terrible journalling

I am terrible at online journals. Partially I find it so impersonal, to share my life with strangers in cyber world instead of having a face to face conversation. But then, I have my music online so I suppose it is the same thing. This is less poetic, though.

I have spent the day reorganizing, working through finance spreadsheets, dog walking, house cleaning, making appointments, and wishing I was painting instead of doing all these things. That's for Wednesday...I have officially made a painting date with a new friend, and I am really looking forward to it. I am thinking of doing a new painting that requires many hours of my time. I haven't done that in a while. I keep trying to just do this abstract work that I love so much, but my abstract just looks like crap and I end up putting it in the closet to be resurrected and painted over another day. I think this time I will go back to painting realism, which I am much better at, but which takes up more of my time.

In order to show a picture of one of my paintings on this blog, I just spent 2 hours looking for the one little cable that attaches the computer to the camera. I know it's here somewhere because my husband just used it a few weeks ago. But do you think I can find it? Of course not. So all my creative energy for the day was spent searching high and low through hundreds of cables and cords and still not finding the elusive camera cable. This camera is my nemesis. Not only do I have no idea how to properly use it to take pictures of said art, but it doesn't matter anyway because no one will ever see them. Sigh...

a tired Saturday

Sigh...just went through our finances again...it's going to a long road to recovery! Going to have to put our heads down and work our butts off for a while here. Not always as easy as it sounds. As much as I am ready for a new career, I think I will have to put that on hold once again until we get ourselves straightened out. It's hard to keep my head up when it looks so overwhelming on paper. But we got ourselves into this, so we have to get out of it. A little help would be nice, though...in a few years we will probably try to move again, if we could make any money on our house. But that is a long time away, so in the meantime, the dreaming may have to be out aside for reality.

I would still love to take on real estate as a career, but how prudent is it to leave a good job that is stable for a career that might be more fulfilling, but also more risky. It doesn't seem as if risk is a good idea right now. On the other hand, the biggest risks can also bring the biggest gains. Oh so hard to know what direction to go.

Well for now I have to go book a flight to Calgary to start work on Monday. The joys of commuting. I wouldn't miss that if I had a job in town, that's for sure!

Time and what to do with it

I have been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do for a career. As my mother reminded me, being a flight attendant is a career, but it is not neccessarily the career I want to retire with. The lifetime travel benefits wouldn't hurt but I'm not sure I will last another 12 years to get them.

I've been trying to think of how to feed my creative self, and also fuel my administrative gifts at the same time. I am less administrative than I previously thought, but I can do it if I have to. And I like the challenge of organizing and bringing people together to make something happen. I talked to my sister-in-law, who is a realtor, about the reality of realty (that's hard to say fast) and the amount of work and money it takes to make a living. She is very successful, but I have seen how hard she works, and how self-motivated she has to be to make it a career. However, I do love learning, I love looking at homes, at picking them apart and dreaming of their future. I enjoy research, I love working with people, and I really love making other people's dreams a reality. So here I am trying to decide if I should go ahead with my schooling to get my real estate license.

At the same time, I wonder if I put that much effort into music or acting, if I could make a career with that. Am I just running away for rejection again by not pursuing my artistic gifts wholeheartedly? Or am I being prudent? And as an artist, do I really want to be prudent? Let's be real here, so many artists put off their dreams and regret it for the rest of their lives. It's often the ones that take the risks that make it work. And that is also a hard road.

I guess I just see realty as selling something other than myself. Selling my art is selling myself, selling a part of who I am. That is what makes it so difficult. Once I get to an audition I do well, I am confident. But getting there, doing the work to get an agent, especially a good one, is so tiring. Basically it is job hunting without the guarantee of work even when you get hired on.

So would being a realtor fuel enough of my gifts that I would enjoy it? Or would I always be wishing that I was doing something else? And will I have time to do both like I do now?

Another part of me thinks, who cares? If I do it and don't enjoy it, I have lost nothing, and learned something.The other part of me thinks that if I pursue another career that isn't artistic in it's entirety then I am a failure.

Man I knew I never wanted to grow up. At 34 I am still making these decisions! This did not happen in my parents generation. Although I love having options, I am not always good at acting on them. And I don't want to stand still in my life. Time to make some decisions...

Lift Your Voice for Haiti

technology vs relationship

Well once again I am trying to keep an online journal of sorts. I love the written word, but I don't love technology and prefer to actually sit down and write in a journal with my own hand. However, I am about to succomb to the world as we know it and learn to use a computer. I have a terrible feeling that my journal may become only a music writing book, and no longer a chronicle of my life with words and pictures and momentos. Is this what we have come to now? A depersonalized way of expressing our emotions? Where we have to choose emoticons to tell someone how we feel instead of coming up with words of our own? Oh it makes me sad...as an artist and a communicator. It makes me fear having children, that they will grow up in a world I don't understand and can't function in entirely. What if our children grow up unable to truly communicate their thoughts and feelings because they are unaccustomed to face to face social interaction?

I believe in every possible way that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So although technology allows us many things that we have never had before - information at our fingertips, networking to the extreme, convenience and connection - it also has an equal and opposite downside. The removal of proper grammer teaching in our education system (replaced by LOL's and OMG's and without any correct punctuation), the dependance on something that we have no control over (what if the internet goes down - God forbid - and we have to function without it for a day), and the decline of human social interaction.

Any move forward is neither good nor bad, it is simply what it is. Because each new idea and transformation of society comes with change and adaptation. New things at the expense of the old. And it is no wonder many of us are coming back to the desire for true community in the midst of this new world. We seem to have come full circle and see more than ever our need for real and active friendship and partnership, for honesty that comes from knowing someone intimately and not simply online. Can we marry our search for new ways to network while understanding our opposite need to know and be known?

So here I sit, writing in the midst of this dichotomy. Even within myself I have to begin to embrace this technological world around me and balance it with quiet.