When I Got Away With It.
Hitting the ground running, just 24 hours after launching this new website, I will now begin my participation in the Scintilla Project. I am late to the party, so this is Day Five. The prompt is:
Talk about a time you got away with it.
I’d only been at this college for six weeks, having transferred from a different college during the summer. In that short time it had already become clear to me that like my previous college, it was full of disappointments and deception. I didn’t like the people, didn’t like the classes, didn’t like the dorm. That’s being charitable; I loathed the dorm.
One Sunday afternoon I walked through the lobby of the run down dormitory. The stench of stale beer and abandoned, rotting food from another weekend of wall to wall parties clung in the air, and my disgust at same was palpable.
There was the pool table. Somewhat of an altar as one of the few recreational options on that part of campus. There was almost always somebody playing on the damn thing. Sometimes there was even a line for it. Yet not that day.
The billiard balls themselves were usually locked up in the RD’s office, available only when someone was manning same. Yet I noticed the balls were laying on the table, though nobody was present but me.
Stepping over discarded pizza boxes scattered around the table, I pocketed the 8-ball, and not in the legal sense. I literally put the 8-ball in my pocket, and walked back to my room.
Yes, it was theft. I knew it was theft when I did it. Yet I had made a decision right at that moment that enough was enough. I was going to leave this college too, and take with me a symbol of much of what I found wrong with it. The most recognizable accoutrement of the aging building’s third most popular pastime (behind getting drunk and having sex.) In so doing, I was in some small way providing at least a temporary pain in the ass to the people who at large had been a pain in mine all year. They wouldn’t be able to play their little game for a few days at least. (Miraculously, until I made off with the 8-ball, all of the balls were accounted for, based on my quick count of same.)
So brazen was I that I placed the purloined sphere in the window sill of my room. My room mate never asked about it. I figured by the end of the day the RAs would be searching every room. I could throw it away now, but then it wouldn’t mean anything. So I kept it there.
The RA never came that night. Or the night after. Or anytime that week. In fact, near the end of that very week, my request to change rooms to another dorm on the other side of campus was approved. And though I’d been teetering on the edge of transferring again, I reconsidered, and opted to stay, to give the new living arrangements a try.
I took the 8-ball with me. I could have slipped it back onto the table just as anonymously as I stole it. But that’s not what happened. It went with me to the new dorm. It was again prominently displayed, this time on a bookshelf. I figured if they ever did put two and two together and come looking for me in the new dorm, that would be my cue to transfer again.
I graduated from that college three years later. Every moment I was there, the 8-Ball had a place of honor in my room. For yes, even once I got it home each summer, I brought it back with me to campus. It wasn’t my room without it.
And it still isn’t. It’s sitting on a small pedestal less than a foot away from me on this desk as I type this entry. College is in the past now, but the symbolism of the dorm property I absconded those years ago is just as with me as ever, made even more potent by the fact that now it always faces me directly, so I literally am never “behind the 8-ball”.
I can look at it face-to-face, and be reminded of my own potential for brazenness. And I will remember that there is just about always an option, even if a bit extreme. A lesson I was willing to remember, even if I had gotten caught and disciplined for my act of defiance.
But I never got caught. It was one of the times I got away with it.
Let’s Do This
Welcome friends, new readers, readers from my previous site, tweeps, clients, colleagues, prospects and anyone who happens to drop by, to my brand new website, here at TyUnglebower.com! I have been awaiting this day for nearly two months.
Six weeks ago, I announced I would be discontinuing my former blog, Too XYZ. Since then I have spent part of just about every day researching, experimenting, observing, pondering, editing, transferring, designing, and let’s face it, stressing, in order to bring about the website you are now visiting. As I have said on Twitter and in other places, the goal is for the website to be a simple, straight forward platform that reflects multiple aspects of me. A showcase of not only my personality, but my interests, opinions, writing skills, and information about who I am and what I do. Judge for yourself, but I think I have done a rather good job at achieving that goal.
Please explore while you’re here, as there are several things to observe and read. You have all of the information tabs at the top of the page, where you can learn more about me. You have the blog posts, the five most recent of which I wrote during and about the construction process of this site. And you have most of my older content from my previous endeavor, Too XYZ. If you never knew about that page, here’s your chance to explore some of its content.
And if you stick around, there will be a lot more new content in the coming days. As luck would have it, I am opening this site just a few days after the start of the Scintilla Project. That project offers bloggers a daily prompt to inspire a post a day for about two weeks. I will be entering the fray late, but I decided what remains of the project would serve as quite a nice launching point for this new blog space.
I don’t intend to post every day as a matter of course once Scintilla is over, but you can expect new content about twice a week at least. Usually on Mondays and Thursdays.
I don’t want to bog down this first post with too much technical stuff, but bear in mind tweaking of things here and there will take place on the site for a while to come. There are always tiny bugs we don’t pick up on right away, as well as little ideas that flash into our heads. But for the most part, this is TyUnglebower.com.
No more rambling for now. All that you need to know about the site you can find here on the site for now. I just want to take these last few sentences to thank everyone who has been so supportive of my efforts to reboot my online HQ. And to thank you for stopping by.
I look forward to many exciting things as a result of this new chapter. And as per my catchphrase for 2012, I’ll close this in welcome entry by saying, “Let’s do this.”
