Quality Problems

I guess if the worst thing you can say about your life is that there is too much purposeful, productive, and outright entertaining stuff to do than you can possibly manage, you might be doing okay after all.  Actually that’s not the worst thing I could say about my life, but it’s the worst thing I’m going to say, at least for the time being.

I’m gradually getting more into the meat of my project for RPM Challenge.  This is requiring not only writing and rehearsal, but trying to the best of my ability to learn how to use ProTools and also finding some royalty-free sound files to use, which is a first for me.

I’m also planning on appearing at The Poet and the Patriot’s open mike this Saturday, which means I need to rehearse.  I’d like to work in a fresh tune or two; ideally I’d be unveiling a new song this weekend but it might have to wait until next time.

Since in addition to singing and playing guitar, I also dabble in about half a dozen other instruments, it’s necessary to put forth some effort to keep in touch with all of them, so to speak.  Last year my ability to organize a coherent practice routine was floundering rather badly, so I started by declaring January “flute month” – I played the Native American flute every day from December 31st to January 30th.  Now February is “ukulele month.”  I started my daily practice on February 2 and plan to continue until March 2.  Now I also have repeating reminders in my planner to go over my flute repertoire every few days so that my month’s progress doesn’t get covered in mental mold.

The job search and other business activities continue.  I have to make a few calls this afternoon, too.  It’s hard…I’m so attracted to the idea of being able to serve someone, and it’s not as if I’m terribly hurt by rejection but it sometimes seems to come in a flood, and that gets old in a hurry.

Aside from that it’s the typical 5-ring circus in my brain; so many things I want to do and accomplish, and at the most I can really only be awake 17 hours out of the day…this is not easy!  Still, it’s fun sometimes.  I’d like to focus more on the abundance of a life focused on creation, healing, and learning rather than the overwhelm of The To-Do List that Wouldn’t Die.

Trundling along

Just a few words to let any regular readers out there know I’m still alive, fairly well, and creating.

I’m doing RPM Challenge.  I don’t know if I’m going to ultimately end up doing my recording with ProTools, my old multitracker, or perhaps some of each, but I’m learning to use ProTools, and I’m thinking that sometimes it’s more important to get going than it is to sit there planning.  No reason why I can’t think on my feet if it comes to it, right?

Time just seems to be racing forward, and I wish it would take some of my progress with it.  I’m involved in an album for the month now in addition to my usual stuff…and there are days like today when even doing the laundry sounds utterly exhausting.

Of course my little sleep disturbance last night didn’t help at all.  I passed out around 1am trying to accomplish stuff, had a very violent and weird nightmare, woke up around 2am, tried desperately to get a hold of someone or other for support, finally got back to sleep around 5am, and then woke up long about the time when church was ending.  (By that point I had hoped originally to have not only attended church but made it to the laundromat…not at all promising.  Pretty depressing actually.)

With the help of a few friends I’m collecting up my consciousness and trying to move forward.  At 4pm I’ve covered almost all the items in my “morning routine.”  Oy.

Still, I have a lot to do and I’m going to do it.  Off I go.

ProTools is now installed

Can I hear an “alleluia”?! I finally called in a computer expert. Sounds like he did in an hour what I’d been struggling to do for over a month. Let it never be said I didn’t try to be independent…or that I didn’t know when to call in a pro because I’d fallen flat on my face. So tomorrow I’ll pick up my computer and start evaluating how difficult it seems it will be to use the program, and from there I’ll make my decision about RPM Challenge 2008.

Also, this was another TaKeTiNa weekend! I know I’ve sung its praises before here, but this is just highly powerful work/play…and a ton of fun – highly recommended for anyone interested in rhythm, the learning process, or consciousness and awareness.

This is more a brief check-in; I’m in a quiet place and feel like I need to get a few more things before bed, and I’d like to get some sleep and hopefully get up early enough for my errands tomorrow. More fanciful and detailed blogging is on the way later this week though!

Preparation or Bike-shedding?

“…Well, with all that talk of changing the infrastructure and the punctuation conventions and things like that, it just sounds like a lot of bike-shedding going on there,” he said casually, grabbing a would-be escapee anchovy with his fork.

“Bike-shedding?”  I was sure I’d heard wrong.

“Oh, you haven’t heard that one?,” he said between bites of pizza.  “Well, the idea is ‘hey, we’re building the world’s best bike shed’…meanwhile the bicycle is out rusting in the rain, which means that even a tarp thrown over it would be better than waiting for the very innovative shed.”

“So kind of like ‘best is the enemy of better’?”

“More or less.”

