MATH ROCK

 When I was recovering from my sinus surgery a month ago, I spent a bit of time watching YouTube videos on the history of popular music. I enjoyed videos from SoundField on the history of blues and jazz. I would still like to watch videos on the folk revival of the 1970s, garage and riot grrl-like bands of the 1980s, and the evolution of electronic popular music in general. I watched the Soundfield video on hyperpop and it was extremely interesting! OIL ON EVERY PEARL'S UN-INSIDES sounds genuinely experimental and not just like someone was trying to be edgy.

I looked up a chart on the evolution of popular music and I saw a genre called "math rock." I listened to a playlist on Spotify and I really liked what I heard and found a flowchart on Reddit that explains what to listen to next based on what you like about other bands. Weeks passed before I realized that Foals was on this flowchart. Yeah, the weird British punk band I told everyone was like Philip Glass for rock music. That's when I learned that minimalist rock music is called Math Rock. I'm not sure what the official definition is, but I read that Math Rock experiments with unusual time signatures and prioritizes musical textures over vocals or verses. They also seem to repeat arpeggiating chords a lot, like minimalism in classical music. Thanks to this little dive, I am catching up on the albums Foals released since Antidotes and I am enjoying them effortlessly. May your research dives into new genres be just as fruitful.

take the pressure off writing by convincing yourself that the stakes are low

 I miss the age of blogs. I miss hearing from my friends about whatever random thing was on their minds and instead I must be satisfied with photos of their amazing bakes, pets and/or children. I was re-reading some of my old blog entries last weekend and reflecting on the blog era of my life from the aughts until sometime in the mid-2010s. I was also mining a friend's blog for their upcoming Wikipedia page as one does. It's a good thing that my friends who are still writing are publishing books and patreons and substacks instead of just giving their writing away. But nothing really captures the extemporaneous, um, rough edges of a person's thoughts in a more open, but intimate way like a blog post.

One of my goals for myself is to stop seeing my writing energy as a limited resource. If I come at writing with the attitude that my ideas are scarce, they will be scarce. But if I have an attitude of abundance-- confident in my ability to write multiple things at once and get more ideas than I have time to implement--somehow the ideas and the motivation to write keeps coming. 

Speaking of coming from an attitude of abundance, I realized that after quitting and returning to my job over the pandemic, I have a different attitude toward my job. For one, working from home eroded all of my work-life barriers. I used to strictly try to not think about work off-the-clock. But now, I don't have the energy to care about that. I'm constantly e-mailing my work e-mail with ideas of articles to read or things to look at. For two, I have less fear. I know that if I disappear for six months that it doesn't matter, but that's empowering. Who cares if I e-mail the wrong person in my quest to get an answer to a trivial question? If I attract the ire of a harpist fanboy? It's insignificant and unimportant in the sense that it does not create capital for anyone involved, but that frees me to experiment and innovate. 

There is another layer to the stakes being incredibly low at my job. I make about enough to cover what I pay my nannies. My husband's profits from his employee stock purchase plan were ten times what I made last year. But instead of feeling bad about it, maybe my attitude that my job is just a fun hobby can take some of the pressure I put on myself to do a good job. Thus I make another naval-gazing entry into my blog that I feel fairly confident no one will read. And I feel great about that.