Pilcrow

Underworld, "Two Months Off" (radio edit), A Hundred Days Off (video embedded below)



(The radio edit doesn't really do justice to the whole song, but the video's kind of cool and it's what's available.)

I didn't really intend to take two months off from posting in my journal. As I noted in my last post, I had a lot going on in October, between volunteer work with KEXP for Decibel Festival, the fall membership drive, and the City Arts Festival, and paid work also at KEXP for a week full-time, followed by a couple freelance projects that took a lot more time than I was expecting. That carried on into November, which was one of the busiest months for work I've had as a freelancer. It was a bit odd in fact, as although I did still get out at least once each week to hang out with friends, I felt like for a good six weeks I spent all my waking time working. However, that was a much-needed counterpart to the six weeks in July and August when I spent no time working at all. In any case, although I did take one evening a week to do something fun with friends, I skipped trivia night a few times and I also had to skip all of my intern work for KEXP—I made it in once during my busy time but had to work on photos and blog posts for City Arts Fest coverage, rather than my usual content management tasks. Obviously, I also stopped trying to keep up with daily journal posts, not that there would've been much to say most days other than that I was still really busy.

Work eased up just before Thanksgiving, partly in volume and partly in pressure. I actually still have a fair amount of work to be doing, but I've been having a terrible time motivating myself this month to focus and get things done. That's a serious problem of course, as I do have work to do and I do need to keep up a good level of billable hours not just to finish recovering from the disastrously slow summer but also simply to carry forward with supporting myself—making a living, not just staving off collapse. I have some ideas for turning that around, though.

At first, I wasn't really interested in resuming my journal posts, either. Not that I intended to abandon the journal entirely, just that I knew I'd missed a couple music-related posts and didn't feel like catching up yet, and also didn't really have anything else to say. But I've had a growing restlessness in the past week or so, partly because my usual Internet haunts haven't offered enough distraction to keep me occupied, and partly because I've been wanting to dive into some good inspirational gaming fantasy material, but not finding anything in the usual places nor looking elsewhere, I've felt the urge instead to write more of my own. Perversely though, I deliberately waited until today to return to my journal just so that I could post the "Two Months Off" video, two months after my last post. 

Anyhow, I am still here (don't call it a comeback), and I will be posting more regularly, again, if not daily. I do still have some music-related posts to do, including a long-overdue review of the album Uncovered Volume 1 that I owe Unwoman, and also belated posts about Decibel Festival and City Arts Festival. And as I say, I want to do some more creative writing, more about Cetak and maybe other stuff further afield. I really have no good idea who reads this journal anymore; every now and then a friend mentions that they read it, which is cool, but now that Facebook is no longer automatically importing posts into the Notes app, I don't know whether people there will follow the Networked Blogs link back here to read. And of course with two months of silence, I may have lost some people too. But then this has always been an outlet for me before anything else, so I will write because I want to, and hope that someone else still reads and enjoys it.

As a sort of footnote: posting the "Two Months Off" video prompted me to listen to Underworld's 2010 album Barking, which I've only listened to a couple times since I got it, and not at all in months and months. I'm pleased to be reminded it's rather good, though I think it could use a bit more diversity in song styles, like A Hundred Days Off and Beaucoup Fish.

Does anyone even still read my journal by coming directly to LiveJournal? I have no idea. And annoyingly, without any announcement or explanation that I saw, LiveJournal changed something about how they measure visitors, because in the middle of June my statistics for "all visitors" suddenly dropped from an average somewhere between 30 to 50 a day to maybe 5 a day. I have no idea whether that means the count was inflated before the change or the count is now under-reported.

Anyhow, I bring all that up because on LiveJournal, my page has a sidebar. And one of the sidebar elements is a set of links to other sites, primarily other personal blogs I read regularly (and consider those people friends, although in a few cases I've barely met the authors in real life, if ever). Well, I've been thinking for quite a while that I ought to update that sidebar; some of the blogs no longer update or no longer even exist, while other blogs that I do read regularly aren't in the list.

I'm dropping the link to "my MySpace music-only blog", because I stopped cross-posting my concert reviews back in 2009 when I also stopped writing them regularly, and now that I'm back to writing them, MySpace is increasingly irrelevant.

For friends' blogs, I'm dropping a few:

• I'm changing the link for bluishorange to Alison's Tumblr site, which she updates regularly. But I'll keep checking the classic bluishorange periodically, hoping for new posts, because she's a great writer.
• Electrolicious because I never bothered to register when Ariel made it semi-private and so I stopped reading it. However, I'd bet it's still worth reading if you want to check it out; she hasn't stopped being smart and sassy, I'm sure.
• FishSuit by Scott Dierdorf is defunct, which is very very sad.
• Elizabeth's Geek's Guide to Getting the Girl is still up and worth a read, but she completed the series and is no longer updating.

