Category: Life

History or Memory?

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What major historical events do you remember?

This question almost feels like it could be interpreted a couple of different ways. Are we talking about events we remember learning about, or events we remember happening in our lifetime?

For me it’s the latter. My initial reaction when I read this question was to recall the memory of where I was on September 11th, 2001. Being 13 years old at the time, I was in school. I was early, the first bell hadn’t rung yet, and I was in the library. A friend’s older brother was there helping part time for credit or something and we had been talking with a teacher when a tv in the corner switched over to playing the initial broadcast of the news coverage. All conversation immediately stopped and everyone watched in silence as they replayed footage of the second plane colliding with the tower…

Taking on new ventures

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What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to?

There are two things that I have wished I could do for a living. Streaming full-time, or becoming a full-time writer putting out books for the rest of my life.

Some people look at streamers, particularly the most popular ones that make a lot of money every year, and think “all they’re doing is playing games all day, that’s easy, I could do that!” I was one of those people at first but before I jumped in to try my hand at it, I made sure to connect with smaller streamers (some of them I’m still friends with even after I stopped streaming) because then I could get better interactions and responses to understand what they were doing. I could see the toll it takes on some of them (when they publicly shared that information) and saw the way their faces could light up with a shot of instant gratification when someone would donate/tip or subscribe. The things I’ve learned along the way tell me that if I really wanted to do it, I would have to put in so much more effort than I could muster to try and build everything up, from the equipment to the audience, just to even be able to take the risk of quitting my job and making that leap. So for now, that’s a back burner hobby that I don’t do very often anymore.

So the other option is writing for a living. By comparison, this one is much easier to accomplish long term because it would be less taxing mentally and emotionally. Where streaming would require tons of “on” time for being engaging, writing can be done at my own pace and will have sporadic levels of engagement with other people. That being said, writing DOES cone with its own problems. It’s a much more “solo” enterprise if you consider that when you write you’re doing it by yourself. You’re in your own head, typically without interacting with others. Streaming is kind of the opposite because your head and mind are in a different place, and you have constant interaction with tons of people who are all yelling (typing) to be heard and seen, cheering for your wins and laughing at your digital hardships. With writing you sometimes have to be your own cheerleader. Nobody will laugh or jeer in real time to the things you’re doing. Which is okay! Aside from all of that, the risk with writing is that you can put in so much effort and not see any sort of return for years, if at all, while trying the different publishing routes. I wouldn’t be able to quit my job to shift to writing full-time unless I had landed a publishing deal. Which I obviously don’t have at this time, but maybe someday!

Was it enough to matter?

Taylor Burian2 Comments

What are you most proud of in your life?

As I get older and reflect on the things I’ve done, I see the increasing number of experiences and accomplishments but I can’t really say I’m “proud” of any one thing in particular. That’s probably because I don’t look too deeply at the details surrounding things like that, and I don’t usually attempt anything I would consider grand in scale to everything else in my life.

This question is making me reconsider those little achievements and accomplishments, looking at them deeper, isolating the elements that make them important to me and then comparing them to the rest of the details of my life at that time.

I can’t pick just one thing though. For many people just graduating college should fit this question. College is tough! Especially these days when the cost of living makes it hard to attend classes and hold down a job that makes enough money to survive. My college experience lacked some of those hardships (though I did have others) but maybe I should still be proud of it.

Other things that come to mind: so many smaller things on the day-to-day scale. Catching a stubborn horse, figuring out how to build something that wasn’t made of LEGO’s, getting my motorcycle running when I needed to rebuild the carburetor, managing to get a small Excel Office Script working with a Power Automate Flow. Most of those are actually fairly recent, but they’re similar to other things that have happened over the last 15 years.

Suffice to say, I can’t pick just one thing to be most proud of, because I don’t assign such a great value to those moments. They weren’t things I invested years of my life working toward accomplishing, but they’re mine all the same so I guess that should be enough for me to be happy.

What’s on the horizon

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What have you been working on?

I started my blog in late 2018 because I wanted to get serious about my desire to write. I’ve worked on a variety of things over the years, and been through my share of ups and downs with motivation and trying to accomplish things. I started small, and tried to build up the habits for consistency. I was streaming on Twitch for a while so I tried to tie them together. Asking viewers to submit prompts helped for a time but I got overwhelmed so I put it on hiatus to try and focus on other things. More specifically, one of those things was that I ultimately wanted to write a novel and get it published!

