Under cover of my birthday, I indulge in some personal news. Later this month I will join Hydrolix, a tiny startup with a very specific database product, as a full-time technical writer. This fulfills the career pivot I began to ponder 18 months ago, and represents both my first new job as a New Yorker and my first salaried job in over 15 years.

I am excited to start. While I expect that I will not have much to say about the job per se in public channels like this one, I also anticipate that returning to stable employment will juice up my creative and personal-toolmaking work. After my last freelance contract ended in March, I did use my pandemic-context “vacation” on projects like Whim and the still-unreleased chat thing—and all that energy petered out right around the six-month mark. I look forward to its return.

Of course, 2021 has gotten off to a wild start for all of us! I see so much hope pushing up through all the shudderingly literal death and chaos that has suffocated us for so long, and I can’t help but see this new employment as a very personal facet of that hope.

By god, we’ve fought and won ourselves a shot at building a viable future, just when it seemed like any reason for optimism had vanished forever. Let’s get to work.