About three weeks ago, I redesigned this website. It was once a grey, clunky Dreamweaver mess, and now it is a bright, white Movable Type mess. I anticipated that when the website’s content was actually updated more frequently than once every two years, I could generate more traffic. Boy, was I wrong. Since the redesign, the traffic to my site has been cut to a third of what it used to be. Change is not always good.

Over the last few weeks, my wife and I have packed up our lives and moved from South Florida to Chicago. We did not do this for a job, we did not do this for family, we did not do this for many of the reasons that anyone would uproot themselves, throw everything they own into a rickety truck and plow across the country with a cat yowling in the back seat. We did it because we were restless.

Florida has been great to us in many ways. In other ways it has been nearly intolerable. We decided that it is a fabulous place to vacation. But to live a low-income life, Florida just taunts you with its possibilities: “Would you like to visit the beach that is only minutes away? Oh, you can’t because you have to do your laundry and grocery shopping.” “Would you like to go on a cruise? Oh, you can’t because you have no time or money because of your piddly full-time job.”

Opportunities for us within our fields were non-existant, so we would both be required to work low-paying jobs to which we didn’t feel we could really contribute. So, if this were going to be the case, we figured that we could do this just as easily in Chicago around friends and a more active art community.

It’s a change - a violent change. We have yet to see if it is a productive change.