back at work, back to being the jack of all trades

The first thing I do when I get to work of a morning, like most people these days, is open my email. It confused me when I opened my email and instead of getting Thunderbird, I got the Outlook that I've been supposed to be getting for the past year or so. Then I went to open one of my shortcuts and got an 'Error: this file location does not exist' or something along those lines. Apparently our server got replaced over the weekend so that it now works properly and with full versions of programs. That is awesome, except that as it turns out, no one in my office knows much about IT, and so I spent the morning putting people's signatures back into their Outlooks and re-shortcutting documents from our file server. Yes, they had been working since Monday without proper signatures on their emails and apparently not knowing how to access half the files. The dumbest thing is, I'm sure most of them would actually know how to do these things if they didn't know they had me to do it. Now, my fun task for the next week is to move all our files from one set of folders to another so that they're better catalogued. This is what I spent five years at university for. Awesome.

I spent last night writing up some goals for the next six months, the next year and the next ten years to try and motivate some change in my life. Will be interesting to see how I go with that.

On the music front, I'm going to spend tonight moving files from my old computer to my new one, so that I can install the driver for my interface onto my new laptop and start getting some demos done on there. Next stop is a portable hard drive so that I don't run the risk of losing things should my laptop crash. Then it's on to working on songs for my next gig in two weeks and getting back into the swing of actually doing my scales every day.

thoughts from the sky

(written earlier this afternoon)

I'm sitting on the plane home from a week in Sydney, and the last week has been awesome. It has been a great, relaxing week, that has enabled me to get my head clear and sorted out. It has also been amazing to wake up to the sunshine every morning, and the temperatures getting over 15 degrees. I know that I'm not going to get much of that for the next few weeks (at least) in all likelihood, so it was nice to get it while I could.

I love going home to Sydney and seeing all my family, but the more I go back there, the more that I realise that it's not home anymore. Melbourne is home. As much as I do miss my family, the week has made me realise that I don't want to move back to Sydney anytime soon.

Now for me, it's down to business. It's time for me to put a focus on my life and work towards it. It's time to stop talking about doing things and actually do it. I need to get my body to a point of exhaustion each day so that it will sleep properly at night, and whatever I have to do to do that, I will do. I am going to get myself back into physical shape and I am going to spend most nights working on music and my voice. I need to grow confidence in my abilities and my ability to make this work, and so, that's where I'm going to start. It's time to let it be known that music is what I want to do, and what I want to work for.

wasting time is my biggest downfall...

So the weekend has come and gone, and I got lost in doing a whole heap of things and spent far too little time working on music. I'm disappointed in myself. I get frustrated because certain things don't sound the way that I want them to, and then I don't spend any time working on fixing that. I think one of my problems is that there is just far too much going on in my head at the moment. There are so many conflicting things bouncing around my head, that I just don't know which one to listen to.

On Wednesday I'm heading home to Sydney for a week, I want to use that week to relax and try and get my head sorted out. There are so many hours available to me every day, and I waste them so often on things that don't need my attention; I spend far too much time sitting in front of a television or a computer screen, and none of that is helping me get anywhere. With that in mind, I'm giving myself the next week and a half to relax and to get my head on straight, and then from the moment I touch back down in Melbourne next Tuesday afternoon, it is business time. No more excuses, no more wasting time, if I really want to make this happen, then I have to make it happen, because no one is going to do the work for me, I just hate that I can talk so much crap, but when it comes to actually acting on it I find it so hard to get the motivation or keep concentrated. This time, I'm changing that.

staring into space can sometimes get you somewhere...

For the past few weeks I've had that, 'I feel like everyone else is moving forward and I'm standing still' feeling. You know that feeling when you look around and it just looks like everyone around you is making progress in what they're doing and you're standing at the back screaming 'wait up guys', but your feet won't just move forward. Yeah, it sucks. Then I was sitting on my bed last night and I realised something. Yes, there are people around me who are getting married, having kids, buying houses, getting promotions, etc, etc, etc, but I've done other things that most of them will never do; and then I realised this morning that life is not a competition, even though sometimes it feels like it is. It's not about how someone else does something, or how far someone else has gotten with their career, or who married a nicer/better looking/richer husband, it's all about how much you get out of the things that you do, the people you know and the experiences that you have.

I've been through some crazy things over the past five or six years, some of them will never be told to anyone who wasn't there, some of them I'll tell to anyone who will listen. I travelled halfway round the world to see a band play, and they'll probably never know that. I moved to another state when I was 19 to live with a bunch of girls I barely knew, and one of them is now like a sister to me, someone I've been through some of the biggest highs and lows of my life with. I have finally discovered what I want to do with my life and what I want to get out of it, and it's time for me to finally do something about it.

I want to be able to spend my life making music, and the more I think about it, the more I immerse myself in it, the more I'm sure that it's what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. I was never made for 9-5 work, for sitting at a desk for eight hours a day staring at a computer screen and doing mindless, repetitive tasks that actually drain me more than doing something that requires energy or brainpower. Some people are made to spend their days in office buildings, I'm just not one of them. And so I'm going to fill this blog with things that I have done to actually make music. Each day I'm going to make myself report in about what I've done music wise, and where I'm at with different things. Some days it may be a bit boring, and others it will be far more interesting, but I guess that's how life works.