Back when I went on sabbatical in 2022, I told the story of the fiddle leaf fig tree I bought shortly after my ex-wife and I separated and I’d moved into my own apartment.

I’d recently moved into my own apartment after separating from my wife and figured a large plant in my new place would add some liveliness to a new beginning that was feeling overwhelming, lonely, and sad. For the first couple of months, I didn’t know if my tree and I were going to make it. I’d never really had a plant before and struggled getting a handle on the watering schedule and other plant care routines. It started losing leaves. Like, an alarming number of leaves.

I’d brought this glorious living thing into my house only to kill it! Not cool. With the stress of the separation, my new living situation, and not seeing my kids every day, I felt a little like I was dying too.

One day, I decided I was not going to let my fiddle leaf fig tree die…and if I could do that, I wasn’t going to fall apart either. It’s a little corny, but my mantra became “if my tree is ok, I am ok”. I learned how to water & feed it and figured out the best place to put it for the right amount of light. It stopped shedding leaves.

The fig tree was a happy plant for several years after that. And I was ok because my plant was ok — I found new routines and rhythms in my altered life, made new traditions with my kids, got divorced, met new people, moved to a new state (w/ my family and tree), rediscovered who I was as a person, and, wonderfully and unexpectedly, forged a supportive and rewarding parenting partnership and friendship with my ex. We made it through that tough time together, that plant and me.

I got a lot of feedback from that post…so many kind notes and comments. But there was one email from a reader that particularly stuck in my mind. Of course I can’t find the actual message in my disaster of an inbox, but the gist of it was something like: There may come a time when you feel like you need to let your fiddle leaf fig go and that will be ok too.

Over the next few years, I thought often of that email. About how my tree, which in some sense kept me going during one period of my life, might not be quite right for whatever the next period in my life would be.

Recently, that time arrived. I carried the fig out to my car, stopping to snap this pic on the way:

I loaded it into the car and drove it a short distance to its new home with my friend and her three young boys. Here it is in its new habitat:

Looks pretty good, right? Like it belongs there. I’m really happy it found such a good new home. I hope it thrives along with their family.

A few days ago, about two weeks after the tree departed, I left my house in Vermont for the last time too. In the preceding months, I’d sold some of my things (including my car), given a bunch of stuff away, and put the rest in storage. I drove my rental car to Boston and got on a flight to Toyko. Right now, I’m sitting in a cafe near my rental apartment writing this post, jetlagged but happy to be here.

So what’s my plan? I’m going to travel for an indeterminate period (mostly outside of the US and dipping back in for visits), starting in Japan for a couple of months. I don’t know where I’m going next yet — probably somewhere closer to the US so I can visit my kids more easily during this transition.

Zooming out a bit, the broader plan is to attempt to answer the questions that I’ve been thinking about for the past few years, ever since I went on a Walk and Talk in Thailand:

Where do you call home? And why?

I’ve been struggling with the concept of home for the past several years. NYC very much felt like home to me shortly after I moved there in 2003 in a way that Minneapolis and (especially) San Francisco hadn’t. Since moving to Vermont in 2016, I’ve never really felt at home here. But NYC isn’t home anymore…and neither is Wisconsin, where I grew up. Where do I want to go to find a home? Do I need to feel at home somewhere? Or is home simply wherever my bed/desk/stuff happens to be? I had more questions than answers around this issue and I was interested in how other people in the group, which included folks that had lived and travelled all over the world, would answer the question.

I’m not going to lie…I’m a little terrified. Sitting on the plane to Narita, I looked out the window thinking “what have I done?” But I’m also excited. Living elsewhere in the world has been on my mind for a long while and at this point, I can’t not do it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

As for what this means for KDO: hopefully not much and only good things. I moved; I didn’t retire. As I get more settled here and my body accepts its new timezone, regular service will resume. I’m hoping the more stimulating surroundings and injection of culture shows up in interesting ways in my life and on the website. I don’t think KDO will ever become a travel blog, but I imagine I’ll write sometimes about where I am and what I’m doing. I’ve got a backlog of things I want to do for the site and now that the massive time sink of moving is done, I’ll have the opportunity to do them.

For now, I’m going to pack my computer up and walk to find something tasty for lunch — I’ve so missed being able to easily do that. Catch you on the flip side.

Tags: Jason Kottke · kottke.org

Post-pandemic vaccination rates of US kindergarteners continue to fall and “nonmedical exemptions” based on “personal or religious beliefs” jumped 0.8% in just 1 year.

I love the aesthetic of Fresco, a video game where you play as a character embedded into Egyptian wall paintings. In many ways, these wall paintings are ancient precursors to side-scrolling games.

