Once More With Failing

So, about twelve weeks have passed since my last song list update, and though I was three ahead of schedule then, at this point I am now four behind schedule, partly because there was a long period where I just wasn't singing, much less learning new songs. I had my reasons, but I'm not sure this is the place to talk about it, so we won't linger on that.

Anyway, what I will tell you about, however, is the fact that I took a brief nap this evening, and managed during that short period of time to have a nightmare in which I had a heart attack and nearly died (in the nightmare, not real life. To the best of my knowledge.) And it really drew my attention to some things in my life, and made me reassess a few things. Some things I'd worried about, seemed suddenly petty and silly, and other things felt more important than before. This journal, I'm sorry to say, was not one of the things that felt more important to me. At least not compared to some other things.

Unfortunately, my life is not a Charles Dickens novel, so there was not an immediate transformation in which I caused Tiny Tim to blurt "God bless us, everyone!" But it did jolt me out of a bit of complacent self-pity I had going, and realized that, on my deathbed, I would not look fondly on the days when I had just at around watching TV shows on Hulu. Which isn't to say I will never do that again, but I don't need entire evenings of that, by any stretch of the imagination.

I could go on, but I've already said more than I'd intended, as I was mainly coming here to add what new songs I've done since the last time. Which isn't many. (Only five. I'd be further behind, were it not for that lead I had going before.) So, here are the new songs (not re-posting all of the ones prior, since that post is just two away from this one):

24. Breakfast At Tiffany's

25. Someone Like You

26. What Are Words

27. Rhythm Of Love

28. Crawling In The Dark

Okay, that's all I've got for now. (No new Dunputoffens accomplished, I'm sorry to report.)

Okay. I really don't want this to just be a quarterly thing. o_O

But, the past few months haven't gone entirely like I'd planned. Life's like that, sometimes.

And I can't say with total certainty that this post means I'm back on track. I may be right now, but who knows about the immediate future.

But one thing I've decided, is that I'm not going to beat myself up for not making the progress that I had anticipated. I'm just going to pick up where I've left off, and move forward from here. And yes, I once again have goals and intentions, and it remains to be seen how well I'll succeed at fulfilling them.

One change that I'm hoping to make in my decision-making mentality, is rather that obsess over the "consequences" of potential decisions, to consider the "benefits" of a potential decision. This makes decision-making potentially less terrifying for an INFP such as myself, and also frees me up a bit to make more mistakes, which some argue is the only way you learn.

Anyway, my intention now is to list, for my own benefit (and optionally the morbid curiosity of whoever stumbles across this), the new songs that I've learned and/or recorded thus far this year (as mentioned in my previous post). I'm not sure yet where I'm at on my goal of 52 in 52, though I know I'm "behind", it's just a question of how much. So, once I've compiled this list in a bit here, I'll know for sure. Here we go.

[Note: as stated previously, there's no guaranteeing that the links will work for you. They all work for me, though, which for now is the important thing. =D]

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1. Epiphany

2. I Wanna Be A Producer

3. If We Never Meet Again

4. That I Would Be Good

5. Be A Clown

6. Count Me In

7. You've Got Your Troubles

8. How To Save A Life

9. The One You Love

10. Take The Long Way Home

11. Inka Dinka Doo

12. Manah Manah

13. Man Or Muppet

14. An Anti-Rick-Roll PSA (parody of "Never Gonna Give You Up")

15. Bluddle-Uddle-Um-Dum

16. Who'll Stop The Rain

17. Shriner's Convention

18. When A Felon's Not Engaged

19. The Bing Bong Song

20. Mother's Day Doo-Wop A Cappella (parody of "Come And Go With Me")

21. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps

22. Upside Down

23. Everybody's Changing

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Okay, so I've got 23 songs done, and this is week, what... oh! Week twenty. So, thanks to today's glut of new songs (21-23), I'm actually ahead of schedule now. Sweet! (I almost didn't include #12, "Manah Manah", since I've heard the song plenty of times, but I'd never really tried singing it before, and especially not on camera, so i went ahead and included it.)

As for the Dunputoffens for March and April, I'm not sure off-hand if I accomplished anything major for those months. I'll have to think back, and read my FB/Twitter/emails/etc. to get an idea. But I'm guessing no. =T Otherwise I would think it would jump out at me.

Oh! One thing I did in May, that I think I will count, is I went gluten-free for 8 days, just to see how I would fare, because of various problems I was having that seemed to pertain to my diet, and after reading the symptoms it sounded just uncanny enough to give it a try. I'm not letting my experiment replace the advice of a professional doctor, but I figured if I went 8 days without gluten and still had the problems, it probably wasn't the gluten. As it happens, many of the symptoms seemed to cease partway through the experiment. Now, I admit that it could have been a placebo effect, but the seeming success (or lack of failure) was enough for me to seriously consider asking my doctor about it. As much as I don't relish the idea of giving up wheat products and the like, if that turns out to be the problem, then the potential long-term (and even short term) benefits I think would outweigh any supposed "consequences." (To use my old terminology.)

Oh! Also, I've started drawing again, albeit not a whole lot, but far more than I had been "allowing" myself to up to this point. A good friend of mine got me a Moleksine notebook and some pencils, and today I finally sketched... a drawing of my hand, sketching a drawing of my hand, sketching a drawing of my hand. Not the most beautiful drawing ever, but it amused me, and I found it to be an encouraging start. I'm also practicing my simpler, internet-based drawing in the game Drawception. Despite the limited tools and it being a web-based game (completely with its own community of trolls), I'm finding it to be a nice way to stretch my creativity, coming up with ways to portray the given phrase in a relatively small box with very few drawing tools and a limited color pallet (and no way to zoom in. o_O) All in a 10-minute time limit. It's a nice balance of structure and freedom, for me. 

My drawings for that game can be seen here:  http://drawception.com/player/182686/krud/&filter=drawings 

(I have no idea if you have to have an account to see that, or what.)  They are hardly masterpieces, and some of the phrases I had to draw were... different, but... it's still an interesting challenge, i find.

If all goes well, in the near future I'll have a new Dunputoffen, in the form of a audio-visual mashup that I won't talk about just yet, but I more or less have everything I need to do it, it's just a matter of sitting down and piecing it together. It might be a somewhat tedious process, but I'm hoping the end result will be worth it.

Okay, that's all for now. Hopefully I'll from me again sooner rather than later!