Guess who?!

The Short Version:

I have a very grown-up job at a financial tech company. I don’t really have time to keep up with my website the way I used to when it was my income. Plus, the world is on fire and I didn’t want to engage with it anymore.

The Long Version:

I caught the writing bug early, but I didn’t really think it could be a feasible career until I started getting commissions from other websites. Once editors — real editors with real jobs and real budgets and stuff — deemed my off-the-cuff musings as worthy of monetary compensation, I figured I could just build a subscriber base of my own. Plus, there’s another timeline out there where I was a teacher. I love information and I’m good at breaking it down to explain to other people, but the politics of teaching in this country (coupled with the offensively low paycheck) quickly pushed the idea of being an educator out of my mind.

So I got to teach a bit here. And I got to write. And I got to pay my bills.

And then, everything seemed to take a turn for the worse. The thing about breaking down politics is you have to know politics yourself, so you need to read it from all corners. I woke up every morning and read Left, Right, and Center to see who was saying what. I cannot begin to tell you the amount of stupidity, bigotry, and hypocrisy you have to ingest every day if you want to accurately represent how idiotic the talking points are from the Republican Party in this ridiculous country. I’m not alone in saying my mental health took a big hit in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the 2016 election, but I felt a responsibility to keep reporting the news.

I was writing less often, but I still had subscribers. I felt like I wasn’t upholding my end of the bargain if I wasn’t making fresh content to read, and I had to adjust my anxiety and depression meds to keep up.

COVID made it impossible to write anymore, and people stopped subscribing for three reasons.

1. Posts were coming less often.
2. People had less disposable income.
3. Everyone was suddenly able to hop online and editorialize right along with me — why pay for something that’s readily available for free everywhere?

I was depressed and broke, so I quit writing and jumped headfirst into Corporate America. I focused on being good at that, got a few promotions, paid off my debt, and blocked out the world. I don’t feel the same optimism about the direction of humanity in general that I used to feel a decade ago. I don’t have any calls to action to contact your Senator or protests you can join to affect real change. I don’t feel like the internet needs any additional negativity, so there’s no reason for me to waste my keystrokes lamenting on the woes of humanity’s treatment of itself and the planet.

But now I’m back! To do what? Who knows. I’ve been writing on the internet since boarding school (and some people have been reading me for 20 years! since Free Open Diary!) so I miss having a space to chop it up online with other people who like to see what I have to say.

I changed the name of the site because So Let’s Talk About had an identity for me that I don’t plan to upkeep. Maybe I’ll talk about current events, maybe not. Maybe I’ll just post recipes. Or my knitting. Or recaps of the next season of Sister Wives. I don’t feel like OverpricedVodka really needs a voice or a goal. The idea is to just read it through the lens of someone having a drink in a bar and talking about whatever comes up.

Oddly enough though…I don’t even really like vodka.