Feast or Famine.

Updating this once a week with something of substance shouldn’t be quite this hard, the real killer of creativity is routine, it was Picasso that said how all children are artists but the real test is staying one as you get older. He wasn’t wrong. Don’t get me wrong I know that people all over the world find time to do other things after they’ve finished whatever it is they do to pay the bills and I’m envious of them.

After I’m done with my day all I barely seem to be able to stay awake. Since my last update I fell asleep on the sofa every single evening after work, waking up grumpy only to head off to bed and not be able to sleep properly there, frustrating isn’t even close to how it’s felt lately with my sleep patterns.

I didn’t want this blog to turn into whining through, so let me end this here.

Hope, dashed.

A week later and I’m flagging, I knew I’d never manage a post a day but I’m cutting it close on a Post a Week right now. My enthusiasm for the year has mostly disappeared in the past 7 days, aside from a wonderful Saturday night/Sunday with my long suffering girlfriend and her family.

At the tail end of the first post I mentioned my new job, I started it the day after that post and since then I’ve hit a downward slope. The job itself now, is not that bad, though it started awfully. However it has done me one favour, it’s finally allowed me to realise what I want to do with my life. I want to teach primary school! Unfortunately, as a retail manager, there’s very little chance of that happening, which is partly why I’ve ended up in a huge rut this week.

Before anyone pipes up about getting out there and making it happen, I’d love to, and I intend on volunteering in a school once I’m settled at work, in the hope of getting a job as a Teaching Assistant at some point in the not so distant future, getting out there and making it happen is costly, and I simply cannot afford to go off to university, nor would they accept me due to me not getting my A levels. Well done, young me, well done. You’ve really done it now haven’t you?

 

The only other thing to note is, I mentioned in the last post I’d be reading 1 fiction and 1 non-fiction book per month during 2011. Well, I’m making an effort to keep that up, January’s books are:

American Gods – Neil Gaiman

Nerd Do Well – Simon Pegg

2011

So another new year means another chance at reinvention for a lot of people and despite the huge cliche that it is, I’m no different. The only difference with 2011 is my desire to make some real changes this year. My first one is to use a blog and not worry if nobody reads it, I’ve come to realise that writing for a make believe audience is a complete waste of time when I really should just be writing things for myself. My friend Mark (you can find his blog here) turned me onto the Post A Day project and it seems like as good a reason as any to get myself going, though all I’m going to commit to right now is one post per week.

I didn’t make any resolutions as such but I did make a list for 2011. My only goal for 2010 was to quit smoking and for a long time it was hard to quit and it felt like a failure even when I did eventually quit! However, now I have that successfully done I feel I need to push on and set myself many small goals for this year.

Some of the goals will lend themselves to this blog and the content you see here. I’ve set myself the goal of reading one novel and one non-fiction book per month, in an effort to get my reading back up to a level where it was a couple of years ago before I got lazy, so you’ll probably find book reviews or nuggets of things I learn from said books up here.

I also intend to start running and get myself more, so who knows, I might post my embarrassingly shoddy run statistics up here (I’m going to use RunKeeperPro or one of those Nike+ things to record all my progress). I’ve set a starting goal of one run per week and we’ll see how it goes from there.

I’m also going to learn to cook so I can prepare some fantastic meals for my wonderful girlfriend and I to tuck into in an evening (and even some tasty leftovers for the dog, maybe) so you may get updates and/or photos of my culinary experiments as I get started with that. Following on with that, more photos! I have a rather lovely Nikon DSLR and a Holga that rarely get touched so I also intend to use those more too.

With all that going on I should have more than enough to keep my Post a Week going in 2011.

Oh and I start my new job tomorrow too, busy busy busy.