I got in around 8pm and was up until 4:30am last night.  What was I doing all that time?  I can’t say that I remember, actually.  All I know is it was mostly stuff on my to-do list, and most of the stuff on my to-do list tends to be an intermediate step toward a bigger goal.  The main things I remember doing were sending emails, refining my goal-setting documents, and writing a comedy script…don’t give me that look, now…yes, I was writing a comedy script!  And yes, I had a reason for doing it.

I still don’t have ProTools set up.  I’m hoping to get that done this afternoon, but realistically there is no guarantee it’s going to happen.  The folks at tech support are doing their best but so far something just hasn’t quite worked…and even when I’m set up with CBR, it’ll take time to learn to use it.  I don’t like the idea of opting out of this year’s RPM Challenge though, so I’m considering that if nothing else I could either take baby steps into using ProTools or firing up the multitracker for one more month…in either case my novelty album concept would be a way to participate without making myself crazy.  It occurred to me that it would be great to have some spoken-word pieces in between songs to sort of flesh out the character who’s at the center of the musical concept…so I’ve been writing a script.

Oddly enough, I still go to bed at night feeling that I haven’t accomplished much for my music.  It occurred to me that it’s because even if I spend two hours writing a comedy script and it’s part of a recording project and it goes really well and I really enjoy it…I’m still not making music.  In fact what I’m doing is…

• writing a script, so I can…
• record a fake conversation with a fictional character, so I can…
• get a better sense of what some of the song concepts I haven’t yet settled on will be, so I can…
• write a bunch of novelty songs, so I can…
• record a bunch of novelty songs, so I can…
• be in RPM challenge and be doing something focused and musical, so I can…
• keep my fire on until I’m ready to do something “serious.”

I’m not saying I’ve decided this is bike-shedding…there’s a good chance I’ll go ahead and do it because it is fun and I’ve long wanted to give myself permission to take some time and do some things that are just plain silly…but it seems like an awfully long detour to take just to work around my problems with CBR and my need for creative motivation.  And I have to decide whether by doing this now I would be taking a pleasant little romp in the field of parodies, or detracting attention that I need to give to my “mainstream” efforts.

Writing and dreaming

Last night was full of strange dreams, but there was one I really enjoyed…

It’s a bright spring day on the playground at my old grade school in Chicago, and today there’s a festival of a sort I don’t ever remember seeing there – balloons and food and people of every age and size running around enjoying themselves, eagerly awaiting the beginning of the music from the bandstand. I have no idea who’s going to be performing, but I recognize the singers when they come out on stage in their richly ornamented Mongolian garb – Huun Huur Tu, who to my knowledge are the premier traditional Tuvan throat-singing band in existence today. This in and of itself is a delightful shock – I didn’t imagine that the Parent-Teacher League members of my Midwestern Lutheran grade school were likely to know what throat-singing was, much less to attract one of the finest ensembles from the other side of the globe to perform at a school function. And now my joy is complete…knowing of my fondness for and enthusiastic (if limited) background in throat-singing, I am invited to lead a jam session on my guitar! I have to think fast…I have no choice but to ask them to harmonize on an American folk tune, unless I am prepared to noodle out – and run a distinct risk of butchering – “Arti-Sayir,” one of the most beloved Tuvan melodies. I think of an American tune which I can literally hear them singing in my head. I sweep across the expanse of the playground in a gossamer ensemble of billowing red and orange fabric which I have long dreamed of, and reflect that I am no longer the too-tall, pale-skinned, painfully quiet misfit that so many classmates taunted during my attendance at the fortress of parochial education that still towers above the crowd of fair-goers…today I am an accomplished and musically gregarious misfit who apparently even commands some degree of respect and attention! I reach for my guitar, hoping I can remember enough of the lyrics to lead competently…

Of course, internal pushes to live my musicianship come and go with time…but they’re coming from the outside now too. Last year I participated in RPM Challenge and recorded my first album, Back to One. The idea of RPM Challenge sounds ridiculous at first – recording an album to the best of one’s ability in one month – but the process can actually yield a beautiful product, and certainly kicks one’s creative tuchus into high gear for a few weeks, which can be a much-needed boost. Well, February is coming up, and the good folks at RPM Challenge HQ haven’t missed a beat – they’re already reminding past participants that the time to sign up for this year’s month of musical madness is beginning. I have to admit it’s tempting – insane, but tempting.

Again, if I can get ProTools working in time it will become a possibility…but then I have to ask myself if it’s a wise thing to consider. There are certainly reasons to do it…

• I have no day job right now, which means that if I really want to stay up until 3am making recordings, I certainly can.
• It’d be a heckuva crash course in using ProTools.
• It’s time to really jump on my music again, which this would force me to do – to write as fast as I could print up blank sheet music and record as quickly as my nimble little fingers will cooperate.
• If I don’t do it now, there’s an excellent chance I’ll have a lot of trouble summoning up the energy and focus to do it at another time…frankly I’m not well-known as a musician and I don’t think much of anyone cares if I record an album or not under most circumstances…but during RPM Challenge all of the other participants care. That’s a LOT of energy.

