Wednesday Workday
It’s a rigorous schedule, but someone’s got to do it. Actually, my preference would be to work 2-3 days this week, but I’m still stuck with decreased demand and fewer big cases have been available as of late. I hope that changes, at least until we can pay the house off.
I’ve experimented with my daily routine in the last few days by putting Korean language study and drawing first and then practicing the various musical disciplines afterward. This has been successful so far in that it’s easier for me to maintain my motivation even if my mental focus is flagging a bit in the afternoon. I’ll keep with this for a while and see how it works out.
Another imminent change is the impending abstinence from alcohol once the on-hand supply runs out. This should coincide with Opeth on Saturday, so the timing is fairly fortuitous. This won’t be an absolute teetotal lifestyle as I’ll still have a few beers at concerts, but I’m going to at least give it a break during March and I’m going to try to resume more strict calorie and portion counting so I can lose some weight. On that note I went ahead and bought this Nintendo Switch and Ring Fit accessory, thinking I’ll give their fitness game a try. I’m hoping that some of these exercises will fire up some dormant upper body and core muscles that generally get ignored with my typical cardio only exercise habits. We’ll see.
Although I didn’t make a journal entry yesterday, I did watch the next JCO lecture on form, including one of her short stories. She has some interesting insights on how to add interest by approaching the traditional continuous chronological narrative in a different manner. Everything from making a story one continuous paragraph with no breaks, writing the story out of sequence, writing the story as a series of questions and answers, or only as answers. She even talked about visually altering the medium, e.g. typing out the text in the shape of objects like a tree. I’m not sure I would do this for a normal prose story, but it might be a cool approach for a lyric sheet to a song.
Her short story “Heat” was an interesting approach to narrative in that it seemed to be told by a friend of two young girls who were murdered when they were in seventh grade. Some of the paragraphs seem to be through the eyes of the friend (assume it’s a she) when the girls were still alive, and some of it’s from points in the future, even many decades later. It jumps back and forth between when they were alive, to their funeral, to the distant future, and back. It gives some stark contrast to some mundane observations interspersed with some really dark revelations. It’s very effective.
Yesterday was an overall successful day. As mentioned I studied Korean, drawing, and practiced drums, keys, and bass. As always, progress is slow and incremental but that’s the nature of the multidisciplinary beast. It’s interesting that JCO’s lecture on form coincides with my reading “Dracula” because that’s exactly how Bram Stoker approached his narrative. The story plays out in a series of narratives told through journal entries and correspondence, so you have a limited third-person view and must do a lot of the work to understand what’s transpiring. Most of us probably already know how the story plays out, so it’s not quite as nebulous, but I imagine this must have been a new and provocative take on narrative when it debuted.