Tag Archives: fears

The Protest is the Point

19 Thursday Jan 2017

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Given that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote last November by nearly 3 million, I feel safe in saying that I stand with the majority of the country in trepidation over Trump’s inauguration tomorrow.  We don’t want this. We don’t deserve this.  This shouldn’t be happening.

I look on in horror as the Republicans work to strip away a health care system that got me medical attention that I sorely needed and shudder to think how friends who have worse health will get by.  Ethics were never Trump’s strong suit and already the GOP have made an effort to reduce ethical oversight in Washington.  I can easily imagine the Republican-led Executive and Legislative branches working to dismantle the EPA, the Department of Education, and worker protections and rights overseen by the Department of Labor.  Goodbye, any effort to protect the environment. Today it was made known that Trump intends to cut the National Endowment for the Arts. Foreign affairs don’t look much better as Trump has already been all too willing to shoot his mouth off about military efforts, both on-going and non-existent, and made international faux pas in an effort to aggrandize himself at the cost of decades of carefully crafted American statesmanship.  Every day news headlines from the incoming administration have sent chills through me.

This is, of course, to say nothing of Trump’s horrifying comments about women, Mexicans, black people, the disabled, Muslims, etc, and how they’ve emboldened white supremacists, re-branded as “alt-right,” and even put the KKK back in the news.

Talking with friends, all I can say is that I genuinely don’t know what is going to happen.

But I will march against this, because it shouldn’t have happened.  Slim margins in several states tipped the electoral college his way.  How could that happen unless the electoral college is inherently unfair.  In less populated states a single vote carries more weight than in a heavily populated state.  How can that be possible in a so-called democratic country?  And for the $10million question: How can this have happened twice in the last 16 years?

I will march against this abrogation of democracy because our Declaration of Independence notes that government power comes from consent of the governed.  And we did not consent to this.

I’ve been asked why even bother when demonstrating doesn’t do anything.  I guess many people are too removed from having to take persistent action to effect change in their country.  No, protests aren’t direct action.  Direct action is getting right in the way of business as usual and forcing it to deal with you – blocking entry to government buildings, laying down in the road so buses returning undocumented immigrants to Mexico can’t move, etc.  The protests that strive to avoid breaking laws are indirect action.  They’re about solidarity and about being heard.  Anyone who has ever watched their silence get mistaken for agreement knows the value of speaking up, being visible.

The point of protesting is to protest.  So you don’t stew in your own home, so you don’t despair that you might be the only who feels like you do, so your community is forced to recognize where you stand.

And with any luck it bolsters those in the halls of power who might present an opposition to the forces being protested.  Call it a political gambit, or maybe a drive to be popular with the protesters, but gaining political support is no small matter.  I can only imagine right now what it feels like to be a liberal Representative, surrounded by Republican Congressmen who now have a good shot at realizing their dreams of squeezing government services until they pop. How intimidating it must feel.  Perhaps millions of people around the country taking to the streets will bolster their will to oppose and counter Republicans.

For people who still want protesting to have utility beyond speaking out in public, the Civil Rights hero and Congressman John Lewis says, “Get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Stepping out, raising your voice, being visible, is a challenge to the status quo.  It attracts attention.  It attracts trouble. The powers that be would prefer if their power and authority were never challenged; they like to behave as if your silence equals agreement.  I will not let them be mistaken as to where I stand.

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Aging Angst

29 Thursday Dec 2016

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This coming year I turn 40.  It’s kind of terrifying and unhappy-making, even while older friends point and laugh and tell me I’m young yet.  I don’t feel 40.  In my heart I feel maybe 32.  I keep forgetting it’s the whole four-oh, and have to pointedly remind myself.  Reminding myself is what’s freaking me out, man, that I didn’t realize all the years gone by.

But anyway, I’m a-gonna turn 40.  When I was about to turn 30 I felt like I couldn’t wait.  My 20s felt weird, I wasn’t suited to them somehow. 30s seemed more established, like I wouldn’t be kidding myself if thought of myself as an adult.  Perception is such a weird thing.

