What is life?!

I have just spent the last couple of hours trying to sleep, all to no avail. Which is ironic because I spent the few hours immediately previous to that trying to stay awake. It's like my body knows which I want to be doing and decides to mess with me. My head was cloudy and fuzzy and I was blinking a lot and getting up and down a lot to stay awake for the last hour of work. Literally, at 17:06 (that is actually when I finish work) I felt grogginess and sleepiness lift almost in an instant.

I probably need to make some changes.

I have a 9-5 job (well, 8:42 - 17:06) and that is good. It's steady work. It pays regularly. There is no need for me to take it home. It does, however take up most of my day. From when I wake at about 7:30, until I get home about 17:35 is given over to work. Then I get in and have to do the essentials: y'know, eating, washing up, taking the rubbish out, ringing the insurance company, and so on.

Then, because in any given week I am usually DJing at least one night, there's that to think about. I normally decide the setlist on the fly but having a 9-5 with less time spent at home and less time on public transport, and less opportunity to sit up late listening to music makes it harder to keep up with new music so I have to make more of a concious effort to get new music and get it into sets. IT's getting harder. But I try when I can. And if I'm doing a special event with a genre or mood I'm not so familiar with, like a fetish night, or a speakeasy night, or a wedding with specific song requests that I may never have heard of, then I will plan out the setlist beforehand. That's time-consuming. I need to get hold of the music, listen to it, and figure out the best way to play it. Then there's the late nights DJing involves. I try, like tonight, to sleep beforehand but spending the only free bit of the day asleep feels like a waste. IF I can sleep. So tonight I will get to bed about 4am and be up again about 7:30am which will leave me painfully tired at work tomorrow. Then I'm Djing Subside from 8:30.

I also have my greetings cards business. I need to research and create new designs for that when I can. I also need to keep promoting my Etsy shop which currently, mostly sells steampunk and dieselpunk cards - https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/CapnDred. It's plugging it on social media - on my pages, finding groups and joining them and interacting and trying to get my name and products out there. It's drawing little things that are relevant to make sure I have content to post. It's repinning things that may encourage people to browse my Pinterest and find my cards. It's blogging like this. It's reblogging the tumblr posts of people who may be inclined to check out my stuff. It's commenting on Etsy's forum posts and getting involved in the community. I enjoy it and there's a lot to learn and I am enjoying learning. Then when sales come, I have to get them posted.

I find it hard to say no to new jobs. DJing new events that may be fun, or a new genre that I could have fun with. New drawing commissions that push me to improve or just feel nice to do.

I resent this sometimes and make myself put a film on to chill, but normally end up tweaking my Etsy shop listings while I do.

The thing with music and drawing and self-promotion is there's no end point. There is ALWAYS more that could be done. Which means whenever I get some free time, it is very easy to almost accidentally keep doing these things. Suddenly, it's 2:00am and I have work in the morning but a drawing that's nearly done, or a load of ideas for content to post, or just half an hour of a setlist to fill with a tricky transition from black metal to RnB. When I'm not doing anything actively, I feel like I'm wasting time. So I rarely chill. Jess has been great for me. We do things together often (we're doing a craft fair up in Bridgnorth on Saturday which I am really looking forward to but for which I will have had very little sleep on account of all of the above), but we also chill sometimes and I need that. She's let me rant at her about this and she's tolerant of how bad I am at making future plans. I worry about the fact I'm always tired and broke for her though. I don't like that.

All of this is compounded by the fact that no matter how long I work a regular job with regular daytime hours, my body clock still defaults to going to bed at 4am and waking around midday. It makes it hard and feel unnatural to go to bed at an appropriate time for work. 11pm would be a good time. 12 wouldn't be too bad. 2am is usual for me and it's just not enough! And 7:30 really doesn't feel like a time people should be up at all. My body clock wants me to get the recommended 8hrs sleep... it's just the wrong 8hrs for sensible civilised jobs.

And for all of it, I'm broke. I spent a lot of today at work researching the Aztecs and Maya for our presentations. I was using Google Earth to check out their historical sites - temples and the like and desperately, painfully wishing I could go there! But I consider a month where I finish the month without having gone over my overdraft limit a success and one where I finish with a few bob to spare makes me nervous that there is a bill around the corner I forgot about. Being able to drive down to Bournemouth and stop in a B&B for a friend's wedding was a decision I had to weigh carefully and figure out a contingency plan for how that would leave me short for the rest of the month.

I'm always working. I'm always broke. Because I'm always broke, I feel like I can't be turning down work when it comes so I'm always too tired and too busy to take stock of the situation and change it or at least organise it to be manageable.