On Friday, I got a bee in my bonnet that this t-shirt should exist and so I made it and now you can buy it. The shirt is simple, straightforward, $25 (+s&h), and ships all over the world.

A promotion. Making a new friend. Or the big cork-popping event; you know the one. Today could be the day!

Maybe it’ll even happen before the shirt reaches your mailbox! We should be so lucky.

Thanks to Dan Cederholm at SimpleBits for his Free Lunch font and to Fourthwall for handling the shopping, printing, and fulfillment.

Oh, and I also zhuzhed up the Goods page, where you can still get the Hypertext, Process, and Choppke’s tees. More fine not-hypertext products to come soon.

Tags: fashion · kottke.org

Om died two days ago, after a long battle against a bum heart.

Om and I often sat next to each other at Apple keynotes. This was not at all surprising or odd, insofar as we’d been friends for 20 years. Folks at Apple PR knew that we were close, and would often pair us together in post-keynote media briefings. I always enjoyed being paired with him. He asked keen questions. He saw through bullshit. He found holes in arguments. He took everything in. When I felt overwhelmed, he seemed serene. Om always seemed serene, period. His own photography reflects his presence.

Also, he was funny and fun. Profoundly generous. A good person to be around. A great person to know and be known by. He knew everyone and everyone knew Om. A lot of the people I know in this racket, I know through Om. Every time he’d introduce me to someone, he’d embarrass me with praise for my work. He greeted everyone with a compliment and whatever he said, he meant it. He had kind words to offer everyone because he had a gift for recognizing good things about everyone. He didn’t have an insincere bone in his body, which made him intensely lovable as a friend, and fiercely acerbic and accurate as a critic of technology. “He did not mince words” and “Everyone loved him” do not usually apply to the same person. They did with Om.

He was, of course, a Yankees fan.

So, no, it was not odd that he and I gravitated toward each other at Apple events. But the fact that Om continued to be invited to these events, with a media badge, was in fact unusual. He had stepped away from day-to-day journalism and became an investor back in 2014. A decade later, he was still on the short list of top invitees to events at Apple. His reputation warranted that respect. His ongoing writing and analysis — right up until the very end — continued to earn it. So of course Om continued to be invited to, and attend, these events. He was Om Fucking Malik. His presence improved any room, and lifted everyone’s mood. He made grumps smile. You couldn’t help it.

When he stepped aside from his namesake website GigaOm in 2014, Om wrote:

“Now it is time for the next chapter,” wrote Derek Jeter, the New York Yankees shortstop and my 2nd favorite Yankee (behind Bernie Williams), sharing his intention to retire at the end of 2014. “I have new dreams and aspirations and new challenges. And I want the ability to move at my own pace, see the world and finally have a summer vacation.”

I relate to Jeter’s desire to find life outside of work. Living a 24-hour news life has come at a personal cost. I still wake in middle of the night to check the stream to see if something is breaking, worrying whether I missed some news.

It is a unique type of addiction that only a few can understand, and it is time for me to opt out of this non-stop news life. After five years as a “venture partner,” I am joining True Ventures as a partner, and thus bringing an end to my life as a professional journalist.

Om, somehow, went straight from new-media wunderkind to éminence grise of tech journalism. Back when he was blogging, he blogged hard — multiple breaking-news posts per day, every day, while he was working as an acclaimed reporter for Business 2.0, Forbes, and Red Herring. That’s not what he did for the latter half of his career at all. He began changing his pace and perspective after suffering a heart attack in 2008, at the age of 42. He knew what he wanted to change, he told us he was going to change it, and then he did it. Thinking about his career transformation brings to mind the great Donald Knuth’s remarks regarding email:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

What email is to Knuth, the 24-hour news cycle was to Om. He’d had enough, and recognized it. He no longer wanted to be on top of things. He wanted to be on the bottom of things. He transformed himself from the bloggiest of quick-trigger bloggers into the most thoughtful of essayists. He went from documenting what was happening, as it happened, to explaining why. He was very, very good at that — he saw things through a singular perspective and expressed his thoughts with a singular voice.

Om was never impressed by who someone was, what they’d previously accomplished, what grand wealth they’d garnered, or stature they’d achieved. It’s human nature to be overwhelmed by awe in the presence of great people. Om was not. To impress Om, you needed to deliver impressive new work. He was impervious to riptides of hype. Those are superpowers in this racket.