I haven’t gotten there yet, but in the last 8 years with the help of friends and just consuming lots of media and I’ve built up plenty of ideas and materials. So in addition to that, I’m trying to get back into a habit of consistency. Which I’m going to need if I want to actually accomplish my goals. That’s what I’m working on these days.

There was an attempt: Pizza

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For the last, I don’t know, several months I’ve been watching FoodTube. I love watching Kenji, Babish, and Joshua Weissman. Who doesn’t?

Well, after a couple weeks of watching videos from the latter of the three, I decided to try one of his pizza recipes.

I didn’t think to take any pictures last night when I was making the dough, so you’ll have to use your imagination. I followed the recipe for the Roman Dough on Joshua’s website. I measured everything out accordingly since I have a food scale (which all of them say you need for baking) and started following the directions. It did not go as I had hoped.

When I started to mix the wet and dry ingredients I didn’t fully know what to expect having only ever watched the videos (typically on my phone) so I didn’t recognize right away that something was wrong. The dough was too sticky. I pushed on anyway, thinking “maybe this is what he meant in the recipe?” I kept following the recipe as best I could. Mix, rest, slap and fold, rest, slap and fold again. Each time the dough was still too sticky, so I decided to let it rest a third time and rewatch Josh’s video on the Neapolitan vs roman pizza. Surely it was something minute that I overlooked. Nope, nothing.

So at the end of the night, after I had put my little dough baby in the fridge, I checked the recipe again. Being the usually vigilant and detail oriented person I am I did eventually notice something was off and wondered how I had missed this all important detail. Like, so important that everyone on FoodTube making dough calls it out EVERY TIME.

The measurements were wrong. I did some cross checking with other unrelated sites to confirm my suspicion as I did the math.

What Josh had in his recipe was 600g of bread flour and 432g of water (for 64% hydration). This was huge. So I took this information and submitted a message on his website to let him know. 432g would actually be 72% hydration… No wonder it was too sticky all the way through the process! If I had truly wanted to hit the 64% mark I would have ACTUALLY needed 384g of water.

So like I said, I submitted a message on the site. We’ll see if I get a response. In the meantime, if you come across this post and you’re having the same issue, know that you’re not alone.

Jack of all trades

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What’s something most people don’t know about you?

This really depends on who’s asking! Over the years I’ve been at my current job, multiple times I’ve surprised people when a conversation steers itself into my territory of random knowledge and experiences. After some of those conversations I have even had coworkers come to me privately to ask for some advice relating to whatever topic was just discussed! After a while, most of them caught on that I really am just a “jack of all trades” type. (Someone even referenced Red Green once.)

Things that I can do that have surprised my coworkers:

  • Cook and bake
  • Home maintenance/repair
  • Automotive
  • Car audio
  • Motorcycles and small engines
  • Horse care
  • Computer building
  • Coding/scripting (this is relatively new for me)
  • Streaming/broadcasting
  • Video games (this is definitely a hobby but I’ve had coworkers ask for advice for their kids sake)
  • Writing

I think that covers the knowledge and skills that have been most prevalent over the years. I’m sure there’s more I can pull up from the dusty recesses of memories but they’re probably more just travel related experiences of things I’ve done, just not consistently.

Anything catch your attention?

Taking those lazy days when I can

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Do lazy days make you feel rested or unproductive?

I go back and forth on this idea. Whenever I take a “lazy” day it depends on what I feel like doing, or not doing, at that time.

Do I want to be a total slob? Cool, I can feel rested but also feel unproductive.

Do I just want to tune out everything connected to the Internet? Rested and probably at least a little productive because then I get some little things done around the house.

Do I want to sit at my computer all day and feel like everything I would normally want to do has its own form of “writer’s block”? Not so rested and definitely unproductive.

I feel like if I really want to make the most of these situations I would ideally need more than a couple in a row, but that doesn’t happen unless I take time off work. Then I could probably choose to be lazy/rested or lazy/unproductive.

On Success and role models

Taylor Burian

When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?

Every time this kind of question comes up I go through two mental processes. Who did I think about last time? Has that changed since?

Usually, I think about the last ten or so years of my life, and the people I’ve met in that time. Almost always I come back to two different people. My brother, and my father.

My Dad has led an eventful life. Many years of military service, corporate office job/life of the 90’s, and lots of education. In those areas he’s accomplished so much and when I look back on how I saw him during the years of each of those stages, I see a different man who is somehow still the same. Maybe it’s just that I got to see different sides of him and the way his core values and habits have been applied. Diligence, perseverance, and drive. Fairness, empathy, compassion, and love. All these things have been part of his success in life, and I see it in my brother.