Obviously, in retrospect this is all ridiculous (thank you, weird perception).  I felt weird in my 20s because I was largely wasting that time.  I had more energy, a faster metabolism, better health, to say nothing of holding down a steady job for most of that time.  I look back in chagrin thinking of the things I could have done – worked harder to get back into acting, studied Japanese, or even taken financial investment classes.  I try not to get caught up in regret or what-ifs because it’s completely pointless, but for all that I may feel young now, my body constantly reminds me that I’m not.  You don’t really need the gory details, suffice to say my health isn’t the product of misadventure or really bad luck so much anymore.

Still, one’s 20s are for banging around in the world and not fretting too much about bruises.  And I know this for I am old and wise now. So if you’re under 30 quit reading this and go have an adventure – before it’s too late!

I couldn’t see my future when I looked so hopefully at my 30s.  I was such an idiot.  I couldn’t see what would come either from my misfortunes or the misfortunes of the world that twined with mine (see banking collapse & Great Recession).  I couldn’t see how my forward movement would disappear, swallowed whole by depression that would take years to even think of escaping.

Maybe I want to be 32 so I can get those years back, goddammit.

But now, I’m headed into 40 and time and tide are not known for their patience.

I hope for 40 what I’ve always wanted from years previous – satisfying, lucrative work that I can be proud of.  Some other things too, I guess.  Good health, physical & mental, getting fit, not feeling like it’s extra complicated for me to get healthy thanks to being flat broke.  Getting to see friends regularly, not having to exhaust myself constantly just to see a few people once in a while.  Traveling would be extra nice.  Unlikely, but still.  But it really is all about the work, the career.  I have so little to speak of in that direction and regardless of what I “should” do with “shoulds”, DUDE, I should have a career by now.

You know, one nice thing that happened in 2016, though, was that I got a really nice voice over project over the summer. It was for a Spanish language video project that few people will see, but it was a nice payday (given the amount of work the pay was probably low, but no matter).  I got to attend a couple of classes with people I look up to in VO and they complimented me nicely, so that’s always really cool.

Finances got a little rocky though and I couldn’t get one major ticket item off my list, which was a Spanish language commercial demo.  I know I’m leery of it.  I know I drag my feet when I consider the tasks necessary for it, but it’s honestly a big deal.  If I can get it done I’ll open up a whole new area of work I can do.

So 2016 was looking pretty good for career stuff and at least by the end of October I had a lot to look forward to there.  It gave me the nerve to get into a theatre project and see it through to the point that now I’m part of an ensemble cast, and we’ll be putting on our show at the end of next month!  Now that is a big deal.  While voice acting IS acting, stage acting uses different muscles.  And I haven’t taken these muscles out for spin since I was in college.  Thanks to VO and thanks to working with generous artists I’ve come to a point where I’m more confident in my acting ability and have the nerve to think I can do a whole show outside of the protective confines of school.

For work that I love doing, 39 was not too bad.  Wasn’t great financially, all told, but there was forward movement.

I’d like to hope I’ll see more of it at 40 and beyond.  I keep hedging because there’s a lot of turmoil around me and I can feel the nervousness in the air.  Trying to get a job in a tense environment is *tough* to say the very least.  I’ve never been able to.  And other people’s nerves make me second guess myself.  All in all, one of the worst things that happened this year is casting a long, deep shadow over next year (and years to come).

What I fear for 40, I guess, is that I’ll have to push out harder and more persistently than I ever have.  In fact, I’ll have to get up with the conviction that I can meet my goals leading me there. And that is far harder than it sounds.  Not only am I prone to depression, but I can’t begin to figure out how to have a positive attitude and be upbeat about my opportunities when people around me are feeling morose, if not in a panic.  I can do steady, cover the basics, make sure the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.  But I can’t do hopeful. Not while everyone is telling me to worry about eroding rights, cut offs in access to medical care, runaway environmental destruction, and urban neglect.  I can’t disconnect what I do from what goes on in the world, or at least my country.

And that leads me to think that at 40 I’ll have to work on both levels, both for myself and for my society.  And here again, I wish I had the energy I had when I was 20.

I turn 40. In 2017.  Good Lord.

Un-thinking

22 Friday Apr 2016

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I’m feeling some stage fright.

Well sort of. It doesn’t seem to be as petrifying as I remember the stone cold grip on my lungs was when I stood in the wings waiting for my cue.  But I’m still nervous.

I know it’s because I’m caught up thinking about how I’m going to impress people who have deeply impressed me.  And I’m likewise caught up in being convinced that I’ll never impress them, only disappoint them.  I won’t disappoint myself, I already know I’m a loser.