A couple I'm going to keep despite myself:

• Annie has been very sporadic about updating This Is Annie, but she does still occasionally make new posts, and I'm always happy when she does.
• Zannah likewise no longer really updates vox.machina; in fact, I stopped checking for months, and only recently discovered that she'd apparently gone through a revival at the start of this year, only to break off again in late March. But Zannah's directly responsible for me having a LiveJournal, so I'll keep a link up for her (and hope she gets back to writing again).

And for the record, the other links I'm keeping in the list are:

• Linda's All & Sundry, which updates less frequently than it used to and more often has posts that are largely photos, but man, she knows how to write.
• John likewise posts sporadically at The Mighty Atom, but as a great designer of both tabletop games and graphic arts (as well as my friend), it's always something interesting.
• Farida's Saints & Spinners is another one that could go under "keeping despite myself" because honestly I rarely read it—sorry, Farida—but she does post somewhat regularly about storytelling, the felt dolls she creates and sells on Etsy, and life in general, and I do recommend checking it out. (And like everyone else in my blogroll, she writes well.)
• And the "year" of Tony's Year of the Dungeon is now over, but he does still occasionally post updates and new artwork.

Rather than add a bunch of new links and make this post even longer, I'll save the list of new blogs for tomorrow.

I should have just declared this to be a vacation week for my journal, I think. Yesterday: quick vacuuming of my place for a condo board meeting later that day, Go Play NW meeting, some running around to deliver Go Play NW posters and cards to a couple game stores, condo board meeting, spending time at Caffe Ladro trying to write a cover letter for a job application, late dinner. Today: data auditing at KEXP all afternoon, quick dinner, trivia night, now I've been at Bauhaus doing a quick high-level review of a 14-page paper, I still have to head home, finish the paper, and also really need to get that job application submitted. I'm working full-time days at KEXP for the next three days, which means I have to get up extra early and should not be up late tonight; i have definite fun plans for Thursday and Friday, and hope to be busy tomorrow night as well; and I may also have this paper come back for extensive editing, though I hope not as I really won't have time to do it properly before the weekend at least. Just a lot going on this week, no time to put thought toward the couple of topics I've been thinking about writing and no better thoughts for other quick topics. And I hate both skipping days outright and also making these short posts of no consequence about how I don't have time or quick ideas to write about. And yet I'm still not going to declare a vacation because I'm still going to hope that somehow I'll be able to squeeze in some kind of quick posts that'll be more interesting to read. I think I'll just have to try to do some stream-of-consciousness nonsense. But I've written all this already and need to get going, so this will do for today.

I've been busy catching up on the concert reviews, and I'm really close to done now—I've just got one more from last month, the Hotels CD release show, and then two for this month and I'm done. It'll be funny to be caught up again, I actually wonder now what will I write about. I haven't written any Dungeon World-related stuff in a while—or even thought much about it, which is bad as I'm supposed to start running a game of it tomorrow—and I can get back to that, for one thing. And I'll have the usual stuff about my life, although I do want to avoid going back into a series of "ugh, not getting things done" posts (which means I have to do something about that).

But I think doing all these music posts at once emphasizes how much of my life revolves around music. Maybe I'll need to branch out and start talking about albums, not just live performances. When I'm not listening to KEXP, I tend to listen to my own music on random shuffle, which is great for variety but means that I tend to not become very familiar with the new albums I buy. So going back to review albums would get me to listen to some of them a few more times. Another thing I keep thinking of doing is going through the catalogues of some well-known musicians with whom I feel I ought to be more familiar—David Bowie for example, or something challenging for me like Public Enemy. That's more work since it means finding what I can dig up at the library and managing to get copies, or sometimes maybe finding all the individual songs on YouTube or something (not file-sharing though, I just refuse to bother with any of that stuff). I suppose it doesn't always have to be the full back catalogue, it could just be key albums; that at least would help me to tackle the challenge. Anyhow, something to think about.

I really need to make some time to get the rest of the 2010 concert summaries or reviews written. I've forgotten a lot of details, and in several cases I just have the list of bands that played anyhow, so I should be done with that. Plus, I want to be writing about the shows I'm currently seeing. I started writing about seeing Unwoman again, when she performed on January 1, and haven't finished yet because I put it aside when I needed to look up some of her songs so I could write coherently about the show. I'm not happy I did that, because now it's six weeks later and I wanted that one done while it was still fresh in my mind. And now I want to write about seeing Gang of Four last night, but I want to get the Unwoman write-up done first. I did just skip ahead to write about Dancing on the Valentine, but I knew I'd only have a sentence or two at most to say about each band, since it was a tribute concert. Also, I've got a bunch of other shows coming up soon, including one I'll be reviewing for KEXP, so that's another reason to get these done.

Of course, now I've got another work project to do—which certainly is a very good thing—so that means I'll end up deferring the music writing and several other things until the paid work is done. I think maybe one thing I have to do is simply short-circuit my thought processes about what's top priority, since I've still been avoiding some of the stuff that I think is the most important for me to get done, and just tackle some of the other things even if they're not what I "should" be getting done first. Reading that book on time management clearly ought to be the top priority…

This is the kind of day when I really needed to start writing much earlier, because I still have music writing to catch up on, or I could have written more about Dungeon World stuff, or I might have found some other topic to discuss. I just wrote a somewhat lengthy bit about editing work for a forum discussion, but I'm not sure it'd be a good idea to post that here, which is too bad because a quick copy and paste would have nicely filled out a post for today. And so instead in the last ten minutes of the day I'm struggling to come up with something to post, which is kind of ridiculous and maybe it'd be better to just skip today, but I hate to do that. Bah. Sorry, filler post again. 