There are also reasons why it’s not necessarily a great idea…

• I have no day job right now, which means I need to be looking for work.
• It’d be a heckuva crash course in using ProTools, which might be really stressful.
• It’s time to jump on my music again, but I really need to work on my repertoire and get out and perform more than I need to make another album.
• When I think of recording, what excites me is not so much the idea of just making another album, but making a better album with richer, more interesting instrumental textures. I don’t know if I could do that and write and learn new music and learn new equipment all in a month.
• I don’t want to push myself too hard, period, and I already have a ton of goals happening. I just saved myself from the bloody brink of total, across-the-board burnout not too long ago; I don’t want to plummet back in.

…Of course if I wanted to take the pressure off I could always start a new account and spend a month on a novelty album that I’ve been considering for a while…that would be something to accomplish if I could and no big deal if I couldn’t.

Ah, decisions, decisions…I’m not really sure what to do. In the meantime though, whether I’m going to make a new album or not, one thing is certain: I can’t go wrong writing another song.

What would you do…

…if you knew you could not fail?

That question was posed to me last week in Wolf Rinke’s book, Make it a Winning Life. It was far from the first time I’d heard or read the question, but it hit me like a ton of bricks this time.

Most of my life, I have lived as if I had this question tattooed on my forearm for easy reference. Similarly I read Goethe’s quote as a teenager…

Whatever you can do, or think you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

…and thought not, “wow” or “gee, I wonder if…” but, “thank goodness someone with the verbal grace and influence to make it known saw this truth.” I find it interesting how sometimes it’s not my older self but my younger self I need to reach to for guidance.

At 20, I must say I had it pretty “together” in some powerful and unusual ways. Even then, folks in their forties and fifties enjoyed communicating with me, and I think part of it was a blend of tactfulness and straightforwardness. I would wait for the right time and place, but I definitely called it as I saw it and did what I felt moved to do even if it seemed unconventional, especially when I felt the stakes were exceptionally high. But in recent times, I’ve noticed myself doing these strange little mazurkas around what I really want to say, especially when there’s something quite important that needs to be made quite clear…and wondering, “if I try to do this, will it happen or will I just end up embarrassing myself?”

There’s a reason why I read books like Make it a Winning Life. I’ve started asking myself, what would I do if I knew I could not fail? The effects are already dual.

For one, there’s the sudden increase in action and willingness. Phone calls are happening a little quicker – not that they were at all slow or delayed before, but they’re happening, say, before I shower in the morning instead of after. I’m starting to wonder if perhaps the time has come to work on a second CD, and if maybe today could be the day I get the tech support I need to get my CBR software running. It doesn’t seem so improbable anymore that I could master more than one of the instruments I have in the house, though it would surely take years of effort.   I’m wondering if perhaps, despite my busyness, I could do some more soft sculpture work once in a while just for creative variety.  What would I do if I knew I could not fail? Start now, and have faith.

Also I’m starting to notice the Pygmalion effect more than usual. When I don’t doubt that something will work, it usually does. If I just throw the book, it will end up on the bed in just the right place. Nevertheless, if I think I’m going to have trouble opening a container of pomegranate tea, I end up wearing part of it. If I rattle off an impromptu rhyme (think something like a comedic version of a poetry slam) and don’t imagine myself having any trouble with it, it comes out clear as a bell. If, on the other hand, I’m worried about stumbling over something much shorter with a lot of alliteration, however, such as ordering a “blueberry bliss” smoothie…well, last time I went to the counter feeling wound up I ordered a “blueberry briss.” Well, if the blueberries are Semitic, male, and eight days old I suppose it’s time…and hiring a rabbi to help the barista would certainly explain why a simple cup of pureed fruit costs $5…

Well, now that I have a lot of disturbing questions in my head regarding the circumcision of fruit, I suppose I’ll wrap it up by saying that this is turning out to be a good question to ask myself. And what about you, the reader? What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

Rebellion and Ergonomics

I’ve been working pretty hard lately.  Promotions have taken up a lot of my time, as have practicing lomilomi and a host of other things.  Friday I felt myself beginning to rebel.

