The past few days I have been struggling to put up content. I made the commitment to blog every day and so far, with one exception, I have managed to do just that since I started this blog about six weeks ago. The dilemma I'm facing now is how do I get all the things done that I want to do while actually having a cool, interesting and creative lifestyle and how do I find the time to make it appear effortless and convincing to the Internet?
During the week I've been spending most my time working on charting compositions for the musical I wrote. It's a mountain of work and it's not even close to being finished. I've been spending nearly every waking hour on it. My neck and shoulders are sore from spending hours at the computer.
It’s not glamorous nor is it particularly interesting work. I shared a playback from one of the songs the other day but I have 20 charts to finish and I think there is only so much about that process that folks might find intriguing. So I have to stop this important and time sensitive creative process to create content that may or may not be particularly relevant to me or to anyone else. I understand that this is the life I am creating for myself as I attempt to carve out a living wage as an artist and throw my hat in the ring as an online content creator but it is kind of screwing with my unhealthy workflow mojo.
There are so many incredibly talented people creating content online and some of it really is wonderful and some of it is just click bait. I genuinely want to be one of those people that contribute something meaningful or at least entertaining and high quality. But I’m also one of those people that has to be in the flow. The raw fact of the matter is that sometimes my flow is gushing and other times it's barely a trickle.
My lifestyle is all over the place. I’m a musician, a henna artist, a tarot reader, a playwright, a health nut, an actress, a thrift store addict and a feng shui junking. I know everybody my whole life has said pick one thing and go with that. I’ve basically said fuck that, I’m doing everything. Was it a wise choice? I don’t know. I don’t own a house or have any of the status symbols that our society holds up to measure ones success against but I’d say that I’m pretty darn good at what I do. I do a lot of cool and interesting stuff and I’d like to find a way to share it with people without just throwing it together. I just don’t know how to do that when my life is so all over the place.
The last 24 hours have been particularly grueling and irksome. Last night, I played a three hour dinner show with my band in a suburb outside of Portland. We got home around midnight, which is pretty early for a gig night. Sometimes we don't get in until two or three am. I often forget how much I love performing and playing music until I'm actually in the process of doing it. For me, it is zen. I feel amazing and energized afterwards. Sometimes I could stay up all night from the buzz but that would be very bad as Friday and Saturday nights are "school nights" for me. "School night meaning that I have to get up at the butt crack of dawn and go to my other gig at the Portland Saturday Market.
I'm not an early morning person. If I'm allowed to get up whenever I want, lounge in bed for an hour, leisurely drink my tea, do some yoga, etc, I LOVE mornings. But getting up to an alarm at 6:30 in the morning when you barely climbed into bed not five hours before is a nightmare (daymare??) in the making.
I have to get dressed and get my ass downtown, parked and present at 7:35 sharp for morning allocation which will determine where my booth will be located within the market that weekend. My number today was 69 (yeah, I know, very funny) which means that I have to wait near an hour before my name gets called. That's an hour of sitting around doing nothing of any use to anyone in a brain dead stupor when I could have been sleeping.
Around 8:30 my name gets called, I pick my spot and get my booth set up which takes me about 20 minutes. I seriously have load in/load out down to a science. This is for my henna booth as well as my band stuff. Nothing extraneous is included in my packing technique. My time is really fucking valuable to me. So any time wasted fiddling with inefficient systems of set up/teardown are not tolerated by me. I probably have the easiest booth set up in the whole market.
Anyways, so by 9am I am completely set up. Only, the market doesn't open til 10. So I wander around looking for food and coffee and try to get my brain to start working. It turned out to be a pretty nice day though and I was relatively busy. It's amazing that I actually get paid quite well to do what amounts to being a little more than basically drawing on people.
Finishing up around 5pm I came home and napped for a few hours, hoping I could rally and go meet some friends or at least get my brain clear enough to write this blog post. The former didn’t happen and the latter, well, you know how that ends: with me spending my Saturday night dog-tired and blogging in the bathtub because that’s the kind of life I’m leading.