Maybe I was a little overzealous at the idea of a second blog. I've been writing more in my long-term project and haven't really had the time to do with this that which I had wanted.
That's not to say that it won't ever happen, just (and this is as much to myself as it is to whomsoever may have decided to be interested in this) don't expect too much.
The above being said, I still feel the need to add something more substantive to this post. The inherent pun in the title is too good to not make good on.
Lately I've found myself on a bit of a musical journey. There are really two things that I've been doing to that end. First, I've been listening to huge amounts of Pandora and last.fm on my phone--partially inspired by the fact that I didn't feel like I was getting my money's worth out of the data plan that I am obligated to pay for given the phone that I use. Secondly, I found a website where you can pretty much search for any song you can listen to, and stream it right then and there.
It is a pretty amazing thing. I've known about it for a while, but only used it to listen to well known songs that I had no desire to listen to repeatedly (ever again?).
Since the increase in usage of Pandora and last.fm, however, I've found myself wanting to listen to specific songs that came up in the shuffle. This way, I am able to do so.
I have always like various sorts of music, and at one point either late in middle school or early in high school I said to a friend that I could like just about any kind of music if I listened to it enough. I also said that that didn't mean that I would like every song, nor did it mean that I liked all kinds of music at that point. I was also heard to remark that there were specific sorts of music that I didn't like and knowing the dangers, I avoided because I had no desire to incidentally start liking them.
So, even though I've liked various sorts of music in the past, and believe that I am susceptible to like most sorts of music at some point in the future, I have stuck fairly consistently with indie rock since high school. The notable exceptions, in my opinion, are a slowly gained familiarity with classic rock (ie Led Zeppelin) and Neko Case.
It is also noteworthy that I don't think I bought any albums from bands that I wasn't already familiar with between 2005 and this past January.
For the last month or so though, things have become quite a bit more varied, and the forecast is for even more change, I should think.
It was the Pandora station for Interpol that got this whole ball rolling. Several songs from The Arcade Fire came up in the rotation, and I liked those songs quite a bit. So, I did the logical thing and moved on to an Arcade Fire station. That led me to Band of Horses, which was a good find.
Some random day at work, a coworker mentioned that a neat band had played on Saturday Night Live the previous weekend. The band was called 'Them Crooked Vultures.' When I found out that former Led Zeppelin bassist and all around instrumentalist John Paul Jones was playing in that band, I decided to look up Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to see what they were up to these days, as well.
The next thing I know, I'm on this crazy bluegrass kick because of Robert Plant's duet album with Alison Krauss.
A noteworthy result of listening to the station for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, is that Alison Krauss has been a part of a whole lot of musical efforts over the past two and a half decades or so, so a lot of the music that was coming up in the Plant and Krauss rotation included her other works.
Another band that came up fairly often was The Cowboy Junkies. So far I don't like all of their stuff, but whenever anything gets played in conjunction with P&K, I usually like it.
So the musical adventure continues, I'll keep trying to expand my horizons, and I have a few different avenues to take to do so.
There. That was a mundane adventure (of sorts), right?
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Mkii
The other day I made a pizza. That may not sound like much to whomsoever may read this, but it was kind of a big deal for me. I've never really been one much for cooking, but I've been trying to do more things lately that I haven't really been 'one much for' in the past. Thus, a pizza was created.
It's not really the pizza that prompts this newest of writing endeavors, however. It was the fact that I was proud of my pizza, and felt like sharing my (mundane) accomplishment. Once the pizza had been fully cooked and partially ingested, I was struck by the need to write up a bit of a story concerning my trials and tribulations of pizza cookery.
The subsequent email that resulted (to my Mom, whose recipe I followed) was probably the equivalent of 3 pages. I had taken pictures (one just before oven insertion, and one just after removal from said oven) of the pizza, and those were both included in the email to said maternal unit.
Writing that email about a mostly ordinary event in my life felt good. Hence, this nascent blog was brought into this world, kicking, screaming, and probably unwilling, but it had to be done. I have lots of things that I want to write, some of which I actually am, but in writing that email to my Mom, I realized that there was sort of an untapped creative reserve.
Sometimes I have trouble finding motivation to write. Often it's because what I'm thinking of writing is too monumental to even really start. I say that because I have long thought of writing, but only recently have I really gotten anything going. Last Spring I was pretty well dumbstruck by an idea that was nearly a complete plot from beginning to end, and I began working on it in earnest in August. Right now I'm at about 40,000 words, and I keep getting stuck. I know what needs to happen next, but it just seems so overwhelming a task, that I keep putting it off. That, or the opposite happens, and I think that since the over-arching idea is so clear in my head that I think it will practically write itself. But then, when it doesn't, I get discouraged and go another week without adding hardly anything at all.
I know that I'm using the word 'I' too much, but that doesn't seem like it can be much helped for the moment. This paragraph was intended to be about something else, but the writer of said paragraph had had a realization that was deemed worthy of comment.
I can't say that I'll add an epically mundane story of my life every day. I can't promise that everything will make grammatical and correctly spelled sense. I can't guarantee that I'll tell anyone about this work in progress.
