Ah, blog. Hello again.
I have a lot of time on my hands lately. Earlier in the year I found myself working around 50 hours a week for nowhere near enough money, despite promising myself this time last year to slow down, to not work so much because for some reason I’m just not wired to work standard full time hours (let alone an extra 10 on top of that). Somehow I forgot this around February, and before I knew it I’d signed a full time contract, was working extra hours in a second casual job as well, and my life was suddenly running at a pace that would inevitably prove to be way too fast.
Sure enough, around June, things got a little hard to handle. My job was more stressful than it perhaps should have been, and the long hours I was keeping did nothing but add to the pressure. This isn’t really the point of this post though – it’s just a lead in to the fact I ended up extricating myself from this job and am now working a lot less. Sometimes I only work 5 or 6 hours a day, and quite often these are split shifts, so I’m out of the house early, back home around 10 or 11am and don’t have to work again until later in the afternoon.
Which suits me just fine. Well, apart from the fact that money can be tight sometimes, but that’s another issue altogether. The point is that I’m no longer stressed outta my mind, I’m sleeping well at night again, and I’m less inclined to bite the heads off my near and dear.
The biggest bonus is getting all this time back again. I don’t have to rush madly around at the end of the day trying to get tea ready, to pay bills, to do all those boring houseworky things that are a right royal drag but still have to be done. Every day I have a long stretch of uninterrupted hours in which I can tackle all these odd jobs and still have time to do whatever I like.
Before I continue I should add that I live alone and have no children, so I recognise that all this extra time is a luxury that many people don’t have. I also realise that there will probably come a time when this is not the case – I will have responsibilities that may include kids and mortgages and loan repayments and all that other grown up stuff.
Which is why I can’t help but think I should be making the most of all this extra time. I shouldn’t be spending it all on the couch watching DVD’s (guilty) and faffing about on the internet (you know you do it too) and turning on the telly in the middle of the day because I just HAD to see Ellen and Colin Farrell scaring people in a public toilet (I did it once, ok… gees. The watching, that is. Not the scaring).
I reckon it took me a couple of months to go from “it’s so awesome having the time to just kick back and veg out” to “seriously? this is how you choose to spend your days?”
In the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed my habits slowly changing. I’ve always exercised fairly regularly, but I’m knocking off from my morning shift and heading straight out for a run two or three times a week now. I’m going to the gym at least one night a week, often two. I’m playing netball every week and walking every day. This sounds really simplistic, but somehow it makes me feel like I’m doing SOMETHING, I’m not being totally slack.
I’m hardly turning the TV on at all now either. I’ve always been a big reader, and I’ve been getting through heaps of books lately – my sisters have informed me that I’ve turned into a big fat dork actually, because I read book recommendations online and in the paper and then hop on my local library’s website and put books on hold over the net and wait for them to email me and tell me they’re in. According to them this is really nerdy but I just think it’s efficient! And the resource is there to be used, why not use it?
Something else that I’ve noticed lately is that my listening habits have changed this year. I’ve spent the last two or three years eagerly following music blogs and downloading new songs and listening to a power of different tracks every week. Somewhere along the way though, I’ve become stuck. Or not stuck exactly, I think there are two things going on here.
The first is that I think I’ve found my little musical niche. When I began It All Started I was searching for new music, for new ideas. I’d never really heard of blogs until a month or two before I started my own and the first few that I read were music blogs and they opened my eyes to music that was well outside my little comfort range of Top 40 plus a little Triple J every now and then. Now I know what I like, and while my tastes encompass a fairly wide range of music, I’m feeling less inclined to want to extend my musical library.
The second thing is that I no longer feel the need to ACTIVELY seek new music. I often stumble across music that I like, usually via the radio or via friends, but I’m no longer keeping track of all the blogs I used to visit or checking out the latest releases or visiting Hype to Elbows to see what’s going on. I’m happy for the music to find me for a change.
So what does this mean for It All Started then?
Well… I’m still not sure. I love writing and there’s something so fantastic and absorbing about sitting at my desk with my laptop and tinkering with words, searching for that perfect combination of rhythm and sound and ideas. But I don’t think I want to write about music any more. It’s still a big part of my life and there’s not a day that goes by without me popping on the headphones or turning the radio up loud in the car, but I don’t seem to have the passion for blogging about it any more.
I have so many other ideas though that are not music related that I reckon are worth writing about and with all this time that I blathered on about before, it seems pretty silly not to be making the most of it.
So I guess my question is, do I keep It All Started, but use it to write about other non-music related things? Or do I start a new blog altogether?
It All Started With Carbon Monoxide 