Tomorrow is the 2009 Creative Chicago Expo and gonna check it out and sort things out as to the future of my lifepath/career/destiny. Feels like I’m starting from scratch again but it seems like that virtually every year.
Feeling pretty bad that I have missed a lot of friends’ and associates’ musical endeavors lately because I haven’t gone out much due to lack of funds and whatever is going on. I’m sorry allá, Maurice, Hernan Sanchez, bass by the pound/Seminar, Five Below Zero, Kevin Licious (quit changing yer damn name!), Marco Morales, and whoever’s blood and tears earned work I’m missing out on. Ugh.
Gonna miss my friend’s band tomorrow too, but already had plans set on checking out Cut & Paste. Was invited last year but now I remembered that last year was the precocious time I was working on Das Kraftwerkkleid and missing out on Autechre. Would like to wear the Das Kraftwerkleid tomorrow but it’s not up to spec and need to wait on getting a new sound controller because it fell apart on last year’s Maker Faire Austin. It was fixed but later shorted due to absentminded carelessness later.
You just cannot do it all and pick and choose your battles.
(Dammit lost some text just now, didn’t save draft and didn’t autosave the new paragraph. Always save kiddos.)
So the battle I choose tomorrow in the war of life is the stratagem of how to go about my future.
On the plus side, the organization and naming convention of my bazillion projects has evolved and become more streamlined and has given me a sense a peace however small. This is such an integral foundation due to large amounts of sketches, notes, doodles, research of different kinds of projects. Described it to someone metaphorically as having all the pieces scattered all over the place and finally placing them in their particular place. I try to think of how a store or school is set up. Everything is in its place so items can be easily accessed. This sounds like atypical common sense but I am doing more one discipline of art and order must be created and maintained. It would be nice and easy if all I had was sewing and that’s all my projects are in. But it’s not, there’s sewing projects cross referenced with construction projects, art works, conceived designs, photography, fun culture themed works, and more. Didn’t realize how bad things are until accessing my “everything box”. It wasn’t that bad, had a storage crate with hanging file folders of projects in their unique categories but it wasn’t enough. Also something had to be created in the naming process that will not only clue in to the category but if as to what action to be done. Will it be sewn, constructed, photographed, repaired, sculpted, made for someone, part of a series, or was done in school?
Oh, btw, the “everything box” and “everything is a project” is credited to the GTD book I read (but haven’t finished :P – doh!). Wasn’t too crazy about being advised to not use color in the book because I like the visual reference (being a visual artist). When I see red or maroon I cannot help but think about sewing. I don’t know why. Black is for reference and archives, hibernating in the background until I’m ready to access it. Blue used to stand for photography because silver binders don’t exist. The way I figured is to adopt my own style of order while picking up advice from many books.
Read an article from Wired, “Diary of a Self-Help Dropout” by Chris Hardwick. The humor and light-heartedness of the article made me feel much better that I’m not the only one tackling with multiple hats. Planning on checking out The 4-Hour Workweek soon, it sounds promising. The author’s name somehow struck a chord (no pun intended), sure enough he’s one half of the duo that created Rodeohead. Ought to thank him and share my Instructable.
Okay, time to log and sleep, it’ll be long day tomorrow.
