Longer Than It Should

 I would be a bit tempted to drive for Uber, but I can't because my car only has two doors. I guess I could do Uber eats or something else like that. What I really need to do is just actually work for myself. There is plenty to do, and some of it actually makes money.  I just listened to a book summary that argued that extrinsic motivation can be harmful. I think I agree. The drives I talked about last week, the appetites, are intrinsic. How then can we adjust the appetites without having to call that adjustment 'extrinsic motivation'? It's all a semantics game after all, but it's a semantics game worth playing I think. Like how reverse psychology totally works in certain situations.  I'm parked next to a stone wall, and I have the sudden realization that life is more like a stone wall than a brick wall. In the end you're going to end up with a wall, but to begin with you're probably going to deal with some irregularities. On the other hand our days are ...

 The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao - loud Sue  I'm here on our easy chair and the dog is asleep on my feet. The sun is coming in the windows at an angle that is better even than a sun lamp. I am catching my rays for sure.  I am planning to go to church as soon as I finish writing this. I have not written in a month, but for no particular reason. It's not that I didn't have anything to say. I have been working on several songs, vacationing, and continuing to raise Jamie. It seems that some tasks never go away once you sign up for them. Perhaps that's what I want to focus on today. Appetites. If we can change our appetites, our drives, then we can change our actions. We don't want to try to get ourselves to go to the gym. Rather we ought to try to get ourselves to want to be in better shape. Then we might go to the gym automatically. I don't know why people use the gym as part of their metaphor so often. Let me put it a different way.  I like quick ...

I was just going to link to another podcast, but I decided to write something... My last 2 years have been fairly devoted to Hold That Note (my musical podcast which came out weekly for most of 2022 and 2023). Alluding to the title of this blog (Longer Than It Should), I was sure that somehow the show would make a breakthrough eventually.  Now I'm not so unrealistic... there is no reason that the show can't remain in obscurity perpetually.  Even if I never stop making art, 'the people' are not obligated to tell their friends about it.  They will only do so if there's something in it for them, which makes sense... that's how I operate too... an equal and opposite reaction, or whatever. Well, it's clear that I have some bitterness about the whole thing.  (I'll admit that).  My whole ecosystem on the internet is so close to good enough... and yet so far.  It's like the difference between good and great gapes larger and larger the closer you get to it. ...

 Here's the link to my newest podcast episode:  https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/holdthatnote/episodes/119-Nikos-Song--Wake-Up-Oh-Sleeper--journaling-with-God-e2rhpt3 Or find it wherever you get your podcasts by searching 'Hold That Note' ... and don't forget to subscribe.

Figuring out what to do with your life isn't easy.  Sometimes I feel like I'm a stem cell... I could morph into anything without warning.  (This may reflect a fairly rudimentary understanding of stem cells). Right now I've basically been stripped down to me, my dog, and my car... and for now I'm staying with my parents... so we're all just waiting to see what I evolve into next.  Could it be a musician? A blogger? A YouTuber? A podcaster? A comedian? An actor?  A children's book author/illustrator?  An accountant? A business tycoon? A foot surgeon? A railroad conductor? A theoretical physicist? A bazillionaire? A racecar driver? It's hard to decide.  And the rules are changing daily... It's hard for me to even discern what my personality type is.  It seems to shift like sand. I'm not exactly sure how sand shifts.  The way I shift is by getting energy from some gatherings and being overwhelmed and anxious about other very similar ones.  Tangen...

Jamie does this thing where she will lay peacefully at my feet, but then she will spring to attention the second I get out of my chair to do something. Just now I had to ask my dad to hand me my phone because I had accidentally left it on the other side of the room before sitting down (and Jamie had decided to lie down at my feet almost immediately).   ----------------- I'm trying to blog more because the numbers show that it's more effective than podcasting, at least for me. Also it takes less time and effort for me to make a post, so if more people read it AND it's easier to make, that seems like a big win.  It's always hard for me to pick a medium. YouTube is great, and it's not that hard to do once you have a setup, but I don't really have a setup right now, and I don't see a likelihood of a sprawling desk covered in giant sleek monitors manifesting itself in my near future. Right now my basic plan is to try to have three or four house shows (although, l...

I find it's easy to fall into an existence where one only wants to do the easy things. We are all like water droplets meandering down the window panes of life, choosing a left here and a right there for no apparent reason to the human eye, but to the eye of the water droplet each decision of which way to go is obvious. Since we are humans though, not actual water droplets, sometimes our decisions seem loaded and important. If you ask me, they aren't. Each one we come to, we end up doing exactly what we were destined to do. Perhaps this is predestination talk, but it's an interesting thought process. Have you ever seen the Mario minigame where they drop a little treasure chest into the mouth of one of three intertwining pipes, and it winds its way down through the mass of pipes and comes out at the bottom into the expecting hands of either Mario, Luigi, or (God forbid ) Bowser?  What makes this game fun is that the mess of pipes which the treasure chest goes through is publi...