Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

You probably haven't noticed, but you are looking at a brand new site. After nearly six years of powering jennatollerson.com with Movable Type, I decided to follow the advice I've been giving out in my professional life for the past year, and rebuild the site using Drupal. This was not a particularly easy decision, as it meant migrating nearly 600 entries, and their comments, and their tags. Not to mention images, audio, and video files.

As you might guess, there is not a super simple way to do this. I got lots of help from this page, but it took a lot of trial and error, after which I went through and audited my content, trying to fix most things that were broken. Many links are still broken. However, it had to be done, because Drupal is a vastly superior CMS, and in the risk of having my salesman persona bleed into this site, I'll tell you why. This is going to be a developer-centric entry, where I talk about lots of geeky things. You might get bored , and for that, I apologize. If you came here looking for an entry all about my dark feelings, you'll have to wait for another day! Read More »

Big Bad Kyle from Jenna Tollerson on Vimeo.

I found this going through files from an old computer. It was the only video I took on my very first $100 digital camera, in about 2000, I think. There was no sound on this camera, and when I got home I realized that not only was the quality awful, but I had made the now-classic mistake of taking it with a portrait orientation, and didn't have the know-how to fix it.

This is Kyle, my friend Sam's little brother, who at the time was practically my little brother too, after a middle school play in which he played the Big Bad Wolf, doing his evil bow for me not once, but twice, while I struggle with some Blair-Witch-style camera work.

This video reminded me of how much time has gone by, because I now have a much steadier hand, and Kyle is now a father. That, and I can't remember exactly which story this Big Bad Wolf is from.

I drove away, looking up at the Cheshire Cat moon smiling down at me, wondering if I would see him again.

This is the thought I had, word for word, driving down the road on Sunday night. This writing thing is sort of a gift and a curse, because you often find yourself narrating your real life as it happens in bombastic and high-handed prose. Even the phrase “bombastic and high-handed” is fairly bombastic and high-handed. That whole sentence was like a snake swallowing its own tail.

The point is, I pretty much spend my whole day doing this, relaying this ongoing commentary back to myself, seeing the words appear before me like a close-up shot of a old fashioned type writer in action. I've been doing this my whole life, and while it has tapered back significantly in the past few years, it still happens a lot. Lately all I've been getting are turns of phrase like this one, barely fit for a bargain bin first novel.

However there is nothing of substance to write about lately. I'm working a ton, and I must admit it is a blast. At least once a day I'm typing or uploading or dragging-and-dropping and it just hits me like a freight train: I love what I do. There was a time when I thought I'd mostly be out of the web business by this age, but apparently I'm just getting started, and the extra cool thing is I'm really fucking good at it.

When I'm not working my brain spins overtime parsing this “he–loves–me / he–loves–me–not” drama, which is like something we've all seen on some network comedy somewhere, young career woman in city, focused on work but looking for love, with generous layers of sexual tension between her and the male lead. Except not as funny as that show you saw, and, unbelievably, more pathetic. They don't ultimately get together because he doesn't love her, and without the Ross and Rachael/Carrie and Mr. Big/Buffy and Angel on–again–off–again mess, the whole thing loses steam.

I'm trying to get that show canceled so I can move something else into that time. Maybe something educational. That would be good.