Time for another proverbial cheese sandwich post1. Thinking about the end of the year and what’s coming up for me. This isn’t my annual aspiration wrap-up post; that’ll come later. ### Mental state I am currently very fatigued. I have a lot of music I’d like to be working on but I’m having trouble gathering the energy to do so. I have so many on-hold backburnered projects and looking at the list of things I want to do is starting to feel pretty overwhelming. I need some sort of spark to ignite the next album’s nucleation. The weather’s been particularly dreadful this winter and that hasn’t helped things at all. Constant flooding and wind and so on has kept me pretty much indoors all the time, aside from the brief respites which allowed me to buy the Corolla and do some work on it. Also, even though the Corolla is fun to drive and work on, I still feel a wave of fatigue hit me when I take it out anywhere. I would still like to figure out where the fatigue comes from. I also get the same fatigue when I ride my ebike, but the ebike at least I don’t worry about killing someone else while riding it (but I do worry about getting killed on it, as the street I take to get anywhere is not _technically_ a stroad but people sure treat it like one). I’m also having my usual chronic pain flareups, which is locked in an eternal spiral with the depression and anxiety. Fun times. My house is also a disaster area and I really need to get organized. I see a lot of spring cleaning in my future, and also ideally selling/donating a _lot_ of shit. ### Music stuff This past weekend I performed at two shows in VRChat, both of which went pretty well for different reasons. The first one, Gilly’s Winter Melodies, was a nice little chill show with a bunch of people just hanging out casually. I just did an acoustic set, which I hadn’t done in a while, and afterwards I hung out with a few musicians I like and wanted to get to know better, and it was great. The other one, VRelium’s Furever Christmas show, was a much bigger deal, and I think I had the largest audience ever for a full set. For this one I did a spectacle with visuals and backing tracks, and during my performance the audience was mostly super great (aside from one jerk who shouted out “When do we start the main act?!” in the middle of it, but everyone around them told them to shut up). During the outro of Safety in Numbers people were **_SINGING ALONG_** with the call-and-response and holy **_fuck_** that felt _amazing_. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before! Afterwards I had several people come up to me and tell me how much they liked my music (and most of them said they’d seen me a few times before too), and during the whole event I had a lot of other great conversations with folks who were super excited to hear me perform. I feel like that’s a big turning point for me. Both of these are recorded and I’ll be putting them on YouTube and the live shows page as soon as I can get them edited. Gilly’s Winter Melodies I have everything I need (and it’ll just take a few minutes to edit), while VRelium will be a bit longer since I’m waiting for the recorded footage from the show itself. My booking agent has already found a couple of shows for me in January. I’m still waiting on details on those though. #### Song Fight! rumination It’s been about 25 years since I first found Song Fight!. On that note, I have a song in the current fight and sometime today I hope to record one for next week’s. Even though I’ve been feeling pretty divorced from Song Fight! for a while I still want to see it thrive, and really I think it’s the lack of it thriving that’s made me feel this way. I’ve been getting more proactive about trying to get musicians and musician-curious folks I know to join in, but it’s been tough. I think there’s a bunch of issues that get in the way: * Established musicians have no reason to participate * People who aren’t yet “good at music” think that they need to be “good at music” in order to participate (which is very much **_not the case_**) * Too many newcomers to making music think that pushing a button in Suno is enough (when that is one of the few things that is specifically disallowed) * People who don’t make music yet don’t see the value in trying to learn, even if they want to, _because_ of AI and oversaturation and so on I just want to say that if you don’t make music but you want to, the best time to start is right now. ### Car stuff Things I need to do on the car: * Take it to the mechanic for a proper inspection and tune-up (no, I didn’t get it inspected when I bought it, yes I know that’s foolish) * Try to figure out why I can’t get keyfob pairing to work, which mostly means opening up the passenger-side C pillar, and probably finding a new RKE module for it (because either the one that’s there is broken, or there isn’t one at all; both are possible and the latter is more likely) * Figure out if I should repaint the trunk, which has exposed metal on it at this point * Replace the glove box latch * Improve the cable management for the handsfree mic for the head unit (it’s _fine_ but technically a hazard since it could theoretically get tangled around the brake pedal which would be, y'know, _bad_) * Install my dashcam * Maybe install a backup camera as well (although that requires a _lot_ of additional wiring I don’t really want to deal with) * Fix the switch on the dome light * Sticker None of these are big deals but several of them are waiting for parts to arrive and others I’m not super interested in doing with the weather as it is (since it’s cold and wet out and I don’t have a garage). ### Finances Insurance is getting expensive again, groceries and medications continue to be expensive, housing costs are getting more expensive (utilities and property taxes, mostly), and so on. However, assuming there isn’t a massive stock market crash and that my interest income matches inflation (and historically I’ve done a bit better than inflation), my current savings runway is until around 2033, so it isn’t time for me to worry about things just yet. If I manage to get disability that jumps up to 2045, and then after that I’ll be old enough to cash out my retirement accounts which gives me another 14 years (under the same assumptions), and that gets me all the way to 80. So I think I’m doing fine there. It’s much more likely I’ll die in a freak coffee-roasting accident before then. ### So anyway I don’t know how to end this post. Note: I may earn a commission on affiliated product links in this article. 1. I don’t know why I can no longer find this term actually defined anywhere, but back in the 90s this was a derisive term used for Usenet posts where someone was, basically, blogging about their day, e.g. “today I had a cheese sandwich.” ↩