Writing this has helped. Now, feeling like I could finally sleep again (like I could at work earlier) I have to get up and go to work.

What I don't like about Christmas.

It's the middle of September. This is fine. I like this time of year. What I don't like is the countdown to Christmas. People who know me will know this.

But this is going to cause me a problem soon. I'll come to that in a moment.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't hate Christmas. Far from it! I love Christmas! But the Christmas I like is just one day. The Christmas period I like is the short run-up to it and the continuation into New Year's Day.

The Christmas I don't like is the one that dominates a full third of a year.

Christmas seems to get earlier and earlier with each passing year. Earlier this year, I went for some food at The Harvester in Star City in Birmingham. On the entrance was a sign informing us that Christmas bookings were now being taken. I don't remember when this was but I know it was around a couple of weeks before my birthday because we decided to go somewhere else to eat for my birthday because we'd been here recently.
My birthday is 18th August!!

Someone, somewhere decided that Christmas promotion needed to start over 4 and a half months, and probably nearer or over 5 months before Christmas. Christmas is but one day.

It's a one day religious event in the UK, actually - a Christian-appropriated pagan celebration. I've no problems with it being an appropriation. Jesus' birthday is unknown so why not stick the celebration on a date where people are already celebrating. I've no problem with non-religious people getting involved. Religious celebration passes into tradition and each celebrates in their own way. Those who want to be religious about it do, those who don't don't. The tradition of gift giving is lovely. But it has become such a feeding frenzy for anyone with any product, service, or message to sell and the sheer force of consumerism that rears up like a tidal wave before December 25th is just nasty.

Can you imagine if I started getting excited about my birthday, another event that is so common as to happen every year, 4 and a half months before it happened? If halfway through March I started telling people on a daily basis what I wanted for my birthday. If I started demanding that they buy me cards 4 and a half months before my birthday. If every single day for 4 and a half months, I reminded people that my birthday was only a few weeks away.

Pretty obnoxious isn't it? Pretty obnoxious to be demanding people buy me stuff in the first place, let alone to constantly bring it up for months. Which is how I feel about Christmas. It's gotten obnoxious.

I know Christmas exists and I know it's coming. Cripes, I know it's coming! I don't need constant telling. I know that the tradition is to give gifts and celebrate. I'm hardly going to forget. So I would love for marketers and businesses everywhere to just STOP! Stop harassing me into buying things. Stop taking what should feel like a special annual occasion, and diluting its specialness by spreading it out over more than a full third of a year until it is everyday and tired come December 25th.
We are told for 4 months solid that we have to BUY ALL THE THINGS or we've ruined the magic and killed Santa and made children cry and broken family values and kicked puppies and we're mean old miserly killjoys and I don't like it.

Which puts me in an interesting predicament now. I'm on the other side. No - it's not working for Cadbury World. That their Christmas produce stocks in September, and that it makes up something like 5% of total sales in September annoys me enough already but that is as big companies do.

No, I'm talking about selling cards. I have a small greetings card business now.
Here it is: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/CapnDred . Please - go and have a look. It's only small so I'll wait here until you get back.

It's a little bit steampunk, isn't it? In theory, I'll be selling other illustration based products there but at the moment, it's greetings cards that I'm focusing on.
I started with a Valentines Card this year, and to date also have a birthday card, Father and Mothers' Day cards, a graduation card for sale. The next big greeting card day is Christmas Day (no-one buys Halloween cards, do they?) so I've got a nice long stretch to work on this one or maybe even produce a couple of designs, and not feel pressured by an imminent deadline like I have with the others.
So here I am, thinking about my Christmas produce. In September.
Also, I want to have the card available earlier rather than later because I personally know people who have started buying Christmas stuff already and as it is something I want to make a bit of money at, sense says I should catch all the early buyers I can. What's the point of me bringing the card out in time for those early-birds if I then don't advertise it to them so they know it's there? But if I do that, I become the bit of Christmas I hate.

Earlier advertising leads to people buying earlier which in turn leads to earlier advertising the following year to catch the early shoppers and so on. It self-perpetuates.

I think I'll produce the card. I'll put it in my store. But I won't shout about it throughout the end of summer and all of autumn and the start of winter.
It can be how I feel about Christmas: It's there and if you want to get involved with it in September, you can. But I'm happy with it not being waved and shouted about and pointed at for the next quarter of the year.

It hadn't occurred to me until now that I need to think about how I want to manage this one so I don't hate myself.

-Curt-


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