How I’m Editing Old Posts
I was in a play once, called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged. You may have heard of it, but if you haven’t it’s a comic presentation of all of Shakespeare’s works in less than two hours. The vehicle for this feat is the “Reduced Shakespeare Company”. The show was a bit of a play within a play. The cast was performing as the RSC, who in turn were performing, (badly) as various Shakespearean characters. As members of the company, we were known by our real names on stage. So in that case, I played “Ty Unglebower”.
The quotations around my name are intentional. They indicate that who I was in the play was of course not a 100% accurate representation of who I actually am. (It wasn’t supposed to be a horror after all. Hi-yo!) Rather, facets of my real personality that best complimented the tone of the production were highlighted. Aspects of me on steroids, as it were. The result was “Ty Unglebower”. Me, but not me.
This provides a nice paralell for how I am editing my Too XYZ posts for inclusion in TyUnglebower.com.
I mentioned previously that not all of Too XYZ’s posts were going to make the transition. Those that have made it require editing. That work accounts for most of what I have been doing with this site in the last week. And since it represents a major part of what you will find here, readers are entitled to a bit of explanation as to how I am proceeding.
My intent is not to whitewash anything from my written past. You must understand this. TyUnglebower.com is a place for people to see my thought processes. A place to get to know me. Which means they also should have access to previous writings, even if views expressed therein have changed. We know people better today when we can view where they were yesterday.
So the Too XYZ posts are still Too XYZ posts. But they now need to play a version of themselves that is more applicable to TyUnglebower.com. To that end I have gone over their copy with a fine toothed comb to catch and correct any grammatical or typographical errors I may have missed upon first publication. (Believe me, I have found plenty.) I always took pride in my writings, but during the Too XYZ era, and especially the first year, many times a post was passionately conceived, written, edited, published and advertised in quite short order. Things were missed. I am more deliberate now, and I wanted that deliberation to be reflected here.
This also means on occasion I cleaned up a very awkward sentence. I couldn’t always tell if the awkwardness was due to a poorly framed sentence, or by typing out the wrong thing in the first place. In either case, I have done some housekeeping in such places.
Some changes are more cosmetic. For much of its life, Too XYZ lacked a consistent style guide. I usually follow AP when I write, but things not covered by AP, I was somewhat all over the board with. Especially in regards to italics, bold face, and other such items. I’ve created a more consistent policy with such devices for TyUnglebower.com, and some of the Too XYZ posts have been edited to reflect that.
In a handful of places, when I thought it was too murky, I have left an author’s note to clear up confusion when the post started off in a way I deemed too “in-universe”, or too much tied to Too XYZ in the beginning, but otherwise expressed a legitimate, universal concept.
In only a few cases, I have either deleted entire posts, or critically altered the content of same, in order to remove references to unpleasant individuals who at the time were friends of mine, but proved to be more than a little like Janus. I saw no reason to include either their memory, nor their exchanges with me in this new endeavor.
A serious writer can always find room for improvement in his writings. Especially after the benefit of time. Yet it was not my policy to rewrite posts for the sake of them “sounding” better. Any post, including this one, can always be rewritten. Yet I have refrained from doing so beyond the perimeters I have described above. Hopefully this is understandable and acceptable to you, dear reader.
Birthday
I think birthdays, (and today is mine) are a chance for even the introverts to allow themselves to be the center of attention. Or in the very least the near-center of certain types of attention. (Which in general is more than we want or need.) I was thinking about that today as I answered and thanked my many well wishers.
I’ll never need or want to be the center of attention in everyday life. But on my birthday, I open myself up to it a bit. Which made me think of this page. I’ll never be thrilled with self-promotion, (I prefer to call it “self-presentation”) but like a birthday, a blog/website perhaps is a place where I will be more at ease with the entire notion of centering things on myself. Or at least on my thoughts and words. It can also be a place where others expect things to be somewhat more about me than average. Much like a birthday is by consensus an acceptable day to make all about one person. Within reason.
By the time you will read this, I will have worked hard on this site for the better part of six weeks. Each time I edited copy, tested out a new picture, or experimented with a setting, I was exploring the best way to strike that balance between self-presentation and ego-mania. You, my visitors and readers must decide how well I have achieved this goal. (And remind me of that goal if you see that I am drifting off the road.)
TyUnglebower.com Through the Eyes of Ty Unglebower
Yes, that was a mouthful. (Or a “screenful” to coin a phrase.) But it’s in response to how I have been feeling lately as I set up this site. (I write this while it’s still under “private”).
With Always Off Book, and the old Too XYZ, one certainly had access to my voice and thoughts. Writing in places like that does require a bit of frankness, or perhaps even a degree of intimacy with one’s readers. Yet even then, content was mostly oriented towards a thought of which I was a proponent. Now that the site literally has my name on it, it feels somewhat different.
I wasn’t hiding on Too XYZ. The amount of irritation if not indignation directed at me for a while as a result of my posts stands as testament to that. And yet, I was more of the director of the play over there. Here, I am the lead.
Though broader in theme, the content here will continue to be honest. Authentic. Sincere. Yet now that intimacy of which I spoke will take on a whole new meaning. For even though coming to this site and reading every word will not make one 100% familiar with everything that is me, doing so will in fact invite a different kind of connection to me. Awareness of this connection doesn’t make me flinch, and indeed on some level it is invigorating. Yet that subtle but significant change informs every decision I am making as I construct this place in a way that perhaps wasn’t so sharp for Too XYZ.
I’ll not live to please other people, even my readers. However, the increased cognizance of the attention now that my very name is in the address of this location cannot be denied.
Ty Unglebower 