Category: The Blog Itself

Posts about the blog itself — “ground rules”, FAQ’s, announcements if I’m going to be away for a while, stuff like that.

2026: The Year Of Intention

I continue to have a weird relationship with New Year’s, and with the concept of resolutions.

On one hand, I carry a certain amount of cynicism about the whole idea of making life changes because an arbitrarily-constructed calendar cycled around to the beginning of another tour around the sun. (Shouldn’t the new year start on the shortest day or something?) There’s also sense — maybe it’s a little judgmental — grounded in the idea that if something is worth doing, well, you’ve got 364 other days to do it… nobody’s forcing you to wait until January 1st to start.

On the other hand, just as a logistical thing, I tend to have a good amount of downtime around the new year. I work in the world of EDU, so I’m mercifully off work between Christmas and New Year’s. My family is a) small and b) mostly local, so I haven’t traditionally had big plans to travel or anything like that. So even if I tend to be cynical about the concept of resolutions, the big Pressing Of Pause at the new year does leave time for some introspection that often lands in a similar place.

And this year I stumbled upon a friend’s Facebook post that helped me think of things a little differently: rather than look at resolutions as a specific set of promises that I may or may not bother keeping, think of it more as setting an overall aspirational goal or theme for the year. That way, you’re not necessarily locking yourself into one narrowly-defined thing you’re going to feel bad if you don’t get around to doing.

So I started rolling that around my brain and the idea came to me — as the best ones do — while I was procrastinating. Specifically, in this case, about going to the gym. My normal routine is Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday, but I had halfway convinced myself that I didn’t need to go “because it’s a holiday”. And then I realized that’s not really a reason. Not a real one, anyway. So if I didn’t want to go to the gym, I needed to be honest with myself about the real reason was and decide if THAT was a valid reason to not go.

The immediate problem of the gym was soon resolved: the real reason I didn’t want to go is that I was comfortable playing with the dog, and… I decided she’ll be fine for an hour, so I made it to the gym. But it also provided me with the answer to my friend’s post and the larger guiding theme for the year…

Intention.

I am guilty in life of sometimes letting the currents carry me too much. Indecision. Procrastination. Doing what comes easiest. Sometimes just screwing around until options drift out of reach and I’m kinda stuck with what’s left because I didn’t REALLY choose to act. In doing so, I’ve been traditionally bad about recognizing that that indecision is, in itself, a choice and an action.

Yoda’s “do or do not, there is no try”? Historically, I’m really bad at that.

This applies to big AND little things. I can see it in claiming I want to travel more while not really setting aside the money to do it or planning an itinerary until it was too late. But I can also see it in coming home, turning on YouTube videos while I’m eating dinner, getting sucked in, and then deciding to just KEEP watching YouTube videos because “there isn’t enough time before bed to do much else”.

So I think the challenge this year will be one of approaching things with more intention. Certainly the part of the iceberg that sits above the water is converting inaction into action with more regularity. But the other part… perhaps the more meaningful part… will be to interrogate my inaction more than I have in the past… understand it… learn from it. Because I’m STILL not going to be able to do every single thing that pops into my head; but if I DON’T end up doing something I convinced myself I wanted to do, it’s going to be important to dig past the easy excuse of “Things Just Didn’t Work Out”(tm) and figure out why I REALLY didn’t move forward, even if it means confronting something awkward or uncomfortable.

Look at travel, which I mentioned above. I DO want to travel more. It kills me that I did the traveling consultant thing for over a decade (between two stints) and never REALLY saw most of the cities I went to. And in fact, in July, I went down to Florida for a week and visited my brother and another lifelong friend who lives down that way, and it was a blast. But then I also had plans to go see my son toward Thanksgiving, and that just kinda died on the vine. At the time I never really asked myself how that happened, but I probably should have. So why didn’t I follow through on that? Was I worried about money? Was it concern my job might somehow see me differently if I missed too much work? Was it worry that a Trump-run FAA might turn my trip into Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Regional Jets?

(That last one was definitely a factor when the air traffic controllers weren’t getting paid.)

And to bring it all full circle, that’s also why I’m kicking the dust off my blog once more.

For a long time, I managed to convince myself that answering questions on Quora was scratching the writing itch I’ve had ever since the days of the college paper. And in superficial ways, I suppose it was. But it’s missing the one essential piece of the equation — it’s really only existing in other people’s curiosity rather than indulging my own. And if this is going to be a year of intention, maybe I need to actually either Write-With-A-Capital-W or dig into why I’m REALLY not doing it.