I’ll just irritate myself and that’ll set off despair at myself and then I’ll lie around wondering what point there is in getting up and attempting anything.

Do I get ahead of myself?  Yeah, of course, that’s overthinking things in a nutshell.  Not only am I already thinking ahead, past my inevitable failure, but I’m skipping over the part where I am present to the work that I am doing while I’m doing it.

Performing has little do with thinking. I’ve already written about that. Thinking helps set things up but does not do the performing.  My thinking muscle is very strong.  I’ve worked it out every single day since I was wee thing.  But my performing muscle is flabby.  Sometimes I pay careful, persistent attention to it, sometimes I ignore it. Every day problems come up that need attention from the thinking muscle and they eclipse the opportunity to workout the performing muscle.  And then along comes a problem, or really the chance to show off, that only the performing muscle can handle.

But sort of like instinctively lifting with your back instead of your legs (and subsequently hurting yourself), the thinking muscle wants to jump in and plan out All the Things, including failing at what it is no good at.

Performance is play. It’s in the body and the soul.  Thought keeps it all together, so I don’t just flop around and scream incoherently, but the impact of performance is created by physical effort and inspiration.  There is no anticipation there, no planning ahead, just doing.  Just right now.

And it’s frightening.  I’m used to relying on thought to help me through everything.  Performing feels like heading out on a tightrope – if I start to tip over how will I keep from falling??  But again, that’s only a concern because thought won’t help.  Performing will.  It sounds weird to say performing saves performing, but… well, what else is there?  If I stay centered in what I’m doing – performing – I won’t lose my balance.

Shhh, thought. I’m doing something.

Out on a Limb

24 Friday Jul 2015

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I don’t do things that scare me or make me uncomfortable too very often.  I keep meaning to fix that, but I’m so busy with all the things that are inside my comfort zone I often forget to go ahead and take a chance on something Out There.

And I mean, everyone is full of the “do one thing that scares you every day” like that’s so easy.  Like there aren’t really good reasons for why it’s scary.  You’re being told to take risks, to gamble and take chances – the people who tell you that certainly aren’t the ones who are going to take the financial hit or lose the relationship or damage their health if things don’t work out.

But still.  There is no growth without losing some skin, right?  The world you have built up around you was once scary itself, and eventually became the status quo, also became the stagnation trapping you in place.  At least that’s how it tends to go for me.

I was thinking about this last night, sitting on a workout-type paid-hangout-with Grey deLisle-Griffin.  It’s really tough sometimes to tell the difference between when I’m holding back due to nerves, fears that I’ll screw up and everyone will hate me (or more likely I’ll be awkward and everyone will think I’m weird (and not worth working with)), and when the hesitation is actually practical, when I can’t squeeze out the time or I can’t afford it or (hardest of all) I’m not ready.

And DAMN the last one is the hardest, because so much of being “ready” is just nerve.  Sheer confidence often trumps actual skill, particularly in performance.  Which is not to say that skill and talent aren’t valued – quite the opposite.  The quality of talent can determine what kind of a career you have, but your boldness will be the make or break point of actually having a career.

When I went on mic in front of Grey it was hard to figure out which affected me more, performance nerves or the frosty cold booth.  (Grey commented on shaking my voice as if it were intentional…um it wasn’t an affect, it was effect but I don’t know what caused it.)  I decided to go with a character I’ve worked on before – ethereal, calm, wise – knowing that the challenge there is to get the life as big as any wacky, loud goofball.

The greater challenge was actually to put on a very slight British accent.  I wanted the character to have a polished sound, articulated and enunciating properly.  Right away Grey came back with instruction to put on a British accent.  I just wanted a “proper” sound, but I didn’t want to go full on Emma Thompson simply for fear of screwing up.

It’s continually a lesson to me when the note I’m given is to play a note I started out with for myself.  It’s like I’m waving at a place I want to go to and the direction comes back “Go to that place.”  Why didn’t I do that from the beginning?

So.  I’m never allowed to forget Grey offhandedly tossing out “the British accent is great” without a second thought and then moving on to other things.  It was fine.  I was fine.

Fear is stupid.

