that ACS did things I didn’t like and I had to separate myself from there. There are good people at that site but you have to choose wisely where you set up shop in this internet driven journalism world. (more…)