Disciplinarian

Feeling the limits of what I can do lately. For a while there I was posting a blog up every Monday but then I thought 'why should I be restricted to Mondays? Why can't I just post blogs whenever I want?' And then of course nothing ever got written, not even the Monday blogs.

So let's walk the tightrope of constraints and freedom. It's called discipline.

Today I bought the new Gotye album. I'd been hanging out for it all year, at least since I saw him play at Sydney Festival in January, but I have no idea why it took me so long to get it seeing as it came out a couple of months ago and I just went and bought it on iTunes.

I've heard a couple of his new songs on the radio and it's the single out now, 'Somebody that I used to know' that he did with NZ singer Kimbra, that actually prompted me to write this post. She sounds like the chick on his earlier album, Boardface, who sung 'Loath to Refuse' and I couldn't find out whether she *was* the same singer via a simple Google search.

(A more complex Google search revealed that the singer was Michaela Alexander for that earlier album. Kimbra, born in 1990, would've been 13 and her voice wouldn't have been that mature.)

Anyway, all this is really a side story for the fact that I've come to the point where any little thing, a gap in my knowledge, a question in my mind, sends me off on a tangent, a search, a quest to know everything I need to know about X.

Of course while this is going on there's a list of things I need to do that grows bigger and a list of things that I would like to do that's even bigger than the first.

At the moment there's a whole lot of work and it's freelance work that I maybe could have said 'no' to but it's money, right? And I'm still trying to find the sweet spot with what I get paid. I'm not quite struggling (that was a bad way to put it... and you call yourself a writer, Ads!) but things are a bit uneasy.

I'm not, for example, paying a little extra on my mortgage like I should. Instead, I suspect that that money is going to gigs. I paid $110 for a Sydney Opera House Insiders membership that gives me cheaper tickets to events there and also lets me avoid the $8.50 booking fee (I'm sure I've ranted about booking fees before—if not, I will add it to that exponentially expanding list of things to do). I reckon I have booked enough tickets to justify about $60 of that $110 annual fee already and I haven't even had it a month yet.

(I just left this blog entry to read this. It is funny. I like her style of writing.)

I need to thank my lovely boyfriend, Boff, though. He pays for the tickets a lot of the time and all I have to do is cook dinner for him and buy him nice cereal (he actually pays extra rent for the nice cereal but I do the bulk of the shopping).

Things are going well between us. We still haven't sorted out the house, partly because it needs new furniture but we can't get new furniture until we sort something out and shuffle some boxes around... so you can see how it goes. There's no Freecell. Except on the solitaire app, which is a bad way to spend your free time when you should be sorting out your house.

Besides which, a great deal of what I want to do requires a chunk of time to complete and that's something I don't have at the moment because I'm too busy accepting freelance jobs at the busiest time of the cycle for deadlines and then blogging about how I don't have any time.

I went to This Is Not Art last weekend. It was good, only none of the verve that usually hits me a few hours in ever got through, which makes it evident that I'm probably too old for TINA (specifically the National Young Writers Festival). I felt more like an observer, an outsider, than one of the revellers.

So anyway. Bah.