Floundering, Drowning Life

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

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I was trying to stop crying.  But that just made it all worse.  God, trying to cry quietly just sucks.

Even when I’m doing things I like (theatre, voice acting), there’s still biding shadows in the back of my mind.  I can rather forget that they’re there.  I can even get so that I forget what it’s like and end up criticizing other anxiety-ridden depressives like a normal, non-messed up person.  The thing I can’t forget, ever, is that stress really brings on the bad brain.

When I’m okay it just pisses me off because it kills so much of my time and energy.  On an okay bout like this one, I lose maybe a day.  But I’ve lost months if not years barely able to get out of bed.

I’ve got *so much* that I want and need to get done that laying about, staring off into space ends up feeling like a cosmic insult I’m giving myself, after all the other abuse I’ve already laid on me.

Everything I’m good at, everything I want more of, is totally crippled – I can’t think creatively, I can’t tune into good art or other people’s feelings.  Every effort feels hobbled; productivity slows way down, assuming I can get anything done at all.  And I feel like every single thought has a giant boulder that it has to go around in order to come together in the real world.

There’s no real reason to tread all this ground – Allie Brosh already did the job spot on.  I mean, the line “No, see, I don’t necessarily want to KILL myself…I just want to become dead somehow” is perfect (and in context, hugely funny).  But maybe only folks who know what depression is like can get that, and everyone who doesn’t know it should count their damned blessings.

What’s on my mind is two things:  The difficulty of trying to build a life at the same time that stress triggers anxiety and depression.  As well as the frustration and pain that comes when a bad episode gets written off as angst, to say nothing of being accused of attention whoring while getting slapped around by self-hatred.

Whatever I do with my life, no matter where I go or what company I keep, this disorder hangs around.  If I’ve got an episode going then all of my measurements for situations between people are completely distorted.  Clear thoughts are almost impossible, and even when I think I’ve got one, I rarely actually do.

After decades of measuring myself and whatever I create, all I can say is… I dunno.  Am I good at anything?  I dunno.  Am I smart?  I dunno.  Am I talented?  I dunno. Is what I made any good?  I don’t know.  I can only go by what other people say because when I rely on my native judgment, folks and I regularly part ways.

Can there be more frustrating conditions for trying to make a go at creating art for a living?

But like I said, that’s all a part of my life.  I make art because I have to.  I’m to the theatre like the ocean is to water.  And I’ve found voice acting spurs everything I like bringing into the world.  It’s stressful making these happen as my body of work.  And of course all the rest of life – sharing living space and getting dinner on the table and finding the time to be alone and paying bills and dodging debt and just trying to keep even more things from breaking…  All of it piles on the stress until something finally breaks my last resolve to push on and all I can do is choke and gulp and wipe my face before anyone notices I’ve been crying.

I’m not sure what the hell else I’m supposed to say for myself when these are the circumstances through which I view the world.  But… I think… I think, I’m a pretty good actor.  Maybe.

————————————————————————————————–

Title was taken from one of the poems in Birthday Letters, written by Ted Hughes, better known as Mr Sylvia Plath (to whom the poem was addressed).

“Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give.”

Rough to read, but you know who really doesn’t want that “strange glitter?”  The person who’s too fucking depressed to swim to shore.

On the Marks

08 Monday Oct 2012

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Today my throat hurts. So today I’ll write about voice acting instead of actually doing it. I haven’t put myself to work on voice for a while. I’ve taken some classes here and there but let auditioning dribble off to almost none – despite seeking more information on where I could go to find more opportunities.

In cases like this I want to explain why, but I don’t have a good explanation. It was hot? I really can’t say. I took a workshop at Bang Zoom! through their voice acting class/lesson program, Adventures in Voice Acting back in July and took another one yesterday. And both days I came away exhausted but happy. And seriously thinking about what I wanted to do next with my career.

I am a bit perturbed that I really didn’t do much for the career in between dates. There isn’t a lot to dig into. I make up my schedule as I go along so I just have to make up the time to work and then stick to it. But…also… there’s just the step that is putting myself out there. I keep finding reasons not to take it. Every once in a while I send out my demo or put together an audition at home. But I’m not making it a habit.