My brother has been the one who has lived up to the image of our father the most. Although he’s the youngest of four kids, he’s managed to pull off most of the old “American Dream” better than the rest of us. A married, kids of his own, a car, and a home. He didn’t go into the military, our Dad forbid it and always said “I did the time so you wouldn’t have to,” but he’s followed a similar career path otherwise. Maybe not to the heights of Dad, but it was enough to get to where he’s at today. When I look at these two, I like to remind myself that they’re closer in reality to the success we should all strive for and not movie stars, celebrities, and corporate big wigs. Those kinds of people had a combination of luck and gaming the system. My family has busted their asses to get to where they are today. They are the ones I think about when I think “successful.”

Office life and how much time we actually devote to work

Taylor Burian

Digging through my drafts, I found a post I had started working on almost three years ago (oops…) and it stuck out to me as something I really wanted to talk about again. That post was about how many hours people actually devote to work in a day.

The premise behind that post came from a team meeting at work. At the time that I had started drafting that post there was an external non-profit type of organization that independently hosted monthly sessions for business professionals and leaders. Several people from my department would attend regularly and bring back notes to share during team and department meetings so that way even those who couldn’t attend weren’t totally missing out. At this point I’d like to remind you that 2020 was a bad year. COVID controlled our lives for most of that year, and I was “lucky” to be working remote, which I’ll circle back to shortly. Anyways, going out of the house and attending events was not encouraged but by November of that year things had loosened up here.

Anyways, I never attended any of those sessions. So I had to take what I could get from my coworkers. Over Teams and WebEx meetings. It was a great time.

So, with the background handled, circling back to the original topic. How many hours DO you devote to work? On the daily? Weekly?

The talking points and discussion materials provided at that session covered things that I knew in the back of my mind and I had previously brought up in personal discussions with friends and family. The subject wasn’t just about time in the office or at your desk. They covered things like travel time/commutes, morning and evening routines, meal prepping for lunches (if that’s your thing.)

When they talked about all of this, it brought to mind that people working a full time job will actually devote more time than they think they do simply because there are things that happen outside of work hours that we do for the purpose of supporting our work-life balance. We devote more time to work at the cost of time devoted to our personal lives.

Now, as to why I wanted to come back to this drafted topic. That’s because three years ago when I first started that draft, everyone at work was required to go remote and temporarily reduce hours by 40%. Starting back then, my work-life balance was shot. I spent so much time at home that the days blurred together. I didn’t, and to this day still don’t, have a separate space for me to work from when I have to work from home. It felt like I was devoted to work so much more, even though there were times I did so much less even if not by choice. I could get away with condensing my usual activities and routines because I wasn’t commuting. I was steps away from the kitchen and could cook lunch. I could take five minutes to go start a load of laundry.

Things have changed since then, and I’m more less back to the usual work routines I had pre-COVID. No more blurred lines. Work-life balance mostly restored. I have the option to work remote should I need or choose to, but I have otherwise gone back to the office full time because for me it provides a nice separation of work and my personal life.

The way things should be. At least, that’s how it is for me. What about you?

Am I a good neighbor?

Taylor Burian

What makes a good neighbor?

I’d like to think I’m a good neighbor, but I guess it’s kind of subjective. What’s the dynamic of the neighborhood? Is the neighborhood filled with close-knit people who have lived there for multiple years? Who have block parties and barbecues? Or does everyone seem to just keep to themselves?

My current neighborhood is the former. Older couples with adult children who come and go, and retired couples, although a couple homes have recently been purchased by younger folks. All that said, they do some block parties and a few of them throw barbecues. I’m not usually the socializing type so I’ve only ever gone to one of these block parties despite being invited each time. I don’t think that makes me a BAD neighbor, but it probably doesn’t leave a great impression on everyone else. Not that I mind.

I think that in spite of what I’ve mentioned above, I’m an okay neighbor. I have on occasion talked with my immediate neighbors a few times, and I’ve offered help whenever I see an opportunity. Granted being a homebody and staying indoors almost all day makes it difficult to see those opportunities, I still make the offers. I also try to stay vigilant of what goes on in the area since we’ve had lots of cars broken into across the city this year, and one neighbor actually had their car stolen several months back.

So, maybe boiling it down, my idea of what makes a good neighbor is just being helpful. No matter who it is, or what their situation is, just being helpful.