Return of the Return of the Undiscovered Self

So for many months I have not been posting more than these online mixtapes that I make on 8tracks.com. It's a new year and I'm going to go back to writing/journalling in this blog again hopefully. Writing is good for me, spiritually. In 2010 I tried to switch to journalling in a Moleskine notebook because I thought that this blog was too public, now I don't really care too much about that. The Moleskine turned out to be too cumbersome for me - I'm always online anyways so this blog always seemed the easiest way to keep track of my thoughts, I was always leaving the Moleskine at home, and it's too awkward to have to whip out a pen and write in a public place whereas I'm always messing around on my laptop. It's the 21st century - if Moliere and Hemingway had access to a MacBook Pro I think they would have ditched their notebooks. So, Cheers. Happy New Years to whatever readers I have left, if any. Cheers mainly to myself, this mission I'm on, to transform my life to something good, is constantly changing, and never ending. And it's more important now than when I first started posting journal entries online about how I'm dissatisfied with my life - because there's kids involved now who depend on me. I think about that every day, it's a heavy burden and I often feel as if I'm not living up to it. Maybe if I try really hard and not waste time anymore one day I'll feel as if I've succeeded. Even if I fail I still have to try.

The story of the past year of my life boils down to only a few main themes, as I'm just a simple guy and there is not a large cast of characters in my life and I live mostly in my head. If there's a protagonist in this story it would be me, and if there's an antagonist in this story that would also be me as I've always been my own worst enemy, as much as I try to convince myself that my parents screwed me up. I guess the basic premise of this blog is that we can determine our own destiny in this world, that any obstacle can be overcome with determination and hard work. The main people in my life would be my beautiful wife K., my gorgeous daughter N., and my new son (he's also handsome) J. There are also my mom, my two brothers, my various cousins, uncles, aunts, in laws, friends and associates that I know from work, the few friends I have left from my past, my therapist, various people from online. Anyways, my marriage is wonderful, my wife and my kids fill me with happiness every moment of my life. I feel like I don't have any time to work on my various friendships, that's just how it is. Also I feel like my relationship with my brothers has greatly improved in the past year, ever since they both moved back home with my mom after L. got a divorce. I'm really happy about that. My mom has been acting strangely for the past couple of years, ever since dad died. I don't know what I can do to improve my relationship with my mom other than just checking in with her whenever I can find the time and bringing the kids by.

The biggest thing that happened to my family last year was we got pregnant and J. was born in November. I feel that everything else that happened this year was a reaction to that event, planning for that event, the result of being stressed out or in denial of that event, recovering from that event, or contemplating that event. I'm still processing being a father of two, and having a new son. I feel like this will be something I will be working on for the rest of my life. But obviously it was a joyous event, he's just the chill baby, very different from his sister. And so handsome (of course). So I can't help but pronounce the year a success, despite how frustrated I may feel about lack of progress in other areas of my life. I'm an idiot. I feel like ever since we found out we were expecting in March, I was using our due date in November as some sort of line in the sand when I would be able to 'get back to the business' of life, whatever that means. I feel like I've been floating, and living in a state of expectation most of the year - which is a convoluted excuse for being lazy. And after he was born, we've just been feeling overwhelmed and unable to balance the demands of two kids with our career responsibilities and personal projects. I think we severely underestimated the work involved in raising two babies, the lack of sleep involved, the way the amount of cleaning and laundry seems to have exponentially increased. This situation is not going to change anytime soon, if I'm going to get any traction in other areas of my life I'm going to have to figure out some way to deal with it.

So this year I have 3 New Year's resolutions: 1. write and record original music, 2. find a better job and 3. beat my time in the marathon.

Other significant events in my life the past year: I trained for and ran a marathon in October. Weather conditions were brutal, and I didn't get the time that I had hoped for. It took me a while to come to grips with what this means to me - I feel like it was not a waste and plan to run another marathon in 2011. I got in great shape, lost weight, and had a lot of great experiences during my training. I truly love marathon training. I'll continue to post about running in the coming year, probably. My friend C. came to visit in July and we went to see the Pitchfork Festival. N's birthday party, a large number of children's parties in the fall due to all the babies in our family being born around the same time.

