Work vs. Play
Well that was a long stretch of nothing, wasn’t it? As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted anything in a while. I think this is because posting here used to be something that I could do to procrastinate while I was at work, and now it’s something I should work on instead of doing other things. This has become part of my non-paying, no-boss-having “job” of leisure. In other words, I don’t want to work, but would prefer to bang on the drum all day. Also, this NYTimes podcast actually kept me pretty busy – I understand now why most podcasts are kind of like unedited live radio shows. You record a 45 minute show and you’re done. All this editing and sound effects and music is really time consuming. But we’re done, and they’ll be posting all three 12-minute episodes on the site tomorrow, just in time to promote the new Funny Pages section on Sunday. Enjoy them. Please don’t yell at me that they’re not really podcasts, because I already know that.
Now then. To business. My new job as a non-job-haver comes with certain responsibilities (which I make up and can ignore whenever I want to). I hereby propose a challenge to myself, which I also accept. To keep the juices flowing, I am going to post one piece of work per week until further notice. This may be a complete song, or it may be some kind of experimental thing, a mashup, a remix, some audio of me eating cheese, who knows. Not every one will be good, or even tolerable. Many of these things will not make any sense to anyone but me, and some of them will certainly suck. But there will be one a week, so that’s got to be worth something.
I’ll post the first item later today (now I have to go buy some fat shorts and eat some lunch), and then every Friday until I can’t take it anymore, or until I am given one million dollars to stop. Get ready America…
Week One – Boy, Am I Bored!
Just kidding. This not working thing is awesome. It’s thrillling just to have time to run errands in the middle of the day. I still kind of feel like I’m on vacation, but I suspect that will change when I run out of money. I should really make some sort of a list of projects. And then do them. Many thanks to all you kind souls who have posted and emailed words of encouragement.
Speaking of which, my old pal John Hodgman and I are working on a couple of podcasts for the NY Times to promote their new Funny Pages thing in the Sunday magazine. John is editing the humorous essays portion (there will also be a comic strip and some serial fiction from Elmore Leonard). Not sure there’s going to be a lot of room for JC sauce in this sandwich, but you should certainly expect some kind of “theme song” situation, and of course the standard Hodgman-Coulton magic a la our Little Gray Books podcast. I should mention, it doesn’t look like there’s actually going to be an RSS feed, which technically makes these things NOT podcasts. Also, there are only three of them, and they’re all going to be posted on the same day, Saturday September 17. I know. NOT podcasts. Look people, I just bake the funnycake, I’m not going to tell the Old Gray Lady how to serve it up.
Katrina Relief
If you’ve been waiting until you could safely buy a CD without any money actually going to me, now is your chance. CDBaby has just set up a way that all their artist can donate profits from CD sales directly to the Red Cross Disaster Relief fund to help victims of hurricane Katrina. I’ll be donating all my profits for the month of September. While this won’t be a huge amount of money, hundreds of CDBaby artists are doing the same thing, so together we may actually do some good.
If you’d prefer to donate directly to the Red Cross, you can do so here. Not to make you feel any more guilty than you already do, but it really sounds like it sucks down there. And I am familiar with the calculus of small donations, so believe me when I tell you that moderate amounts of small donations will most definitely add up to moderate amounts of money – I can only imagine what enormous amounts of small donations might do. You can change the world in a tiny way…
Don’t Quit Your Day Job
If you haven’t been paying attention, you might think that I am an actual rock star. This is not the case. An examination of my tax returns would indicate that I am in fact a “software engineer.” For the past 8 or so years I’ve worked at a small firm in NYC writing software. The music and the robot building and the podcasting have all been non-profit (or extremely small-profit) enterprises done in my spare time. Those days are over. I quit my job. This is my last week.
I’ve been psyching myself up for this for a long time, but saying those words still makes me pee my pants a little. Really, I haven’t even posted this entry yet, but just writing it makes me feel dizzy. I don’t have any specific plans, I just know that I need to reconfigure my life to have a more flexible schedule, more room for creative endeavors. I need to be more of an artist, or at least pretend to be an artist for a while and see if it ends up being true. But I don’t know how I’m going to make money, and I’m not even sure what I will do with the hours in my day. I’m just hoping that this leap of faith will open up possibilities – ask the universe and it will provide, blah blah blah. As you can see, I’m back and forth on this. Part of me is sure this is exactly the right thing to do, while the rest of me is screaming that this is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. Time will tell. Right now all I can do is try not to panic.
There: now it’s real because it’s on the internet.
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