[Image description: A person leans into a microphone. They are wearing red lipstick, a white top and a gold watch. There is a cell phone on the table in front of them]

Hi everyone. So this is my third time trying to record this. I know everybody – like, at least the people I follow on YouTube start everything by being like, “Oh my God I recorded this video ten times and it was a hundred minutes long each time,” so – okay, I get it now. [laughter] This is my…third time trying to record this, and I’m trying to get it under five minutes, cause I’m gonna have to transcribe it. So – you’ll notice that today’s so called “post” is different than others in that there’s an accompanying audio track. And the reason for that is because I have been toying with the idea of making a podcast. And at this point I’m probably gonna do it, I’m just not sure uh – when it’ll be out and also what it’ll be. So – let me explain myself.
The reason I wanna make a podcast is twofold. The first reason is that I think that I’m going through a really interesting period in my life, right? I just graduated from college and while I was in college, I don’t know if I either wasn’t seeking this information out or it just straight up didn’t exist, but I didn’t hear a lot of the existential dread that people had, you know, post graduation. So I want to talk about that and I’m like, half kidding about existential dread. Um…I want to make a podcast to talk about my experiences in a bigger context, right? Like, I’m a Black queer person who just moved to the South. I just graduated from college, and graduated from like, an elite, private liberal arts school, which I’m realizing now that I work at a university, is a particular experience that I can speak to pretty well. And so there are these different facets of my life that I’m trying to explore and my hope is that ah, sharing them will be helpful to somebody. Um, you know I already know folks that I wanna talk to, um, I’m just not sure about what and so I’d really like to know what would be helpful for folks. In reading my blog, or really you could just say like, “how does one start collecting things?” or something you know like, something that it seems like I wouldn’t know anything about, right? Like…[laughter] I just want to start uh – working on the podcast, um, but you know I wanna do it well.
Um, and the second reason that I want to do a podcast is because I think there’s a lot of power in the human voice. I think that it’s really important to hear people’s messages, or to communicate in ways that people are receptive too right? So for some folks that might mean hearing things as opposed to just reading them, and so in prepping for this podcast I started recording my blog posts and I realized they sounded completely different. And what I mean by that is that the message seemed completely different when I was speaking it versus writing, or hearing my voice hearing my voice crack or hearing myself cry when I was talking about stuff and um, I very much think, I try to think about stuff on like, several different planes in terms of like, how things sound, how they look, how they smell [laughter]. Whatever, but my point is that I think that having a couple different layers to my content is really important and can affect people in different ways than just maintaining a blog. The other reason that I…want to…have a podcast is because I’ve been trying to keep things purposely vague – I’m quite private and so I haven’t talked about what prompted me to write about grace, you know, what it really felt like to have a couple hardships in my family this year and such and so I…I think that having another person there to have a conversation with and almost act as a facilitator maybe really interesting. And too, you know, some of the podcasts might be by myself. Um…but, also like on the note of speaking and hearing, I’m trying to make this content as accessible as possible and so I’ll try to – I will transcribe uh, any and everything that I’m posting up in an auditory way.
So, follow me on Twitter @allisonalcena [el-SEE-nuh] that’s how it’s pronounced [laughter]. Tweet me ideas that you have um, or fill out the contact page. What do you want to hear from me? And that also could be blog posts as well, too. So, thank you for listening. I also have a blog post coming down the pipe, coming down the line? What is the phrase? Um, about appearance, which is you know, quite theoretical but I’m trying to break out of that by talking about very real and tangible ways that my appearance plays into my life. And this is ironic because I’m recording – you can’t see me [laughter]. And you know at some point I also might make videos as well, I’m hoping to do that too. Let me know what ideas you have and thank you for listening!

Image from createherstock.com.