(Though, OK, part of it is also that Quora has gone the way of lots of social media sites and is increasingly a tire fire of bot-driven conflict. But that’s a whole other conversation.)

Maybe it’s the time commitment… though if I took JUST the time and word-count that I put into Quora, that would probably be a shit-ton of content. Maybe I’ve grown too comfortable with the idea of having a pre-existing audience over there and am scared of really starting from scratch. And OK… there’s also this little fear I have of making something I enjoy too structured and turning it into a chore I hate doing. There’s a difference between doing something because you want to do it and doing something because it’s on your schedule to do it.

You know. Like a New Year’s Resolution.

Who Am I? What Is This? (aka The “About The Blog” Post)

Who Am I?

Definitely not prisoner 24601, though I am resisting the urge to break into song as I’m writing this.

I’m Jason McDonald. Early 50s, native of Pittsburgh, PA. Single dad, dog owner… by day, I’m an IT guy who works for a local university: I fix the computers of the people who are going to change the world. By night? Not so much a “failed” writer because that would imply I ever made a serious effort at making a career of it. More of well-intentioned amateur, looking for a place to let my words run free and burn some mental energy off.

If you’re looking for formal credentials… well, I’ve never had a paid gig as a writer, unless you count the beer-money check I got for being an editor at my college newspaper. I have been fairly prolific answering questions on the Q&A site Quora, and back when they still ran a Top Writer program, I won several years in a row. I also spent a few years writing weekly episode recaps and occasional product reviews for a gaming podcast (Roll For Combat) I’m part of, though I stopped doing that when it started to feel like I was writing the same thing every week.

I’ve tried to start a blog two or three times now, but never quite reached critical mass with it. Life just kinda intruded. But with Quora in particular going downhill (worth its own post at some point), I feel like I should stop generating content for someone else and get back to doing my own thing.

What’s the blog about?

Still figuring it out, testing the waters. It’s going to start out as just “slice of life” with a possibility of it developing a more specific direction as we go. Though I can at least lay down some guard rails what you’ll see on here.

A lot of it is just going to be the reindeer games of daily living. Sports (with a somewhat larger emphasis on the local Pittsburgh teams), movies and TV, gaming (computer and tabletop), music… whatever happens to enter my mental gravity well on any given day.

I may hit on politics from time to time, but the last thing I want is to become A Politics Guy(tm). It’s one of these things where the things that are going on in the world do matter, and I can’t really keep quiet about it ENTIRELY but I also don’t really want to let it consume me either. Also there’s people that simply do it better than I do. (Among others: Jim Wright, aka Stonekettle, who has real and relevant experience from his days in the military, whereas I’m fully aware I’m Just Some Guy With Opinions On The Internet.) But just to put a stake in the ground, I lean left on a lot of issues, so… hope that won’t be a problem, but also don’t especially care if it is.

(One idea I had was just to pre-write a bunch of “soapbox” posts where I write out my thoughts on various issues, and then just point back to those if people care to hear what I think. We’ll see if that happens.)

I do have kids, but I’m going to be careful how much I talk much about them, just because they’re people with their own lives and I want to tread very lightly vis-a-vis turning them into content. They’re also both adults, so there’s not as much “parenting” to discuss at this point. So they may come up from time to time, but they won’t be a constant feature. My DOGS on the other hand…

I also won’t talk about work a lot, but mostly because this is supposed to be what I’m doing for fun. If something of general interest happens at work, I might mention it, but I’m sure as shit not going to spend my free time talking about the latest Windows security patches.

Lastly, I promise to never spoil the day’s Wordle.

What else?

Well, if you’ve read this far, you probably noticed that I write in an informal, almost conversational style. Pauses, changes of direction mid-stream, abuse of the ellipses… I do that more than I should. I hope it’s not distracting, and it’s likely to induce a stroke in your fifth-grade English teacher, but it’s also not likely to change any time soon. You’ve probably also noticed I have an open-door policy on profanity. I try not to be gratuitous with it, and am a firm believer of expressing yourself well, but sometimes the naughty word IS the right one to express the thought.

I’ll try to write something daily, as much to build good habits as to give The People something to read, but for now this is just something I’m doing in my free time, so that’s not some sort of ironclad commitment.

With all that said… LET THE WILD RUMPUS BEGIN.