Goals update

On my other blog at the beginning of this year, I made a list of goals. As I'm about to enter a crazy month and my money is disappearing, so I want to take a tally of how this has gone.


"Professional" goals

• Make an album with my band.
• This is the one that's farthest along. We've been recording the album in most of our spare moments for the last seven weeks, though we have been sidetracked by Song Fu, concerts and a commission project. We're trying to continue having fun, but it's hard.
• The "recording" part is a bummer, certainly. But the good stuff is: album art - for which we hired a local illustrator and a local photographer - is going well! Now we just need to write the liner notes and line stuff up and hope everything is proofed and mastered in time for the CD to be ready at the release show.
• I didn't get the new songs done that I was hoping to have done. Argh.
• Learn how to make a web application & learn enough of a language to do a sample project. Do the same with web design.
• This is... happening. Ish. I'm doing a lot of reading still. There's a PHP book I like. I had been reading a PHP book that was doing a very poor job of appealing to my "learn stuff" senses. In general, learning without structure/classes/help is hard for me. Also, time. 
• Make a documentary (with filmmaker M_ V_- one of my informational interview subjects)
• I'm failing at this one! I'd like to blame the people who haven't called me back, but I can't really. I should call them again.
• Take classes in computer programming.
• I am doing this! Thanks to my Alma Mater and a crazy-awesome professor, I'm in a "learn Java by programming games" class that is both helping me learn how to program Java and getting my head around programming in general. I really like it.
• Train and volunteer in community radio.
• I give myself an "A" here. I have already had my voice on the radio *twice* interviewing people, and I am taking occasional trainings that are awesome. The people at the community radio station are a little scary at first, but I've come to like them a lot and I think they like me too. Which is awesome. I really like radio and I am learning a lot about it.

"Personal" goals:

• Write and send letters
• Try writing fiction
• Learn how to cook
• Throw more parties/events
• Plan and take travels to: Grand Canyon, Alaska, Prague

I haven't even started on any of these. Maybe I will "when I move into my new house," I tell myself.

Things I have done that I wasn't planning on:

• Social media consulting (for multiple clients!)
• Freelance writing (I could almost make enough money on this to pay rent! Unreliably!)
• Managed a band T-shirt sale- orders, production, and shipping.
• Plan band shows in California and British Columbia
• Find a new house, apply for and get it, thus creating a lot of work for myself in sorting/packing/moving everything I own.

Alright, this post was relatively useless other than as a way to track my own progress, which is important because yesterday I watched more than three episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

2012: The move

HELLO AGAIN, INTERNET
I just finished leafing through my old Prague blog and in it found a few posts that reminded me how glad I am that I kept a journal during that time. I had forgotten, for instance, how supportive my friends were through comments on that site - some of these people are friends I rarely talk to anymore. I had also forgotten some of the specific stories - especially the terrifying day I had to travel from Germany to Prague, my myself, on a train - with no currency or sure way to get from the train station to my hostel. What a crazy day.
So I thought I might ought to come back to the world of personal blogging. It's a world I left when I thought no one wants to read about the mundane details of my everyday life, and people will judge you for sharing so much online. But I didn't care about that when I was in Prague, or when I was on LiveJournal as a high schooler, or when I was (ugh) sharing my poetry online for anyone to see. And when I didn't care, and I didn't think to care, I was writing. I was analyzing my thoughts and putting them into words, and I was sharing those words. And it didn't matter if anyone read them - but sometimes people did. And those people were good friends.
And thus I have returned. And I'm returning right back to the last place I had a personal blog, because it's here, so I'm not creating a new thing just to abandon it - also because this blog's older posts have a nice combination of "my creative writing" - which I don't do anymore, and "my trying to learn how to be an interesting blogger" - which was cute.

BLATHER TIME: MOVING
Right now I'm sitting in my "office," which is actually a bedroom I've stolen from my roommate who doesn't live here anymore. It's going to be my "office" only for a few more weeks - my housemates and I are planning a move across the river to the East side of Portland. It's going to be a great location and a wonderful house. Our current house is HUGE - but most of that is wasted space - extra bedrooms, a big finished basement that we haven't really furnished, etc. The new house is smaller, but has a bigger kitchen, a bigger bedroom for me (yay) and a bigger living/common area. About this we are very excited.
Before we can move, we need to pack. Before we can pack, I need to get rid of like... all of my stuff. I have a lot of stuff. I have everything I brought to college, and everything I've acquired since then. Because this house has so much darn storage space, I haven't gotten rid of anything since I moved out of the dorms two years ago. I've barely even thrown anything away, really. So this should be fun.
I'm in a good place for throwing things away, because I just watched this video. In that video, Alex Day, who you don't need to know who he is, whatever, explains that he owns fewer than 100 things. Of course, that's extreme. Plus he's a boy, and he's British, so he's weird. But the message that I got out of it was that you really don't need to own things, because things take up space, and you don't really use them. I was particularly struck by one moment where he showed off all of the clothes he owns - about 5 t-shirts and two pairs of pants. Because, you know you have only a few articles of clothing that you really like wearing, he explains -  "I thought, I'll just always wear my favorite [clothes] and not own any of the others."
Not a new sentiment necessarily, but when it's said in such a nice british accent it's hard to not hear it in a new way.

This post doesn't have much of a dramatic arc or anything - but I'm going to stop writing now and go sort my clothes. Bye!