The only explanation is fear, even though I don’t feel afraid. But sometimes I don’t feel tired, I just notice I don’t have energy. Or I don’t notice how stressed I am but I have trouble catching my breath. Maybe it’s simple fear of change. I’d have to quit a lot of simple luxuries and treat myself like an employed person – even without an income for a while to come. It doesn’t make any sense to not just do the work in front of me. But I never make much sense to myself.

It’s past time I took all of that, all of myself in hand and pushed onward.

Amazing people are doing really cool things and there are zero reasons I couldn’t be one them.

On Profession and Professing

23 Friday Dec 2011

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Today on Twitter Fr James S Martin (so-called chaplain of The Colbert Report) wrote “Gospel: When Zechariah fulfills what God has asked him to do, his tongue is loosed. When we follow our calling in life we are able to sing.”

Two things come to mind quickly.  First the one that made me happy, that made me want to blog and then second the one that maked me question everything and feel unsure.

First, even though I think I know what I’m good at and what I enjoy doing and I put my effort into making them be the same thing, as well as that thing that pays the bills, it’s quite the juggling act.  I have yet to be successful at it.  More over, there’s still enough play in my certainty of myself that I’m not sure if The Man Above has set me on this Earth to do this.  I mean, I also get a lot out of serving others, helping and solving problems.  Or just feeding people.  Maybe I should be doing that? Continue reading →

Finding the Wrong Way and Working Backwards

21 Wednesday Dec 2011

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Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. –Winston Churchill

At Whitechapel, the only real Web forum in which I participate, some of us have taken stock of our lives and felt a bit frustrated all over again to see we’re not at all close to where we figured we should be at our age(s).  Several of us are staring down, if not fully ensconced in, middle age and reliant on someone else to help us get through everyday, whether its parents, spouses, housemates, etc.

It’s not just the frustration of trying to keep the momentum of a career going during tough economic times, many of us already got kicked around town by that particular bitter pill, but now we’re trying to get a new career going.  Many of us (because it’s Whitechapel and this is the sort of folks we are) are having a go at careers that involve artistic ability.  Man, talk about all around asking for negative judgment.  Subject: 35, lives with parents, limited background for but seeking paying projects in creative writing, acting, photography or graphic design.  Even I’m trying not to scream “get a job, ya bum!” and that’s pretty much my life.

I guess at no point in career counselling did anyone promise the line would be straight and clear between getting an education and securing an income, but then again no one ever mentioned it would be so murky, confusing, and rife with soft spots where a person could get awfully stuck.  Pushing your art as a service means running your work like a business and oddly enough it’s a rare curriculum that teaches artists/actors/musicians/writers how to do this.  There’s practical advice, here and there, but advice lacks the regimentation of study and is often contradictory.  What I mean is, I learn lessons from a classroom more clearly and for longer than advice I run across at receptions or on Twitter.

Of course, the reason advice is contradictory and isn’t subject to any kind of review is because these careers don’t have single correct path for advancement.  There just isn’t one and maybe there simply couldn’t be one.  There are many, possibly even one for every individual.  (Ugh, what an annoying thought, moreso because that’s probably the most accurate way to think of it.)  Everyone has to blaze their own trail because achieving success isn’t about getting to a virtual territory where all the pros are, but securing a professional status for oneself.  In other words, even though we think about it as traveling the better metaphor is evolution.  You become what you’re aiming for.

Oh well, all I’m trying to aim at saying is that I don’t know what are the wrong methods of going about this.  But what I have learned, and had confirmed for me by people who would know, is that a certain false path is giving up.  The only way to fail to get to where you’re going is to just not try.  Even if I put all my effort into this crazy career of mine and get hit by a bus before ever landing a paying gig, is that really failure?  I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to be sure I’m not any good at voice acting is if I quit before I get anywhere.

When Improv Attacks

12 Saturday Nov 2011

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A recent improv class reminded me why I actively avoided performing it ever since my first encounter in junior high.  Every thing about improv puts me in a situation that is terrifying to me: I can’t control the performance, I can’t control the trajectory of the scene, I can’t even control who I am.  That same class, however, reaffirmed for me why I’ve chosen to tackle this fear and furthermore let me know that I am getting better at picking up from work that left me in a bad place, if only a little bit at a time.

The less I know about what’s going on at any given time, the more likely it is that I’ll hold still and be quiet until I get a kind of lay of the land.  This isn’t self-imposed silence.  I can’t stress that enough; I’m quiet, not because I feel shushed, but because I lack anything to say for myself until I understand how I want to present myself.  I make that delineation because I want to be specific that I identify as introverted, not shy.