Music has not been going very well, mainly due to the demands of family life and career interfering with my music time. In order to write songs you need a lot of quiet time, away from distractions. It's just really difficult right now for me, I have to figure out how to work songwriting and recording into my life. I've been experimenting with late night and early morning songwriting sessions - the problem I think is the lack of sleep due to the new baby, I'm just not able to focus on music as much as I need to as I'm pretty much always sleep deprived and exhausted. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'd really like to realize the goal of write and record original music. I'll definitely post more about my struggle to create art in this blog as it's basically my only hobby and interest outside of spending time with my family and trying not to get fat. Very frustrated in my musical progress though - I feel like it should come more naturally and easily, and I spend way too much time overthinking the creative process. I also feel like I spent a lot of time this year learning Ableton Live, sound design and production, which I tend to confuse in my mind with the songwriting process, which is more important. This year I did manage to become very good at Ableton Live, which is not a small feat and took up a lot of time and research. I also became a better guitarist, despite practicing less due to spending time on Ableton - which I think is just a natural outcome of playing and would have happened anyway. I took a few classes at the Old Town School, a songwriting class and a music theory class and some others. So I feel like I learned an awful lot about the technical aspects of songwriting this year. I also wrote a few songs, I think I have about 20 songs written since I started my musical journey. That's being liberal and including some longer song experiments I did in Ableton throughout the year. So, some progress, but not as much as I would've liked. But I learned a lot last year, maybe I needed to learn more to get to a point where I can just create. Maybe I just need to drop any preconceived notions I have about the artistic process, or what I want my art to be about or sound like, there's definitely some type of internal block getting in the way of my creative output. One thing I talk about a lot with my therapist is my need to overcome my OCD tendencies and my perfectionism, which is really fear of trying.

Likewise, my career. I'm very very frustrated with my career, and really unhappy at my current job - I feel like I've been ignoring these issues for a long time, years. Even with all the stuff going on in my family life I feel like I could have made more headway in my career last year. I'm just lazy, and when I feel overwhelmed I just shut down and then nothing gets done, that's the basic truth about me that I have to always be mindful about. And I'm not like an unsuccessful guy at my career, I actually make a pretty good living, but I always feel at my age I should be more advanced in my career and be earning a larger salary. Definitely there are many who would love to be in the position I'm in with my career, but I have high standards for myself. This past year my previous managers were fired and I was put into another group with a new manager. This change at work has not resulted in increased job satisfaction on my part. I know what needs to happen in terms of my career - I need to work overtime at my job so that I'm feeling productive and on top of my job, I need to start working on certifications and personal projects that will make me a better developer, and I need to quietly start looking for a better job with an opportunity to grow in a more supportive environment. All of this takes time and focus, of course. Just like my music, I don't know how I'm going to make time for this stuff with the demands of two kids.

Also, I've given it some thought - and it has crossed my mind that my career is the most important thing, and that I could probably make more time for improving my career by letting go of my musical ambitions, maybe just play guitar in my spare time whenever I had the time. Or I could make more time for music, or at least not feel so guilty about all the time I spend on music, if I just accept where I am right now in my career and get too ambitious. I feel like if I give up music it would be a spiritual death for me. What I need to do is make time for music, but keep within strict limits of the time I reserve for music, and within the time I reserve for music really use that opportunity to create - this means allowing myself to create and not overthinking the artistic process or prejudging every song I create before it's even finished and allowing myself to finish my songs without judgement. This also means that I have to use my time at work more productively and not waste any time while I'm there, maybe reserve at least an hour or two during the day to work on career related research and stick with it, hopefully by steadily applying myself to the goal of improving my career and getting a better job eventually something good will happen. Definitely nothing good will happen if I don't work at it on a regular basis. This is a new life, and I'm never going to have the luxury again of being able to spend all day being really OCD and hack at some personal project, I have to adjust my way of thinking.