I texted him on June 1 to coordinate meeting up at WWDC the next week. That’s when he filled me in that he’d been hospitalized in the ICU at Stanford since mid-April, and the situation was dire. He needed a heart transplant or he wouldn’t live. I knew he’d been dealing with health issues in recent years, but I had no idea it had become so acute. We’d been chatting regularly for weeks — largely because he’d been so prolific of late, on topics exactly aligned with my own recent attention. He’d been doing some of the best writing and analysis of his career this year — but for the last few weeks, unbeknownst to me, and most of the world, that writing was from a bed in the ICU.¹ This is going to sound cornier than a bucket of Jiffy-Pop, but it is a profound irony that a man with such a big and beautiful figurative heart could have such a lousy literal one.

I apologized for calling out his website in my “What Is a Dickover?” interactive essay, which I hadn’t warned him about, and had posted just three days before he told me of his medical plight. He told me not to worry, I was right, it was annoying, and he’d fix it. I didn’t think he’d get to that. But I checked today, and it’s gone.

Om didn’t keep his health crisis secret, per se. He kept it private. That was very Om. He was generous and effusive, often ebullient, always intense. But he was, in many ways, inscrutable. Private. Contemplative. Comfortable with himself, and by himself. I’ve never met anyone like Om Malik. They broke that mold after minting one.

I seldom ask anyone for professional advice, but when I did, I often asked Om. We did not do exactly the same thing, he and I, but we did close to the same thing. He understood what I do — or at least, what I try to do here — in a way that few others could. Among those of us who came of age in the first decade of blogging, who aspired to make it a career, the common route was to go from independent blogging to a salaried byline at an established big-name publication with roots in print as a magazine or newspaper. Om went the other way — from acclaimed reporter in top-shelf print magazines to turning GigaOm into a phenomenon. I never saw Daring Fireball as a stepping stone to greater things. I wanted only to make Daring Fireball a great thing. Om recognized that. In one of my earliest memories of meeting him — I think when I was working at Joyent, circa 2006 — we discussed publishing and new media and my own ambitions. He told me I should just keep doing what I was doing. Establishment media was a bloated slow-moving mess, he said. The future, he was absolutely certain, would be controlled by creators building their own brands and reputations, not subserving a legacy media publication. I told him I had no such plan. He said, “Good. You don’t need them. They need you.”

Om loved good coffee, nice watches, exotic pens, Apple products, the media industry, photography (both the art and the gadgetry), and the New York Yankees. So, yeah — he and I always had more to talk about than time to talk when we were together. Always. But it was the Yankees we talked about most. He loved about the Yankees what I love about the Yankees — that they embody the pursuit of excellence. Not just winning, but winning the right way. The Yankees play in Yankee Stadium, not Shitco Cellular Service & Financial Bank Park. He got angry about the Yankees by what gets me angry about them. Not when they merely lose. That’s baseball. But when they get cheap, or stupid, or both. (You did not want to get Om started on Hal Steinbrenner, who is definitely cheap and possibly stupid.)

We attended a handful of games together at the Stadium. One time, he told me the most amazing story. When he first immigrated to New York in 1993, and was hustling to make a career in journalism in the U.S., he supported himself with a job selling luggage across the street from (old) Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. If you’ve ever been to New York, you know those stores. He worked at one. He didn’t know anyone in New York, let alone anyone in the U.S. business or technology news media. And he didn’t know a damn thing about baseball. So, on many days, he’d work all day and into the early evening, and then go across the street and buy a cheap seat in the upper deck and watch the Yankees. You’re never alone in a stadium. He learned baseball, and he fell in love with the Yankees on the cusp of the remarkable Jeter-Rivera-Pettitte-Posada dynasty. Om’s favorite player of that era was the serene Bernie Williams, of course. (Mine was Paul O’Neill, the hothead. Of course.)

I said, “I’ve always wondered about those stores. There’s so many of them. Does anyone actually buy luggage at those places?”

“John, you would be surprised. But they do not sell themselves. You have to sell them. It is hard work. The people who buy suitcases in those stores buy them there because they want to argue about prices. It is a fight every day.”

In Om’s telling, the threads were all infused. His lonesome isolation as a young immigrant, 7,000 miles from his birthplace. Falling in love with baseball (in general) and the Yankees (in particular) at just the right time — a crash course in American culture and an antidote to loneliness, rolled into one pinstriped package. His burning ambition to break into major U.S. journalism. And the daily humbling grind of selling suitcases on the hot summer sidewalks of the Bronx.

Om didn’t sell suitcases for long. But I’ll bet while he did, he was pretty fucking good at it. He didn’t wait for his future to arrive. He made it happen. Careers — hell, our entire lives — are like those suitcases. They don’t sell themselves.

He not busy being born is busy dying, wrote Dylan. Om Malik wasn’t busy dying even when he was dying.

“British energy major BP on Tuesday reported that first-quarter profits more than doubled from a year ago, following a surge in oil and gas prices driven by the Middle East conflict.” Oh, surprise surprise.