What I can say, is what I'm hoping for and intending right now. Put simply, I want this to be a kind of reserve. A place where I can write what comes into my head. It doesn't have to be connected to anything. For now, I assume it will mostly be nonfictitious events from my life that may or may not have been enhanced or altered for the purposes of levity; both my own and anyone with whom I may or may not share this. It may end up including works of fiction, I don't really know. What I really want out of this is a place to get some writing out of my system. Something that makes it a little easier to write for the projects that have long been in the making, but seem so daunting for such little reasons.
Also, I hope to add pictures where reasonable/applicable.
In closing, a couple of explanations are in order. Be they for myself only, for the purposes of the historical records, or for newcomers who are trying to figure me out (good luck with that... and if you should succeed, please explain me to myself).
The idea of this 'blog came about the day after the event with the pizza. Now, I had written a 'blog back in '06, which detailed a fairly epic adventure I had taking state highways to Chicago, driving Route 66 down to LA, then taking the Pacific Coast Highway back home. That 'blog had been (and is still) entitled 'the adventures of capcoy.' I'd had thoughts of just continuing that one but decided that I would leave it alone and intact. An encapsulation of a time that was (which you can find conveniently enough at capcoy.blogspot.com). This work, being about more the every day for me (hence the 'mundane' in the title) is something separate.
Also, the above paragraph should help explain the URL to anyone I may have shared it with, or anyone who happens upon it, I suppose. The 'm' is for mundane, and the 'ad' is for adventure. Plus, and this was purely a coincidental benefit, you can change the spacing in your mind's eye, and make it madcap coy--which works too.
Also, and probably finally, the title of this current post is Mkii. In and of itself, it should probably make sense given the fact that I've stated this is my newest and most second blog ever! But I probably didn't actually need to explain any of that to you. You're either me, or exceptionally clever.
It's not really the pizza that prompts this newest of writing endeavors, however. It was the fact that I was proud of my pizza, and felt like sharing my (mundane) accomplishment. Once the pizza had been fully cooked and partially ingested, I was struck by the need to write up a bit of a story concerning my trials and tribulations of pizza cookery.
The subsequent email that resulted (to my Mom, whose recipe I followed) was probably the equivalent of 3 pages. I had taken pictures (one just before oven insertion, and one just after removal from said oven) of the pizza, and those were both included in the email to said maternal unit.
Writing that email about a mostly ordinary event in my life felt good. Hence, this nascent blog was brought into this world, kicking, screaming, and probably unwilling, but it had to be done. I have lots of things that I want to write, some of which I actually am, but in writing that email to my Mom, I realized that there was sort of an untapped creative reserve.
Sometimes I have trouble finding motivation to write. Often it's because what I'm thinking of writing is too monumental to even really start. I say that because I have long thought of writing, but only recently have I really gotten anything going. Last Spring I was pretty well dumbstruck by an idea that was nearly a complete plot from beginning to end, and I began working on it in earnest in August. Right now I'm at about 40,000 words, and I keep getting stuck. I know what needs to happen next, but it just seems so overwhelming a task, that I keep putting it off. That, or the opposite happens, and I think that since the over-arching idea is so clear in my head that I think it will practically write itself. But then, when it doesn't, I get discouraged and go another week without adding hardly anything at all.
I know that I'm using the word 'I' too much, but that doesn't seem like it can be much helped for the moment. This paragraph was intended to be about something else, but the writer of said paragraph had had a realization that was deemed worthy of comment.
I can't say that I'll add an epically mundane story of my life every day. I can't promise that everything will make grammatical and correctly spelled sense. I can't guarantee that I'll tell anyone about this work in progress.
What I can say, is what I'm hoping for and intending right now. Put simply, I want this to be a kind of reserve. A place where I can write what comes into my head. It doesn't have to be connected to anything. For now, I assume it will mostly be nonfictitious events from my life that may or may not have been enhanced or altered for the purposes of levity; both my own and anyone with whom I may or may not share this. It may end up including works of fiction, I don't really know. What I really want out of this is a place to get some writing out of my system. Something that makes it a little easier to write for the projects that have long been in the making, but seem so daunting for such little reasons.
Also, I hope to add pictures where reasonable/applicable.
In closing, a couple of explanations are in order. Be they for myself only, for the purposes of the historical records, or for newcomers who are trying to figure me out (good luck with that... and if you should succeed, please explain me to myself).
The idea of this 'blog came about the day after the event with the pizza. Now, I had written a 'blog back in '06, which detailed a fairly epic adventure I had taking state highways to Chicago, driving Route 66 down to LA, then taking the Pacific Coast Highway back home. That 'blog had been (and is still) entitled 'the adventures of capcoy.' I'd had thoughts of just continuing that one but decided that I would leave it alone and intact. An encapsulation of a time that was (which you can find conveniently enough at capcoy.blogspot.com). This work, being about more the every day for me (hence the 'mundane' in the title) is something separate.
Also, the above paragraph should help explain the URL to anyone I may have shared it with, or anyone who happens upon it, I suppose. The 'm' is for mundane, and the 'ad' is for adventure. Plus, and this was purely a coincidental benefit, you can change the spacing in your mind's eye, and make it madcap coy--which works too.
Also, and probably finally, the title of this current post is Mkii. In and of itself, it should probably make sense given the fact that I've stated this is my newest and most second blog ever! But I probably didn't actually need to explain any of that to you. You're either me, or exceptionally clever.
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