After being stood up by Time Warner twice, and then having to wait until the next week for an appointment, I FINALLY have Internet at my apartment! You have no idea how thrilled I am about this, people. I’ve been twitching like a junkie in need of a fix for the past 21 days.
I’m celebrating my new Internet connection by sitting and deleting myself off of about a million mailing lists and notifications from sites that I really don’t need to get in my inbox because, you know… I CHECK THE WEBSITE!
I’m a little neurotic about my email. My inbox always HAS to be zero. This means every time I notice I’ve gotten an email (usually because my phone has bleep-blooped) I have to go in and check it and set things back to zero. When you get lots of email, much of which is totally unnecessary when you really think about it… You end up doing this a LOT.
No more. I’m tired of all the emails trying to sell me the latest deal, or what shows are coming to the city, or who repinned something on Pinterest. I don’t need this shit cluttering up my inbox any longer.
Now… Excuse me while I stop writing and start unsubscribing.
I’ve been thinking a bit about my blogroll recently. I always end up getting kind of absorbed by this every now and again, and since I just sorta wiped the slate clean and started over with the blog, it means starting the blogroll all over again too.
There’s a ritual to this that I’ve done since the dawn of time.
It involves poking through all of the blogs that I’m subscribed to on Google Reader. I have no idea how many things I’m subscribed to, but it’s a lot and there’s a lot of broken stuff in there because I’ve been using it a long time.
I end up visiting all these blogs that I’ve subscribed to over the years and decide who’s worthy of being on the blogroll.
There are two reasons why I’d link to someone there. One, because I find this person somehow inspiring. Two, because they’re someone I consider to be a good friend.
After I’m done going through Google Reader, I tend to go through the blogrolls of the blogs I’ve just blogrolled. I usually don’t add any of these new people to my blogroll straight away, but I often subscribe to some new ones.
This whole ritual tends to be a bit of an inspiration gathering process. Getting inspired by the design of these blogs, by what they’re posting, by what they’re talking about.
Which brings me to want to answer the question, “Who have I been inspired by? Why?” I’d like to say this is going to be a series of posts, but if I say that I won’t do it so I’m not going to.
Amanda Palmer. There are a lot of reasons for me to be inspired by Amanda Palmer. She’s a fairly well known musician. She was half of The Dresden Dolls. She has a pretty successful solo career. She does interesting musical projects like Evelyn Evelyn. I’m certainly drawn to her because I appreciate the kind of art she makes. And if you haven’t heard of her, you should check her out… but that isn’t the point of this post.
The point of this post is I like her blog.
Musician bloggers tend to be kind of a rare breed. The blog tends to be a medium that falls into the realm of the PR strategy of a given musician or band, and most of the time if a musician has a blog, it’s more of a press release blog that may or may not be maintained by the musician themselves. A musician that talks openly about what their life is like, what the creative process is like, what being in the industry is like, and so on and so forth… well, that’s not exactly something that most musicians (at least in my experience) have much interest doing.
The thing I like about Amanda Palmer is because she blogs about her life as a musician who makes records and tours and goes to see the fireworks with her friends and how she misses her husband, I think of her as a person rather than, well… a brand that makes a certain kind of music.
I find I read her blog for a bunch of different reasons. One, I think she’s an interesting person and I find myself being interested in her life. Two, I’m interested in the field that she works in and how she approaches things in art. Which from what I’ve read, seems to be a series of impulse decisions to do something just because it might be fun, not because it might make money. She’s more concerned with getting by rather than getting rich. She does things just because that’s what she wants to do. The result might not be perfect and everyone might not like it, but at the end of the day if she had fun and created something, it’s a success.
I find I admire that trait in people. The just doing it because it’s seems like the right thing to do at the time.