Sometimes, the longer I sit here, the harder it becomes to write.

Looks like this will be another filler post. I'm still pretty tired, presumably from the combination of having a cold and traveling, so I don't want to write anything long. I did feel somewhat better today, after spending a good 13 hours or so sleeping last night and this morning, but I still found myself feeling pretty tired even early this evening. Sitting here trying to write doesn't help, either.

I've realized too that I'll probably have to start making posts early in the day, as I can expect to be busy at least several evenings while I'm home, due to hanging out with friends. I don't particularly want to post early, as I feel I need to make an effort to take care of some other business during the day too, but it's the only way I can be sure to get things done. I may just devote myself to writing all the archive concert summaries and reviews I haven't done, since that will remove the trouble of thinking up topics and also meet one of my goals. 

For now, off to bed.

I called my friend Doug in Boston tonight to catch up with him and talk about plans for Christmas, since I'll be there next week. I should've made a post earlier, since I knew I'd be on the phone for a few hours and didn't think I'd have even this five minutes to make a post. But I was out doing work this afternoon, and then had a condo board meeting, and then made dinner. So I didn't really have time to write then. And now I'm just filling in a quick note of no consequence whatsoever. Which I don't like doing, as I've posted about before. But I also don't like seeing days with no posts, since I committed to posting daily as an exercise in discipline, as well as opportunities to develop my own writing. And so the result is this kind of thing. Tomorrow I should have time for something of a little more substance. I want to write some more about the cosmology thing, but haven't had time to shape my thoughts about it. And now I don't have any more time to write, I've got about a minute left to post. The end.

I know I had an idea last night, after finishing yesterday's long post, for something else to write about today, but now I can't remember what it was.

I was reminded, after writing my concert summary for August and September 2009, that I'd forgotten about seeing Beehive playing the Dead Baby Bike Rally afterparty; and I've just remembered that I also went to see them play at Hempfest, of all things, at that time as well. But I didn't leave myself enough time to write about that, and I don't want to post yet another draft and finish it after midnight.

I also don't want to write about how troubled things are for me right now—it's the same old story, not enough work, just about broke, not doing enough to get more work. Who wants to read that? It's as tiresome to me as it must be to you, and just as exasperating that I'm largely responsible for it. Bah.

I thought about writing about how I'm hopelessly optimistic, how despite my current troubles I always seem to be able to put that aside and just expect that things will get better. Again, not enough time to gather my thoughts.

Good things today: got out of the house, got a ticket to see Black Angels next Monday, got stuff for Thanksgiving, made a decent dinner, made blueberry sherbet for tomorrow. Not good: a disappointing delay in a personal matter (but no big deal, just a matter of waiting until the new year), and learning that I'm not getting a good layout project after all because the client wants to do it in a different way. And, typing that last bit took just enough time that I had to post this as an incomplete draft, damnit.

Really, I shouldn't even be trying to assess the past month right now. I'm tired because I spent over 12 hours yesterday on an editing project, staying up past 5 this morning in order to get it done. I'm also supposed to be working on another project right now, and I'm feeling daunted by the required tasks and worried I won't be able to get it done properly in time. So those factors no doubt are coloring my view of this month.

That said, most of this month I haven't felt too positive about my progress on the list for August. Let's see, I carried over 20 items from the list for July, and added 16 items for August. I completed only four items in the July section, and marked another five as "started"; I completed three August items and only started one other one.* That's pretty terrible. It's hard to judge too which is worse: the many tasks that should be easy to complete but aren't done, or the few tasks that are very important and aren't even started, or maybe have been started but should've been completed long since. 

*EDIT: I have since decided to mark two "started" items as "done"—posting daily, since I did follow through on that (although I missed two days); and learning about fixing or replacing the loose outlets, since I did ask some people about that and got the answer I needed, which is that I'll just have to replace them.

I really don't know about the list-making. It doesn't seem to be helping me act in a more accountable or responsible fashion, in fact it's threatening to contribute to my bad behavior of avoiding doing anything because I don't want to do some of the hard tasks and I hate to do some of the easier and more fun ones when I have more important things to do. On the other hand, if I stop making a list, that doesn't mean all those tasks just evaporate.

Notably, one of the un-started tasks is about reading self-help books, one of which is Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play. I got the book back in February at the urging of my sister, and haven't even opened it yet. Clearly the book is worthless: if I could get myself to read it, then I wouldn't need it in the first place! My sister sent me a sign recently that simply states "Nothing works until you do," but then isn't that the problem in a proverb.

Well, the proverb certainly does apply right now: I have to get back to figuring out how to improve this PowerPoint deck.