Because I’ve been busy.

I have a love/hate relationship with being busy all the time.  There’s a validation in busy-ness.  There’s also stress, and not getting important stuff done, and not getting to focus on important things that really demand more time than you have to offer.

I’m 23 and I want to have fun and have good conversations and moving experiences and crazy random stuff happen to me.  And I guess, I do have that stuff.  And it’s hard to enjoy it in the moment because in the back of my mind I always feel stressed about something else I’m not doing.

I played a show tonight in Jersey and I kind of felt like I was phoning it in.  I played good, I had a pretty good time…  but my heart wasn’t in it the way it has been for every other gig I’ve ever had, ever.  And it’s not because I’m not still in love with music; it’s because I couldn’t get outside of the stress of I-should-have-done-a-better-job-promoting-this-are-my-friends-bored-watching-me-do-suburban-coffeeshop-people-give-a-crap-about-music-like-mine-and-is-it-really-the-best-way-to-move-my-career-forward-anymore…

Feeling bad about yourself is the quickest route to not enjoying the things you love, and the quickest route also to mediocre-izing a performance.  I made a lot of resolutions this year about getting stuff done and I’ve been pretty serious about keeping them.  At the same time, I feel like something needs to change, still, because I feel totally overwhelmed by the amount of work I need to put in to keep it all up, and on a different side of things, totally freaked out about money and making a living.  I’ve been working for myself for a while now, and I love the freedom and mental health benefits, and have no trouble disciplining myself to work — but not knowing when and how my next “paycheck” will come is putting me in constant stress.

I have all these shows coming up and I’m afraid none of them will go where I want them to go because I don’t have the time to promote them properly, and I’m still not even sure what “promote them properly” even means.  I read constantly about marketing and stuff now, and try to pay very close attention to what works and what doesn’t…  and I still feel very hit or miss about it.  Maybe it’s because I never really have time to put all the work in that I really should be putting in, on promotion.

I don’t know.  It’s easy to get down on myself about it.  It’s also not that hard to see that I have a busy life, I work at least 50-60 hours a week between “work work” and music (I’ve counted) and I’m doing my best.  And neither of those things matter that much–whether I choose to give myself a break, or to be hard on myself, the bottom line is that I’m not going to be happy until I see myself moving forward at a faster pace.

I don’t know what to do about all this.

I’m just letting it spill out of my head right now.  Hopefully tomorrow I can just spend working, working, and working and feel like I’ve made some progress on all fronts.

I have plenty of stuff to write about.

New band.  New shows.  New political diatribes (do they ever stop?).  But tonight, I just have a poem.

(more…)

I have nothing but respect for the gals over at Feministing for having the wherewithal to respond intelligently to Charlotte Allen’s pile of bulls*** Washington Post article. I personally just don’t have it in me. In fact, I went to great lengths to avoid reading it, because I knew from the responses it was getting that it would just make me very upset, and honestly, there’s only so much impotent rage a girl can manage in one week.

But there were so many links being flung at me within my social sphere that, in a moment of weakness, I clicked on one. And I’ll tell ya what: I am NOT linking to it here, much as I’m sure some of you may want to read it. The huge-and-growing number of link-backs to this article is telling the Washington Post “The more articles you publish like this, the more link-backs to your paper there will be.” I will, however, link to its rebuttal: A Dumb Argument

Anyway, like I said: I couldn’t respond to this article directly without getting upset, so here’s my extremely indirect response:

rorie’s Top Ten Reasons to Be A Feminist

1. Women and men are equal and should be treated as such.

2 - 10. Duh.