Improv forces me to run counter to my natural programming by demanding an immediate and creative response.  I can’t just sit back and intellectually take in what’s going on I have to be a live wire in the midst of the situation.  Moreover, I’m there as a character that would be there, not as me.  This is both extra work and a saving grace.  It shouldn’t be as hard as it is to avoid taking personally what my scene partners say to me, but it can be.  But if I can come up with a character fast enough it’s like the other players take a swing at me but hit the shield that is my character’s facade.  The characters in my head are generally slicker than me and can coolly deflect a roundhouse without breaking a sweat.

If I don’t get that character together and up fast enough I’m stuck taking the swing that is an avalanche of information coming at me full force.  And that’s the trouble.  I don’t think of myself as cool enough to tangle with situations I don’t understand. And when those situations include other people blatantly ignoring social norms – becoming threatening, getting too close or too loud – it’s hard as fuck to ignore my instinctual responses.  If I’m not ready for the madness that improv can summon I can easily end up stuck between a really hard rock and the worst place for me.  My mind completely shuts down leaving only a tiny handful of options – all of which would end the scene if I acted on them, and possibly lead to me exiting the class.

Come up with a creative response? No.  Not when it’s all I can do to keep from bursting into tears or running off stage.  Or hitting someone.  Bottom line, I can’t figure out how to go on with the scene.  All of my instincts (ALL of them) want me to get out and a tantrum would be as effective as locking myself in the bathroom.  I have zero mental space left for a response that has me actually take part in, let alone propel, the scene.

So I give all that as background on what, for me, is the worst case scenario: completely shutting down.  As much as acting is an art, it’s also work.  If I am to be an actor, shutting down presents a negation of everything I’m trying to do artistically and professionally.  So that added anxiety bonus gets tossed on top.

Now, it hardly it ever happens.  I can handle most situations on stage (or on a mic) just fine as far as my basic instincts are concerned.  I don’t even get much in the way of stage fright – some minimal nerves, maybe.  But when it does happen it puts me into a recursive loop of frustration and anxiety (full disclosure, this happens a lot more offstage than on) and it’s tough as hell to break free from it.

Improv to the rescue!  Well, sort of.  Maybe it’s more like the freedom of improv to the rescue.  Probably the last thing I think about when performing is entertaining and getting people to laugh.  Every once in a blue moon I’ll come up with a quip that I know will make people giggle, but I have many more priorities ahead of comedy.  (Here’s a theory: part of my difficulty stems from others having different goals.  Eh, if so that part is a small one.)  But improv gives me the room to create based on any reaction so long as the scene keeps growing, even if that is the feeling of irritation.

So, at this recent class I had to make through a scene that I couldn’t get into.  I was hemmed in and swiftly shutting down.  At the end I took my seat and contemplated leaving the class.  But I didn’t.  I put together a couple of ideas for upcoming scenes and worked through them even though they were still a bit of a mess.  I can’t pinpoint when but I did get to another scene where the anger I was feeling at myself and the situation in front of me gave me an inkling of where to go next.  In improv that’s a watershed.  It lets me progress from a posture of taking in information to one where I’m leaning forward, putting my thoughts and feelings out into the creation.  That’s when the lights turn on.  Not all of them, just enough to start picking my way and finding other light switches as I go.  That’s when improv is  ridiculously fun.  That’s when I remember I’m acting, a creator, a being in possession of worlds and words that had never come together quite in such a way before.

That’s how I know improv can help me get to where I need to go.

Stripping – No, not like that

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

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Have you ever been working long and hard and get to the point that you should change your clothes and wash up but don’t quite want to because the fresh air and scrubbing feel like they’ll bring on an invasion to the mojo you’ve put together? Sure, it’s childish, but you earned that grit why not just press on?

It’s kind of felt like that over the last month and change.  I didn’t quite notice August slip by without blog updates, though I had started the month quite gung-ho about getting this site rolling.  I even paid for my own URL and everything.  But…stuff happened, like it does and I forgot to get back around to this, no matter that this blog is specifically for documenting such …uh…stuff.  But as time kept sliding by without writing anything of substance in public I found myself even more reticent to make the time.

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