Coffee for dinner

M., my old college roommate whom I have not spoken to in more than a decade, added me as a facebook friend. I was happy to hear from him and responded cordially of course. I'm still mildly freaked whenever old people from the past come out of the woodwork on facebook like this. I like to think you become more of yourself as you grow older, I still relate to M., and C., and D., like we are back in college. We did not get a chance to grow older and develop together. Maybe now is our chance.

K. left with her mom to go back to MI for the week, she brought the babies with her. So I have the house to myself. I swear, when left to my own device, I revert back to living like an animal. The house is still a mess, I haven't cleaned up like I told K. I would. I've been going to work and then coming home and not really using my time effectively, instead taking advantage of my temporary freedom to catch up with old friends. Me and J. went to the Blackhawks game last night, for instance, I had a few beers. It was good to catch up with him, which is a weird thing to say since he works in the floor below me.

I've been running, it's cold here in Chicago and there's a lot of ice on the ground, the farthest I ran was about 4-5 miles. I've been taking advantage of the Garmin to track my time and it's slow - I attribute it to all the ice on the ground, but also I'm out of shape since the marathon. I went to my guitar class, I'm actually learning a few things, but mostly I'm too advanced for the class as usual. I still enjoy going to guitar classes at Old Town School, I just love being in that environment with 'guitar' and 'music' people, even though their taste in music may be a bit too folk and roots-based for my taste sometimes.

So as I was telling my therapist J. at my session last weekend - I've been thinking of ways to maximize my productivity given the time constraints imposed on my life by the responsibilities with the new babies and with the baby we already had. I'm going to try my best not to give up my hobbies of running and songwriting, although time is very limited. A couple of decisions I came to: I'm going to start following Hal Higdon Novice I training program, which is much less intense than the Intermediate I that I used to train for last year's marathon - you definitely run a lot less and make use of cross training time more. I'll just have to make sure I'm monitoring my progress on Garmin and trying to train smarter, if not longer, maybe I'll see some results as in a better time in this year's marathon, maybe not. I'll just be satisfied if I can finish it. After all there's nothing really dependent on a stellar time in the marathon, just my personal satisfaction. That's all I have time for in my life at this time.

Another thing that was really concerning me was the idea of having to give up songwriting for good. Writing and recording an album, that's something that young people who are single and have a lot of free time (and quiet) do. It may work out that I may have to ditch that idea while I still have small babies to take care of, but right now I'm thinking, maybe like marathon training, I may have to adjust my expectations in order to keep this activity as a part of my life. I really don't want to do that as, like I said before, it would seem to me like a spiritual death, although that may be an overly dramatic way to put it.

So I'm thinking with songwriting, I may have to cut back the expectations I put on myself, like I said before this may actually result in my being more relaxed about music and I may actually take more enjoyment out of music with all the deadlines that I impose on myself taken away. It may actually result in fewer songs, but better songs, and I may still wind up with an album written. I previously had this arbitrary deadline of a song a week, and an album at the end of the year - I'm thinking of just letting those arbitrary restrictions go. I'm just going to play my music, play the guitar, work on Ableton when I feel like it. Still try to write songs, but there's no expectation that I have to write a song by a given deadline or even write at all. There's also this idea about how I want the music to be - I want it to be acoustic based, as was my original concept, before I got sucked into the hole of learning music production software and tinkering with loop based sequencers. Ableton is just a musical sketchpad and recorder for me. I don't have the time to explore remixing and creating experimental electronic pieces, much less trying to merge my love of electronic beats with acoustic composition. That's a very difficult thing to do, even for experienced producers and songwriters, I don't know how I expected to do it myself. I want my music to be acoustic based, acoustic guitar, a lot of fingerpicking, maybe all fingerpicking, think Nick Drake. Whatever additional instrumentation I create in Ableton should support that idea.

My mom called, I get the feeling she's mad at K. for some reason. I don't know how that happened, K.'s been a terrific daughter in law from what I can see. Who knows. It's interesting for me to think that perceived problems in my relations with my parents used to take up so much of my time and mental energy and now they barely register. I just have too much going on in my life to worry about things that aren't going to change, it's too bad that my wife and probably my kids will probably be affected by it to some degree.

Work going ok, I've been working hard, as much as I can. Work should be my primary concern in life, and if I'm not happy about it, then I should be spending all my time trying to improve my work situation by working hard at the job I've got, trying to improve my skills, etc. This is like pulling teeth for me. I feel so burnt out, I used to be so passionate about software engineering concepts and programming languages, and open source. I don't know where all that passion went. So I've decided even if I'd rather be sitting around playing guitar all day (I mean who wouldn't?) I still have to act like a professional at work, and honor my responsibilities to my family and work on my career even though I'd rather be doing something else. Those babies deserve a dad who is a success at his career, and who's providing a safe secure environment for them to grow up in.