I’d just been working too much, too long, too hard, and the fact that I wasn’t really seeing commensurate results was really making the whole thing exhausting.  I finally got my body straightened out on Wednesday – I needed a massage very badly indeed – but my brain and my spirit were still balking at my overall workload.  So I pushed forward through yesterday afternoon, after which I still had things to do but nothing that absolutely had to be done right this second.   So I spent the night alternating between watching Complaints Choirs on YouTube and reading The Da Vinci Code.  (I don’t normally read much fiction but this was a gift from a dear friend.)  I don’t think I’d done a reading marathon like that in at least half a year.  It was a much-needed break.

Today my morning was pretty much spoken for before it started; I was headed to church and then had a few errands to run.  I’ve done a lot of work (errands, studying, things along those lines) today again but the good news is I got almost all the critical stuff on my list accomplished before 9pm, and there’s also been some time just for creative and enjoyable things – more reading, practicing Native American flute and violin, hugging the cat.  So I think the tide is turning; while I don’t expect to run out of work/errands to do anytime soon, it seems like there’s a little more room for me in all of this mess all of a sudden.

Following my massage Wednesday I was pain-free for the first time in a few days, and I’ve started relaxing enough to remember how to play the violin without clamping it like a vise under my chin.  I adjusted my desktop computer setup so it’s a bit easier to manage, but I still don’t find it a cozy place to sit.  I’ve been trying to stay away from it, which I think has actually helped me find something else I need – it’s too soon as of yet to tell whether it’s time that was previously being eaten up by surfing for info or whether it’s just the feeling of not being tied to this box constantly – being free.  All I know is it feels better.

Well, since I still have a couple of hours before bedtime, I think it’s a good time to go practice another instrument and enjoy myself.

I might be a bit quiet for a while…

…or I might not.  It all depends on how my body is feeling.

My beloved massage therapist’s departure for New Mexico last month left me without a bodywork provider.  If you’re sitting there making fun of me, I invite you to stop!  Not everyone feels a strong need for bodywork but imagine this.  You are…

• over six feet tall, living in a world full of spaces and objects designed for people nearly a foot shorter than yourself.  This means nothing is supportive to your back and you feel cramped almost everywhere you go.
• a professional bodyworker yourself.  You are forever kneading and thumbing and rubbing and lifting and kneeling and standing and balancing…in short, you are running yourself ragged relaxing other people, and are therefore just plain tired.
• on the computer CONSTANTLY…in an ergonomic situation that all too easily goes way out of whack.
• doing weight training.  Enough said.
• playing a ton of different musical instruments, some of which you have been well trained in and others of which you’ve had to simply teach yourself from books.  (My new-to-me, insane-bargain-on-eBay, used violin arrived last night, but I don’t dare play it too much yet.  I haven’t picked one up in six years and while I can actually make it sound pretty good already, I can feel my shoulder girdle locking up trying to keep it in place, so I need to either read up on my ergonomics or somehow get lessons to refresh my memory.)

This is someone who needs a bodyworker regularly. Until I can manage that again, the easiest factor to limit (I think) is computer time, so I might not write quite as frequently as I have been until I find some more support for my poor body.  But I will definitely be back, still fairly often, so don’t move that bookmark!

Movement on ProTools

I wasn’t really planning on approaching this topic the day after getting back to California but it just kind of popped up…well, from what the folks at my laptop manufacturer tell me, ProTools’ new upgrade, 7.4, includes supporting Vista.  I actually wrote them an email asking before if they were planning on doing that but for whatever reason I never got a response…it seems strange to me because I’d think it would be easy enough to take ten seconds to write back, “get the 7.4 upgrade – it supports Vista…” but, well, it’s not my company, so realistically they might not function in the way I would imagine.

Anyway, what this means is I might just be closer to getting ProTools running on my laptop!  YAY!

Fly in the buttermilk

Okay, the good news is I have the laptop computer I’ve wanted for four years. I am really, really excited about this. I love it. I am SO happy to be sitting here typing away over – get this – a wireless broadband connection. I am REALLY happy about this.

So, plenty of buttermilk…yet I have to acknowledge the one little fly doing the backstroke on the top: it runs Vista, and this means I now have two computers and neither one of them is ProTools compatible. I’m not going to ruin the experience of having a wish of four years granted by freaking out about this, but realistically this is a problem and I have to figure out what to do about that. I can…

1. try – most likely in vain – to send back the ProTools software where I bought it, which would mean
   1. trying to get a different CBR program…which would involve still more time, money, energy, and confusion I can’t really afford, or…
   2. just planning on continue to kick it 20th century-style, which is stupid
2. have a different operating system put into this computer down the road – a heckuva thing to have to consider doing when I just uncrated it two hours ago
3. wait for ProTools to support Vista, which might never happen

Good thing this buttermilk is so tasty or else I’d be on eBay right now, shopping for a cannon to rid myself of the fly.